Warsaw at War: 1939-1945

Warsaw rebuilt itself from rubble, and the scars are still visible if you know where to look. On this walking tour, you'll trace Warsaw's wartime history from the 1944 Uprising to the Jewish Ghetto's destruction. You'll also hear how a city reduced to ruins restored itself piece by piece.

The tour starts on the Royal Route beside St Anne's Church, then leads you to Sigismund's Column, badly damaged when Nazis detonated it in reprisal for the Uprising. You'll pass the Royal Castle, rebuilt using Canaletto's paintings as a reference, and the Katyn Massacre memorial, honoring the thousands of Polish officers executed by Soviet forces in 1940. Bullet-pocked columns and reconstructed facades reveal just how much of the city had to rise from nothing.

Along Podwale Street you'll find the Little Insurgent monument, commemorating child soldiers who fought in 1944, before reaching Krasiński Square's Uprising memorial and the Kotwica, the anchor symbol of Polish resistance. You'll walk through the former Jewish Ghetto, once home to over 400,000 people, where pavement markers trace the vanished wall. The tour ends at Piłsudski Square, beside the statue of Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the military leader many believe could have prevented the war entirely.

On this 75-minute tour, you'll have a chance to:

• See the ruins of the Reduta Bank Polski, left pockmarked by bullets as a deliberate wartime memorial
• Visit the Warsaw Arsenal, scene of a daring 1943 operation to free a captured resistance leader
• Walk through the Saxon Garden, once modeled on Versailles before Nazis dynamited its palace
• Stand at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the only surviving fragment of that destroyed palace
• Learn how Chopin's farewell concert in 1830 preceded his lifelong exile from occupied Poland
• Hear the story of Jan Kiliński, a shoemaker turned military commander during the 1794 Warsaw Insurrection
• Discover the Katyn memorial's connection to a massacre Russia denied for over fifty years

By the time you reach Piłsudski Square, you'll understand exactly how this city rebuilt itself after Nazi occupiers deliberately destroyed nine-tenths of it.