As a person who lives here - I can say Warsaw is a great city to live in. I’ve considered many destinations for emigrating and in the end decided to stay. Anecdotally, so did many others I know.
Green, walkable, clean, good public transport, mostly-well-connected airport, reasonable cost of living (esp. if you work remotely as a software engineer…), good and varied restaurants, and very safe.
I spent a week in Warsaw in 2020 (right before the world shut down, to a point where it was not 100% clear I'd be let back in the US), and thought it was an extremely underrated city. As you said, very clean and walkable, and as an American it's really cheap due to the exchange rate.
I go to Poland nearly every year because of Lambda Days, which is in Krakow, though next time I fly over I might take the train over to Warsaw again.
The main reason why’d never want to live in Poland longterm are the extreme pollution levels. Compared to some other places you can’t even escape it by moving to the suburbs/etc.
The only place worse/as bad in the EU is Northern Italy but at least they have geography as an excuse.
It would be a nice place if the Poles stopped burning coal..
That depends heavily on the exact place you live. Warsaw has central heating and central natural gas distribution network, so almost no one uses coal or wood here. My air pollution meter shows very low levels of P2.5 and P10 (< 20 p/ug) for the majority of the year.
It’s easy to manipulate by using a color scale where perfectly harmless pollution levels are painted red or black.
Warsaw is surrounded by suburbs and peripheral small towns that have predominantly single family housing which usually have fireplace as secondary heating source and often coal/wood as primary heating source.
If you follow for example air quality in Legionowo (one of Warsaw northern suburubs) since November till March the air quality drops at around 6pm until 6am to the levels compared to most industrial parts of Silesia. This pollution spreads over central areas of Warsaw depending on the winds.
Suburbs near Warsaw are almost all connected to the gas network. I have many friends who own a house (and I also own a house at the border of the city) and I know nobody who would heat with coal.
However the major problem is that gas is expensive and wood is cheaper. It is enough that one house in the neighborhood is heated by burning wood and everybody can smell it.
The situation is also much worse in small villages far from Warsaw.
The one I posted was the yearly average which I think is a much better way to look at this (maybe monthly would be better though).
> < 20 p/ug
~ 20 seems quite high (IMHO)
> so almost no one uses coal or wood here
Power plants might be the much bigger issue. Coal is still > 60%, of course it has improved massively over the last few years (used to be almost 80% a few years ago). IIRC Poland produces more electricity from coal than all the other EU countries combined besides Germany (who also suck).
What you're pointing at is mostly irrelevant - the massive coal / lignite plants are obviously filtering the exhaust through filters according to EU levels. A family member works in the field.
The actual air pollution issue stems from small heaters used in houses that haven't been upgraded yet (or people using them improperly / burning trash) - but there's plenty of EU funding going towards replacing them. Many of the remaining users are unfortunately living in poverty and can't even afford the remaining 20-30% of the price + heating afterwards can absolutely become more expensive.
Nah, it's mostly residential houses heating with coal. In the winter the air quality is shit, in the summer it's pretty much the same as in the rest of EU.
Coal powerplants suck cause they produce a lot of CO2, but they don't polute much (because of mandatory filters). It's negligible compared to unfiltered coal heating in millions of homes.
It counts pollution particles in the air by highlighting them with a ray of laser light and counting the reflections. Air cleaners usually come with a device of this kind. Or you can build one yourself by buying the sensor separately (eg. PMS7003) and attaching it to a microcontroller.
Depends on Poland location. I moved from Warsaw to coast and my air filter is gathering dust in a basement. Due to natural windy weather here air is extremely clear almost whole year including winter. And 25 degC is considered hot here instead 35 in capitol city ;-)
I'm a Pole. Lived in Warsaw for about 8 years and later moved to London over 10 years ago. The air here stinks unless you're somewhere on a patch of green. Sometimes when I get our of my bedroom and into the hall I can already smell the polluted air in my house. Never had that in Warsaw even though I lived in a more congested area there.
This could be said about all capitals/big cities in the region - Krakow, Prague, Brno, Bratislava, Budapest etc.
Good for you that you stayed if that's more like your cup of tea. Perspective of somebody who actually moved - best decision of my life. Nothing less than Switzerland, no point trying to reach less in life than the limit. Not easy to get into by any means, and you have to adapt to their culture and way of life and not vice versa (which is usually the biggest issue with immigrants) and accept few tradeoffs.
But for adventurer and mountain lover like me, who came to appreciate massively clean everything, low criminality, consistently polite and respectful people, society that just works (TM) - social, education, medical aspects, even bureaucracy. Then coming back (not Poland so not comparing with it specifically) gets less and less rosy over time, to the point of being disappointed with whole place and society. You see corruption, stupidity, self-shooting in the foot, greed, everybody thinking about themselves and screw others, mafia, and everybody knows it, knows who is bad guy, yet nothing is done.
Not a place I decided to have kids and raise them, nor get old. To each their own, as long as we are all happy with our choices down the line, life is easy in your 20s and 30s without kids practically anywhere.
>You see corruption, stupidity, self-shooting in the foot, greed, everybody thinking about themselves and screw others, mafia, and everybody knows it, knows who is bad guy, yet nothing is done.
Westerners who move there as tourists or with their remote jobs will never see this so for them it's only upsides, especially if they come from that country full of gun crime and homeless people, it's like some miracle place.
My wife and I vacationed in Prague in the fall of 2021. To us it was magical and beautiful. We've been lucky enough to visit several European cities, Prague is where we could live.
Having grown up in the late 60's and 70's in the States, eastern Europe was usually demonized because of the then influence of Russia. When my wife suggested Prague, I admit I had a little apprehension, but I was absolutely wrong. The people were very kind and helpful, the history was interesting and the food and drink was fantastic.
I lived & worked for 5 years in Prague before moving en Suisse. Integrated pretty well, had local girlfriends, visited their families regularly over weekends etc. No expat buble by any means, which is not what you want to rely on for permanent living anyway. Its one of the better places of the bunch for sure. But also ridiculously expensive housing, you'll never own a house in reasonable distance if you start cca now, even apartments can be tricky.
Still, what I wrote is valid for that too, no reason for me to return there from where I am now. As semi-local I could see through the surface and see issues I mention, and they are there (plus a typical Prague thing - kids starting with meth at 10-11 since its very accessible and weed even earlier, very popular with adequate consequences). They may be negligible /invisible to many others, not pushing my opinion but I stand by it, and in past 15 years nothing happened to change it, in contrary.
For someone from Gdańsk this is laughable. The city is very car-centric. There are large areas of it that are just concrete with no green in sight. This contributes to absurdly high temperatures in the summer and difficulty of finding any shade. “Patelnia” (frying pan) has that name for a reason and it’s by no means the only such place. The city also keeps building glass skyscrapers which reflect sunlight onto the ground in already heat-stroke-inducing heat. It’s laden with huge intersections with 2-phase crossings, which you need to run through in order to go through in one go. If you fail, you’ll be stranded on a concrete island breathing in fumes from car traffic. Public transport is good if you can use the metro. But there are only 2 lines, so aside from maybe going to work you’ll most likely be using a bus. The bus is most likely to be going regularly late and overcrowded (god I hate 186).
The greenery is a spectrum of course, depending on how close to the very center of the city you are. I never had big problems with busses, but trams are good too, and I generally prefer them.
I disagree with it not being walkable somewhere though. You can easily get anywhere on foot, and safely. Never had an issue with that anywhere in the city. It could definitely be more cyclable, as there are still many places without a dedicated biking lane (and you have to use the road or sidewalk), but walkable it definitely is.
There's also trams, and the bike infrastructure - 9 out of 12 month I use virtually only scooters / bikes to travel around. And that is from Saska Kępa travelling to Mokotów/Żoliborz/Wola/Ochota.
The downtown bike lines surrounded by concrete borders seemed pretty cool to me.
I wandered around the big (big to me) park in the center, Lazienkowski park.
I did find the huge open spaces next to Stalin Skyscraper and Saxon Palace to be very unused looking.
I love Warsaw, too bad I find the language impenetrable.
My fiancée started learning it with a tutor about half a year ago for 4 hour per week and she's already making very good progress and is able to have short conversations, don't get discouraged! It's just a language like any other.
The salaries in Warsaw are incredibly low for such a big xity, they are lower than in Krakow. The hate towards foreigners is way too high. It feels very non-European.
And me, I'm just moving out, after 15 years in Warsaw, because I hate it.
I agree that it's mostly safe, but green, or clean? And the public transportation is a mixed bag, my daily commute to the office used to be 1h each way (around 6 miles distance). Cost of living is ridiculously high compared to the rest of Poland, software engineers, businessmen and celebrities are probably the only ones who really can afford it.
But the main reason I'm leaving is because people here are assholes. As a capital city of Poland Warsaw attracts the worst kind of scum, politicians, wannabe celebrities, con men, corporate drones, gold diggers, etc.
If I could have one wish it would be for Putin to nuke Warsaw.
He will certainly nuke Dresden first. Because he used to live there.
Also, the relevant NATO simulations start with the first nukes arriving from Kaliningrad (Königsberg) to North Dresden. Warsaw is a bit later in this game. In the end all is down.
I spent 15 years here, had like 5-6 software engineering jobs, moved a few times to a different neighborhood, tried different social activities (sports, arts, dance lessons, online dating, etc.) and in the end the people always turned out the same. But maybe I'm just unlucky...
About a decade or so ago, I was living in Poland for a few months and on a spare weekend, stayed in an AirBnB in Warsaw, on Smocza Ulica. This is a long street lined with 50s concrete block apartments, surrounded by lawns and trees. While walking around the neighbourhood I read a sign about a Yiddish poem written about one of the former Jewish residents, a girl called Khaye, who was eventually murdered in Treblinka and then incinerated. Much of that quarter of the city is in fact literally built on the rubble of the old Jewish neighbourhoods, and many of the remains of the former inhabitants still lie buried beneath the apartment blocks, burned alive in the terrible retribution of the German occupiers who decided to burn every single block of the Jewish Ghetto after the walled-in Jews attempted an uprising. Anyway, I looked into the history of this particular poem, and it led me to a modern song by the famous Israeli singer Chava Alberstein which I find very beautiful and sad. https://open.spotify.com/track/5JHgN8sWvcrG1u4rrk4yQM
It was much more than the Ghetto that got entirely destroyed, to the point where new street layout has been implemented after the war since there was no reason to use the old layout. Well, apart from property claims, some of which are still being contested in courts to this day. Around 150k to 200k people died in the Warsaw Uprising alone. But yes, the Ghetto got hit especially bad.
One of the reasons why the Germans wanted Warsaw so exceptionally destroyed was their feeling of racial superiority. The Fuhrer got extra angry when he found out those occupied Poles still dare create rebellions, and ordered a systematic levelling of the capital. I'll let you ponder whether we've actually learned a lesson from those times.
And stalin watched.A uprising fought down by your neighbor who you jumped the the country together with,is a uprising you dont have to trample yourselves.
I can believe people discussed the option to relocate, but I think the forces of population movement back to the ruins really forced their hands. Not that the government couldn't have forcibly relocated them, there was plenty of precedent for that in recent times: The willingness to do it would be absent.
In any event, The USSR needed Poland to succeed as a buttress protecting the Russian state. Unlike Germany it was not partitioned, it was integral and complete as a country, it had voting rights in the UN, and it had a complicit puppet government. If that government wanted to reconstruct Warsaw and the Russians held out for Łódź It would create tensions which weren't needed. Realpolitk intruded.
Is there any record in post-roman history of a city subject to destruction which wasn't rebuilt?
I am told that in order to re-create Warsaw, other towns were also denuted of stone carvings. In effect, so that Warsaw could exist again, other towns lost parts of their heritage. You can of course see some of the reobar and plaster overlay on brick and blockworks of the less well restored places, or from 70 years of erosion. It's substantively a modern city with a dress on.
The continuing legal fights over land ownership speak to how strongly people feel about their patch of land. Fighting human nature is a King-canute move.
> Is there any record in post-roman history of a city subject to destruction which wasn't rebuilt?
Tana (Tanais) comes immediately to mind, founded by the Venetians in the 14th century (notionally a refounding of the ancient Greek city), destroyed by the Mongols about 100 years later and essentially never fully rebuilt after that.
Machu Picchu might be another example, depending on your definitions of "post-roman" and "destruction".
Aghdam, Marinka and Soledar would be current cases, though they may be rebuilt (already planned for Aghdam).
> Is there any record in post-roman history of a city subject to destruction which wasn't rebuilt?
I think your question is basically a proxy for population. In areas where populations rebound, cities are obviously rebuilt. In areas where the population continues to decline, they aren't. And the very nature of dead cities means you also probably have never heard of them, so listing random names is pointless. But you can obviously find endless examples in times ranging from the Mongols to the USSR. Well and probably beyond, I'm sure Africa has examples after 1991.
I am polish but only been in Warsaw recently and I was surprised by how beautiful the city is.
I traveled all around Eastern Europe and I put it definitely higher in my rankings than Prague and Budapest.
I can see the point of those who may disagree, it's a matter of taste, but I find Warsaw one of the most beautiful cities in Europe for a weekend (whereas the likes of Rome, Paris, London can simply not be appreciated well in such a short time span).
Indeed. We've been witnessing nine months of pure retaliation for the October 7 attack, complete with tens of thousands of civilian deaths and controlled demolition of mosques, schools, and residential neighborhoods. An arrest warrant has been asked for Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and yet he will be speaking this week in front of a joint congress session. I imagine standing ovations will abound, as usual.
They'll be either writing exactly the same articles as they do today, perhaps with different technology ("Israel widely condemned using fleet of hunter-killer robots against elementary school") or the whole of the Levant will be uninhabitable nuclear crater.
Or current times in general. WaPo gave a total excess deaths caused by the 'War on Terror' as 4.5 million. [1] That's 500+ deaths a day since 9/11. And we'll certainly be adding to that rapidly once the unspeakable of today becomes the regrettable mistakes of tomorrow. But for now, a supersized serving of Freedom Fries and WMD for everybody.
If your nurture includes a inability to form societies and cooperations, your outcome (save for a tech transfer vehicle) will Reproducable always be a bombed out city. Who bombs who why may vary, but societal level weakness has an attractivness of it own. At least i did not cheer on a repetition of fruitless instead of change.
Probably like people write today about holocaust in WWII. 80 years from now oil & gas will probably be much less important than today, so many countries that are happy today lending billions and providing cover for a brutal apartheid regime in middle east will be much less willing to do so. History will not look kindly to omission in face of those crimes.
Dresden was never rebuilt (by the soviets) and it’s so much better for it. The city was mostly left as a pile of rubble for decades. It began being rebuilt in the 90s after the fall of the USSR to the historical standards and without all the bloc architecture
While the Dresden bombing raid was devastating in terms of human lives lost, it doesn't rank equally high with respect to percentage of buildings destroyed.
Far less people died in other places but far more building damage got done (e.g. Würzburg, Pforzheim, and/or large cities hit by dozens of major raids like Hamburg, Cologne or Berlin).
None of this, though, justifies razing Warsaw. Atrocities don't "balance".
It was bombed for, given the data they had, good reasons (it turned out the intelligence data was not correct, but not the decision process).
It was also relatively untouched compared to what Third Reich planned to Warsaw even before war, yet alone the revenge spree in 1945.
There are reasons why it's practically illegal to remove most bullet holes you find on some walls on western side of Warsaw - they are the rare walls that survived.
There was a reason for Dresden not rebuilt by the Soviets in the same way as Warsaw. It was a reminder for the Germans that starting a world war has consequences.
There is another reason. Russians saw rebuilding Warsaw as a way to rebuild Polish national identity after the ravages of WWII and the severe redrawing of the borders. It was a way to make Poles warm up to the Russian rule over the country. In Germany, Russians had no such sophisticated thoughts, they literally raped and pillaged their part of the country and if Germans wanted to protest they'd be reminded that it was Germany who started WWII. Quite honestly, after what Germans did to Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe, there is zero sympathy for what happened to them during WWII or afterwards.
I think Gliński's could add some more elements to his article:
Nazis had plans to turn Warszawa into a provincial but yet a model Nazi town in Pabst Plan [1], by completely demolishing it and rebuilding anew. But after the Uprising, they just simply destroyed it [2].
In the 1952, Stalin offered Bolesław Bierut (president before the office was disbanded; later he become the chairman of the Council of State) a choice between building an underground network in Warszawa, building a housing estate or PKiN (the Palace of Culture and Science). The answer was: "The underground is unnecessary, we can build the housing estate ourselves" - and so, out of Bierut's choice, the Palace was built.[3] Some criticize the decision and today even the very existence of the Palace that shares style with Moskow's Seven Sisters skyscrapers [4] and is considered as a monument of Soviet and Russian influence over Poland. It's still a quite hot political potato for all sides.
It's also somehow intriguing to think how Łódź would look like if it would permanently become the country's capital; the city itself changed much in last 12 years mainly because of new communication hub that Łódź Fabryczna railway station become. But that's still not the same as being the capital.
The underground network was started but scrapped and later erased from history due to the failure (flooding they couldn't fix) of the tunnel under Vistula river - the tunnel still exists, abandoned, with collapsed openings - no idea if the tunnel collapsed in part or not.
Warsaw is a fascinating city. I am not Polish but have spent about 3 months there over the past 20 years. It’s been a cool experience watching it continue to transform. There’s a very interesting mix of surviving architecture, rebuilt, reimagined, communist, capitalist contemporary, and urban renewal. Here’s also a very young energy there due to all the schools and being a magnet for young people across the country to start their careers.
A little gem example: there’s a communist era train platform that’s been reimagined as a Bangkok night market. In a nearby rail yard building is a very good pinball museum with playable antiques.
I am aware of that. I visited Thailand several times and even attempted learning Thai (besides planning to move there for work in mid 2010s). I don’t live in Poland any more but I know several Poles with Vietnamese roots, hence my assumption/comment regarding the night market.
Apologies if the way I phrased my comment was somewhat confusing! As a Pole who studied Persian I can see how people might expect ignorance in that matter.
Many sushi restaurants around the world are run by non-Japanese Asians (who often have a separate menu for their ethnicity than can be asked for if you know). Where I live (in the Washington, D.C. area) most Latin American people are Salvadorans, but they mostly run Mexican restaurants as that's the Latin American food that sells.
> A little gem example: there’s a communist era train platform that’s been reimagined as a Bangkok night market. In a nearby rail yard building is a very good pinball museum with playable antiques.
> Sounds like the Thai government’s decades long program of soft-diplomacy through food is working
> My bet is that is has more to do with the Vietnamese (largest non-European) minority in Poland
Speaking of 'communist era train platform's, one of the many interesting architectural flourishes that you can find in Poland is how the names of some of the train stations around Warsaw are embedded in the structure of the station. An example can be seen at [1]
Another little architectural flourish I love are the 'latarenki adresowe' (lit. 'address lanterns') you can see in the cities. They're a little lightbox that shows a silhouette of the street name and number. The older metal and glass ones you can find around the stare miasto in Krakow are especially beautiful. Some examples are [2] [3].
Some of the old buildings in central Krakow have really awesome relief art on the facade. This page has some amazing examples: [4]
A great blog about history and architecture in Polish cities is Miasta Rytm: https://miastarytm.pl/
It's where power and money converge, because of its status as the capital city of Poland. This gives its residents a feeling of exceptionalism. It's a typical Eastern European capital city where you go to join the corporate rat race. Just like London and the rest of the UK, you see a huge gap in income and quality of life between Warsaw and the rest of Poland. That's why the rest of the country dislikes Warsaw, just like the rest of the UK dislikes London.
Polish population is quite distributed across many middle sized cities. Warsaw has a population of less than 2 million but next one Cracow has ~800k. For many Warsaw will be still too big also considering it has only 2 metro lines. I usually recommend my foreign friends to go visit Cracow, Wroclaw or Gdansk - all the also more interesting for tourism since they haven't been as much destroyed as Warsaw during WW2.
Not sure, it depends what you like. Putting it on rural/conservative is pretty low. There are more progressive people outside Warsaw than inside.
I like old buildings, so prefer Cracow as it wasn't rebuilt, the old buildings there are really old, not built in past 80 years.
Also capital dwellers tend to have such self-centric attitude that makes other people upset (Warsaw is known as the "default city", because in some early days of internet when some of them asked about where to buy stuff, they didn't mention in which city, they assumed it was Warsaw).
Coming from a German part of Poland[1] to Warsaw, a Russian city, it actually seems conservative. It was the first place I saw someone pray the rosary on public transport... kneeling. It blew my mind.
There is also a lot of fetishisation of its history by conservatives, since history in Polish schools is told in a very martyr way, and history of Warsaw, its monuments and all that play well into it. If anything, it’s a very good place for conservatives.
[1]: partitions and other shenanigans of Polish history.
Regarding the rosary, I would rather guess Warsaw being the seat of government attracts lots of fringe types who come there to protest. I've last been living there in 2019 and I remember that the political climate was already heating up back then, with religious groups protesting in various places spontaneously - groups with loudspeakers at entrances to public transit, trucks driving around blasting anti-gay slogans all day, random marches of people in knight gowns carrying that certain picture of Jesus in a lavish crown that's a dogwhistle among certain ultra-religious groups - I've seen all of that, and still I would consider Warsaw to be overwhelmingly liberal in comaprison to the rest of the country.
One exception is the city's football team of course - but football in this country is synonymous with ultra-nationalism.
> since history in Polish schools is told in a very martyr way
I think that's the perception of Polish history pretty much everywhere except Russia, Ukraine, maybe Lithuania? I'm genuinely curious as to what other theories of Polish history exist, especially in Poland.
I think outside of Poland people think of it as a victim mostly in the context of the XX century, but inside, the martyrology begins much earlier and was the leading ideological current in the XIX century. It just seems we have a long tradition of not wanting to own up to our faults, always ready to blame someone else for our misfortunes. This also jives with the catholic doctrine of noble suffering.
Personally I’m a fan of taking responsibility. And in the context of falling into partitions we did have a role in that internally the country was a mess, conflicted and for sale. We could learn something from our western neighbours when it comes to forming some unity and valuing work/grit over aristocratic navel-gazing.
Poland was partitioned in XVIII century by three similarly backwards neighboring Eastern European powers: Russia, Prussia and Austria. They were more efficient that Poland though, because they were ruled by ruthless tyrants, while Poland was a democracy of the nobles, with all the worst traits that can occur in democracies (triumph of small egoisms, power and votes for sale, domination of politics by few richest oligarchs who don’t care about the country etc.). It’s basically a great pre-modern era cautionary tale of how a democracy can degenerate to the levels of complete state failure.
I would argue most of the mess of the 17th-18th centuries comes from not having a strong centralized government at a time when that meant having an absolute monarch or emperor. Sure the back-biting oligarchy was not ideal, but neither was the alternative, at least to most modern audiences. Getting it's act together as a nation would have been an anachronistic thought until well after the first partition. So while wallowing in victimhood isn't helpful, neither are/were Poland's issues entirely self-inflicted.
One somewhat weird aspect of it I encountered: my Polish grandfather (born in Łódź in the 1920s and fled as a refugee at the beginning of WW2) always told of how his experience growing up Jewish in Poland was that Poles were virulently antisemitic and he didn’t really consider them any better than the Nazis (on that specific account).
I multiple times had exchanges online where Poles absolutely refused to acknowledge any antisemitism was ever present and that everything was the Germans’ fault (to the point where if there was any it was “due to German influences” and other such weird reasoning). I don’t consider anyone at fault for something their ancestors did, I just didn’t expect such total denial of wrongdoings before encountering it.
People tend to value their own group than the other. Jews tended to keep to themselves, which had two reasons: they were forced to by laws in many countries (e.g. Ashkenazi group evolved to have good math skills mostly because they were forbidden from owning land etc. but were allowed to be merchants) and by Jews themselves tending to one another and keeping outsiders out (which is quite natural for any group, but not to that extent). Consider what happens in most cases when w given ethnicity moves out of their country - they integrate in century or two (see USA). Jews do not, at least orthodox ones (which were majority before I think).
Similar thing happens with other immigrants - if they don't integrate, they are feared. If they have different religion even more so.
Countries outside of Germany during (and before) WWII didn't have state level killings of those "alien" groups.
You may be surprised to learn that if you go to the garden of the Yad Vashem institute the trees there have tags with names of Poles. Each tree is planted for the person who saved Jews during the Holocaust. Here are the statistics https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/statistics.html Those numbers do not only matter as statistics, there was a law in place in occupied Poland that allowed the whole family to be sentenced to death if one of the members was caught helping Jews. Herr Schindler was not the only person who was saving Jews.
My grandfather was talking about his childhood, before WW2.
And I’m not at all surprised to know there are many Poles that saved Jews in WW2 - there are also a lot of Germans! I’m sure individually a lot of Poles were and are fine people.
But at least according to my late grandfather it sounded like it was pretty common to experience anti-semitism as well (my grandfather grew up in an ultra orthodox family so was easily identified on the street as Jewish - he became secular during the war).
> I multiple times had exchanges online where Poles absolutely refused to acknowledge any antisemitism was ever present and that everything was the Germans’ fault
Perhaps it's just that antisemitism didn't stand out among other -isms and frankly paled in comparison to nazi industrialized genocide.
Make no mistake - it was there - but pre-WW2 Poland was actually fairly diverse with ethnic Poles being 69% of the population and the rest consisting of (population numbers in descending order) Ukrainians, Jews, Belarusians and Germans.
It was a melting pot of mutual antipathy.
Case in point: to this day in literature there are two terms for the largest of these minorities - Ukrainians and the Rus' (the generally agreed on definition notwithstanding), the difference being that the latter did not display ambitions of forming an independent state.
For a fledgling state any such notion was of course dangerous and Ukrainians were treated in accordance to that (badly).
And for Jews specifically, it might sound weird, but in Poland they were actually better off than average citizen.
It's just an artifact of our history: even in 18th century, before partitioning of Poland the social structures we like this: Polish nobles > Jewish bankers, merchants, clerks, lawyers, doctors > Polish peasants. This structure persisted through 19th century into the 1920s and 1930s. You could say, that Poland basically outsourced most of the middle-class jobs to Jews.
In the late 1930s Poland actually ran kind of "affirmative action" to get more Polish students accepted to Polish universities, which had pretty high percentage of Jewish students: 15-25%, compared to 8.5% of Jews in general population.
All this naturally created some outrage against Jews, with Polish people feeling like a second class citizens in their own country, sometimes (but rarely) resulting in violence.
There's a long history of persecutions of Jews in Europe. They found Poland relatively liberal and settled there. Germans chose Poland to make it their graveyard. Poland is not immune from antisemitism, but there is also a long history or Poles and Jews living together and Poles helping Jews during the Holocaust. Poland was also used as a route to transport tens of thousands of Jews from the failing Soviet Union during Gorbachev rule when Israel set up a resettlement programme.
Antisemitism has always been used by those seeking to gain power through ripping up the society to shreds and it was not and is not limited to Poland.
I'd like to suggest a minor improvement: Poles instead of being "no better than Nazis" as an entire nation, should become implicitly included in the "Nazis" in your future online work (on that specific account).
That's much more clarity of message, see? After all, your late grandfather wouldn't exactly disagree with that.
I can't ask him what he meant as he died almost 20 years ago, but I believe he was speaking emotionally as a reaction to being attacked as a kid as well as some neighbours helping the nazis by turning over some people from his family that were trying to hide. Of course the Nazis are to blame for the industrialised systematic murder they introduced to Europe (not only again Jews) and I never claimed Poland as a nation was as bad as the Third Reich was (and either way I don't condemn people for the sins of their ancestors, especially those that were done before they were even born).
There are some facts of note here, not only emotions. You saw the thing primarily through your grandfather's lens, or kinda reconciling it with the "other side" online (my guesswork), but I offer starkly different perspective.
1. There were times and nations where "anti-semitism, period" was a complete political program that won legal democratic elections.
2. In Poland this program was always in substantial minority, geography and economics nonwithstanding.
3. People susceptible to such programs are a part of the problem, not a part of the solution. The program is about labels, but it breeds the hate towards an actual neighbor. Even if the idea is changed to "it's all because of Zambians". Or Poles.
Just spent a couple weeks in Poland, including Krakow, Wroclaw, and Warsaw.
In general it's considered an uninteresting city to visit as a tourist... of course as detailed here, the historic parts have been rebuilt, so what you're seeing isn't authentic. As well it's considered to be a modern, Western European'ish city, so the idea it's not a great representation of Polish culture.
That said, I enjoyed my time there the most. I love the fact that this city that was ravaged by the Nazis w/ an Eastern Bloc past has emerged as this beacon of resilience and modernity. The part that was hit the most, the Wola district - perhaps the most by the Nazis over any other part of Europe - was the most modern. It has some really great museums and public artworks.
Also to note, the areas that were rebuilt were done so well that it's not obvious to me the difference between those and the actual medieval structures in the other cities. The old towns in all had a pretty similar flavor and of course the facades of these structures have likely been updated/fixed/repainted multiple times over the centuries.
I don’t usually recommend that tourists visit Warsaw for their first trip to Poland. There are plenty of interesting things to see there, but an international tourist is going to have a certain expectation of what they will want to see, which is mostly Kraków’s medieval center and the Jewish history. That is course is a very narrow slice of Poland, which is a rapidly developing modern European powerhouse in its own right.
Another interesting thing is that almost all “old” things are materially mostly new, like the Ship of Theseus. Most structures take regular refurbishment to stay standing. So in a way, while Warsaw Old Town is materially new, the form is old, so it is still in some sense old. This is in contrast to Gdańsk’s old town which are facades slapped on top of communist block buildings meant to create a Polish themed city out of the former German city, much more Disney than architectural conservation.
I have visited Warsaw for the first time around ten years ago. And I was disappointed by how gray and bleak the city was.
Then I have visited Warsaw couple of years ago and I was shocked. Shocked. To me personally this city is one of the most beautiful in Europe, and I have lived pretty much everywhere.
I love Warsaw so much I actually moved here a year ago.
And when the Warsaw Uprising started Stalin ordered Soviet troops to wait 20 miles out of Warsaw for a month so poles and Germans would kill each other.
So the USSR has had a pivotal role in Warsaw's fall.
The article seems to gloss over the most appalling fact of the destruction of Warsaw: that it was not caused by combat or bombing, but that it was demolished, building by building, by nazi troops already on the ground, simply as an act of reprisal for the Polish uprising.
“What was left was methodically looted and then razed to the ground by the German Vernichtungs- and Verbrenungskommando – even as late as mid-January 1945.”
Vernichtungskommando is the specific German unit that was responsible for the systematic demolition of the remaining buildings.
The other one, Verbrenungskommando, was responsible for the cover-up of the mass murder of the tens of thousands of Warsaw's civilians that had just been carried out by the German army¹.
While soviet troops waited on the other side of Vistula for the uprising to fall, because they wanted to be the ones to "liberate" Poland, and not the Polish resistance.
How much extra losses would you expect Soviet troops take in an unprepared operation? The official story is that Stalin warned them against the uprising.
I can't speak for current Russian doctrine, but Soviet "human wave" attacks during WWII are mostly German propaganda. It's true they took [1] heavy losses during their operations, but "human wave" attacks wasn't a tactic the Soviets used.
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[1] They took and accepted heavy losses, but given the alternative was total extermination, their tradeoffs were entirely different to the Western Allies'...
> I can't speak for current Russian doctrine, but Soviet "human wave" attacks during WWII are mostly German propaganda
Also Western (considering silly movies like Enemy at the Gate). They had more than enough equipment outside of some brief periods to make something like that entirely unnecessary.
BUT the Soviets were much more tolerant about manpower losses than the allies and even the Germans. They regularly traded massive amounts of casualties (in ways that would have been entirely unacceptable in Britain/US) to sped up their advance (or due to political reasons).
Agreed about Enemy of the Gates! Such an awful and misleading movie.
As for your last point, I think the tradeoffs the Soviets were forced to make were entirely different to the Western Allies, especially say the US. If the US lost the war, their soldiers got to go back home. If the USSR lost the war, about 80% of the Slavic population of Eastern Europe would have been wiped out, as per stated Nazi plans. A terrible situation surely demanded terrible resolve to overcome.
Not in 1944/45. The Germans had lost and had no way of winning. Even if that was not obvious on the ground to some allied leadership clearly understood that.
Regardless the Soviets had almost no concerns about throwing away manpower unnecessarily due to political and other reasons.
e.g. the whole “Race to Berlin” and the ensuing battle, had Stalin and his generals had any concern about the lives of their soldiers (compared to most western generals/leaders) hundreds of thousands of Soviet lives could have been saved at a very small cost.
Race to Berlin made sense because it led to better post-war outcomes for USSR, which also had price in human lives. However, helping Polish uprising would do the opposite, as the Poles proudly tell themselves. It wasn't impossible though. Yugoslavia pulled that trick and that allowed it to remain neutral.
[Zhukov said:]“There are two kinds of mines; one is the personnel mine and the other is the vehicular mine. When we come to a mine field our infantry attacks exactly as if it were not there. The losses we get from personnel mines we consider only equal to those we would have gotten from machine guns and artillery if the Germans had chosen to defend that particular area with strong bodies of troops instead of with mine fields. The attacking infantry does not set off the vehicular mines, so after they have penetrated to the far side of the field they form a bridgehead, after which the engineers come up and dig out channels through which our vehicles can go.”
Regardless of anything else, in this well-known quote Zhukov isn't describing a human wave attack.
He furthermore explains how the casualties of ignoring infantry mines are in the end about the same. Remember minefields were not really used as area denial but for delaying operations. An offensive operation that gets successfully delayed results in much greater casualties later on, as the enemy has more time to prepare or retreat in an orderly fashion. Which is the whole point of using minefields!
But in any case, as Zhukov explained, the casualties of ignoring mines vs taking the time to disable them would have been about the same. So no real difference in lives.
The context of Zhukov's quote also matters. Unlike the case with the Western Allies, the war between the USSR and Nazi Germany was existential. Had the USSR lost, there was no surrender or retreat possible. There was no "going back home" or being "under new management": Nazi Germany had their Generalplan Ost, most of the Soviet officers would have been executed and more importantly 80% of the Slavic population of Eastern Europe would have been executed as well. When facing this kind of outcome, the tradeoffs that must be made are different.
But this is all a tangent, because what Zhukov describes is not a human wave attack. A human wave attack is infantry charging in waves, without cover or any tactics, and getting mowed down by dug in enemy infantry, without care about casualties and without any thought for tactics. This is definitely NOT what the Soviets did; in fact commanders who wasted the lives of their soldiers in this way were reprimanded, punished or removed from their posts (with some exceptions, of course, but exceptions also happened with the Western Allies).
Well, the Eastern Front was fought with a savagery unmatched by the other theaters. It was a war of extermination after all.
There's no denying the Germans were tactically superior (and the Soviets pretty bad, especially initially, as evidenced by their disastrous performance during the Winter War), just as the Germans were logistically and operationally inferior, especially as the war progressed.
Have everybody else not did that calculation too? Were they all wrong about it and soviets were the only ones who were right it reduces loses overall?
We know soviets just pushed people through minefields.
We know soviets had huge loses - higher than everybody else.
Your reading is that it's unrelated because the guy that did it said so :)
For me this is just excuses/trolling exhibiting the typical soviet attitude towards human life. And it's very much related to their higher loses through the wars they fought.
One, this is not a "human wave", are we agreed on this at least? Human wave describes something else. Zhukov describes attacking through minefields as if they weren't there, not running recklessly and getting mowed down in waves. They actually took cover, advanced tactically, etc; they just ignored minefields.
Two, their higher losses were mostly due to tactical incompetence in relation to the Germans, plus a much more desperate situation (not comparable with anything the Western Allies faced).
As for the Allies, did they not consider this tradeoff? Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but the tradeoff was different to them. A delay in a Western Allied operation was concerning but had different outcomes for them -- what was at stake was different. A delay in a Soviet operation had vastly more disastrous and costlier consequences (in lives).
So what is the alternative? Take a very careful and time-wasting approach to minefields, such as wasting lots of time to disable them while avoiding hostile artillery and MG fire, or avoiding that avenue of approach entirely? Acceptable to the Allies, but disastrous on the Eastern Front.
What do you mean, "trolling"? For decades the accepted thinking on the Eastern Front was what the Germans told the Allies. I call that the ultimate trolling... history as told by the losers!
I recommend some reading of Glantz and House, both renowned military historians, both retired American vets, both expert on the Eastern Front.
> Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but the tradeoff was different to them
Yes. Because they don't value human life as much. That's the point.
> What do you mean, "trolling"?
Taking pride in shocking westerners with your recklessness.
> A delay in a Soviet operation had vastly more disastrous and costlier consequences (in lives).
Notice how when it was politically beneficial - soviets waited for over a month on Vistula river bank while on the other bank Polish resistance was securing passage and fighting Germans.
> Yes. Because they don't value human life as much. That's the point.
No, that's begging the question. I'm providing a different interpretation than yours, based on reading experts on the Eastern Front.
I explained the tradeoffs, and I know you read my explanations. You cannot simply ignore them.
As an aside, in my opinion you're implicitly making an entirely unsupported assertion: that most of those lopsided Soviet infantry deaths were caused by minefields (since you provided it as an example). Unless you can support this with some references, I'll be skeptical... especially since it contradicts the stated opinion of someone who actually was there to win the war: Zhukov.
> [re: "trolling"] Taking pride in shocking westerners with your recklessness.
I'm sorry, who do you think is/was "taking pride in shocking westerners"? Zhukov was reckless in order to shock westerners? I don't follow what you're saying at all.
> Notice how when it was politically beneficial - soviets waited for over a month on Vistula river bank while on the other bank Polish resistance was securing passage and fighting Germans.
It was politically and strategically beneficial from the Soviet point of view, yes. That uprising was discouraged by the Soviets and it wasn't a Soviet-led operation, so it doesn't seem to have much to do with those alleged "human wave attacks" or "not valuing human life". Can it be criticized from other points of view? Sure, but it doesn't support your main point.
It must have also been the same Stalin who ordered the extermination of 22,000 of the educated part of the Polish society and then blamed the Germans for it
Germany had no oil after invading Poland. Almost all of it was imported over the ocean (IIRC mainly US). In theory the allies could have just waited them out. And then the Soviets sent that massive amounts of war materials due to “reasons”.. I guess. Barbarossa couldn’t have happened without that either.
France/Britain were even seriously considering bombing the Soviet oil fields in Azerbaijan and intervening in Finland before France fell.
> extra losses would you expect Soviet troops take in an unprepared operation
Not more than usual? Trading massive amounts of casualties to sped up their advance was a core aspect of their military doctrine. Soviet military leadership had no qualms about that before or after Warsaw.
Of course near the very end of the war the difference between them and the allies was heavily exacerbated by the fact that the many Germans troops were willing to fight till the death after encountering the Soviets while immediately surrendering if they ran into the US/UK forces.
> Stalin warned them against the uprising.
Well obviously. Almost entirely due to political reasons. The last thing the soviets wanted was a rival political with its own military after the war. Same reason non-communist resistance movements were purged on a large scale after the war.
I'm not sure why Poles have this audacity that many young Russians (but also some Belorussians and Ukrainians, and some Soviet Jews) had to die so that Poles had better bargaining position with Stalin later on.
This all while explaining how Russian lives are worthless anyway (a scroll worth of comments) so why bother about these.
I'm also not sure why Stalin will discard his political goals and help Polish resistance achieve theirs instead with his armies. What did they expect?
First Russians invaded Poland together with Germany in September 1939.
Then after Germans betrayed them in 1941 they recaptured Poland from them (stealing and raping their way through the country) and then kept Poland as a puppet state for 50 years, murdering innocent people, censoring press, falsifying history and enforcing the totalitarian system they put in place after faked elections with stalinist purges and communist terror.
More seriously, it seems that you are trying to pass Polish passivity and inaction as a virtue. Somehow individual Polish human beings should be treated better because their Polish state was AFK, than other human beings whose ancestors were living in other states which were assaulting each other through Poland.
That just does not sound convincing east of Rhine.
The had no issues unnecessarily dying entirely for Stalin’s political ambitions?
One might say that being one of the aggressors who started the war and by playing a massive part in the successful German invasion of France (it’s hard to imagine Germany could have pulled that off without massive Soviet material support, they basically had no oil after all..) that the Soviets had a moral obligation to right some of those wrongs.
> Russian lives are worthless anyway
That was a fact (in relative terms) mainly established by the Soviets. They indeed considered the lives of their citizen to be worth very little (compared to the allies).
> What did they expect?
That he’d prioritize the defeat of Germany and the liberation of Poland over them. Of course extremely naive…
I may be beliving that a benevolent AI has an obligation preserve our consciousness after our death, as well as treat us with free ice cream. There should be a process of reconciling your beliefs with reality.
Poland did end up on the receiving side of Stalin's benevolent dictatorship. He essentially de-partitioned Poland thus effectively recreating it. An uncelebrated founding father of Polish nation state.
Many people would think Poles suffered comparatively little and got out with comparatively much out of WW2.
This is 1984 level of bullshit. "War is peace, murdering innocent people and annexing countries is benevolent".
> [Stalin] essentially de-partitioned Poland
Are you even aware that Poland existed before WW2? There was no need to "de-" partition it if you just kept your hands to yourself. It was Hitler and Stalin who partitioned it in the first place.
And even in strictly technical terms - Poland was in one piece after 1941 because Germans took it over from soviets. There was no need to "de-partition" it after WW2 either.
On the other hand soviets did partition it AGAIN in 1945 by splitting the eastern parts and annexing them to USSR. Even including the gains in the west - Poland lost about 1/7th of its territory during WW2 because soviets just took it.
> Many people would think Poles suffered comparatively little and got out with comparatively much out of WW2.
Over 1/6th of Polish population died in WW2. About 6 million Polish citizens (half of them Polish Jews) died because Nazi Germany and Soviet Union joined forces to invade Poland in 1939 and did ethnic cleansings and political repressions there. Germans for 5 years, Russians for 50 years.
Stalin is personally responsible for ordering murder of several hundreds thousands of Poles and forced expulsion of millions of Poles from their homes in eastern Poland (which became USSR after WW2). And indirectly co-responsible for all the deaths that resulted from WW2 which he helped Hitler start.
> An uncelebrated founding father of Polish nation state.
Attack on German forces distracted by uprising, with safe places to move through the river secured by rebels would be easier and faster than waiting for Germans to mop up and destroy the city.
And of course Stalin warned against uprising - he wanted to get Poland, any independent forces were a threat to that plan. After WW2 he imprisoned anti-nazi guerilla fighters in Poland and murdered their leaders in a show trial in Moscow (after promising them safe passage).
Of all these, only Warsaw was demolished systematically, and to the greater extent not by regular weapons, but by engineering corps using fire and explosives after the fighting has already stopped (the capitulation of the uprising in Oct 1944). It is a rather different case, even though – of course – all the other cities mentioned suffered very much too.
Green, walkable, clean, good public transport, mostly-well-connected airport, reasonable cost of living (esp. if you work remotely as a software engineer…), good and varied restaurants, and very safe.