May 28, 1968
Warsaw, Poland — There are three Warsaws, blurred into one by bricks and mortar, ideology and memories.
Living on in fond reminiscence is the city of Chopin and Madame Curie, which existed here before the Nazi invasion of 1939.
The second Warsaw — a sea of rubble, which inspired Hitler to tell the Reichstag in 1945, “Warsaw is now no more than a geographical tem on the map of Europe.” — has nearly disappeared from view but pervades speech and thought.
The visible city of 1968 — the third Warsaw — is a driving, sprawling town molded in the pattern of socialist man.
This is a city with a new face on an old body and a new guiding force with old memories, seeking a new identity but unable to discard its past. Warsaw is a city with its eye on tomorrow and its mind on yesterday.
‘Heart, Brain and Treasury’
Warsaw was a latecomer among Polish cities, emerging during the thirteenth century. In 1596, it was designated as the capital of Poland, replacing Cracow. In the following centuries, the city was the center stage of Poland’s continuing struggle for independence, witnessing numerous uprisings against foreign domination.
The city on the Vistula River lost its rank as capital under the czarist occupation of Poland and not until 1918, when the nation regained its freedom, was Warsaw restored its rank as leading city. In the next 20 years, it prospered and grew into a leading European capital.
Warsaw has been called “the heart, the brain and the treasury of Poland.” It was busy performing that role in 1939. It had 1,350,000 residents living under capitalism and was a mixture of achievements and problems.
To Kill A City
The second Warsaw was born September 1, 1939, in a rain of fire, the first European city to be bombed by the Nazis. What followed in the next five years has become legend: establishment of the Jewish ghetto, genocide, uprisings against the German occupants. Through it al1q the city, despite serious damage, continued to exist.
Muranow, the area of the Jewish ghetto, was a desert of ruins in 1945
In 1944, Hitler ordered Warsaw killed. The city was to be evacuated and razed to the ground.
As writer Karol Malcuzynski relates, “Special units were assigned to the task of destroying historic buildings, monuments, museums, libraries and archives. These units benefited from the advice of experts — art historians, architects, etc. — who told them which buildings, monuments and collections were to be destroyed in the first place as representing particular historic or artistic value…
“The thorough and methodical way in which Hitler’s order was carried out verges on the insane. Specially equipped detachments destroyed the city’s underground installations; tanks were used to pull electric cables out of the earth. Other special units were charged with the task of destroying parks and open spaces, felling trees, etc.”
Of the same period, Olgierd Budrewicz writes, “It (Warsaw) is probably the only town in Europe, perhaps even in the world, of more than a million inhabitants, whose population dwindled, at a certain point in history, down to naught. Well, perhaps to 150 — fugitives hiding in the cellars and ruins on the left bank of the river.”
The Remains
When Warsaw was liberated by Polish and Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, something like 80 per cent of the city was in ruins. The war had seen from 500,000 to 800,000 people die in the city and 200,000 corpses still were lying in the debris, in sewers, and in temporary graves.
In material terms, the city suffered a loss estimated at 2-5 billion dollars. The Poles who struggled back to the city that winter found the remains of a city without light, water, telephone or transportation. Still they flocked back to Warsaw, setting up living quarters in the few remaining buildings, next to walls that still stood, or in the open.
The new communist government decided quickly to retain Warsaw as the capital of People’s Poland, a decision made on the basis of nationalism, not socialism, which had important moral and symbolic meaning to the war-weary Poles. Hitler had sought to obliterate the city. The Poles replied by determining to rebuild Warsaw, regardless of cost. For this reason, a proposal to rebuild the city on a new site was rejected. Raising Warsaw became the primary goal of the Polish nation.
“The building of Warsaw,” relates Adolf Ciborowski, former chief architect, “was no easy matter. Warsaw was not a city built on a clean slate –like Brasilia in the midst of a virgin forest. There was no need to fell trees or to convert steppes into places fit for urban construction…In this case, the site had to be cleared of some 2 million 15-ton carloads of rubble, and more than 100,000 mines left over by the Nazis had to be rendered harmless.”
There was so much rubble, in fact, that one plan was proposed to build the city over in three levels, using layers of rubble to elevate whole sections. As it turned out, the rubble was used to do many things to make concrete, to build a 100,000 seat stadium, and to reconstruct buildings.
Al. Jerozolimskie (Jerusalem avenue), a main east-west street, as it looks now and as it was before reconstruction following the war. The two towers along the street serve as a reference point for comparisons.
Planning the Rebirth
The planners who gathered in the Warsaw Reconstruction Office after the war drew upon pre-war plans for the city and those made secretly during the occupation. Looking at the task before them, they searched for anything, which had survived the war intact. There was one thing — the infrastructure of the city, the form it had taken over its centuries of growth.
“We decided to keep the main infrastructure,” explains Architect Maria Niemczyk of the Town Planning Department. “The existing network of streets was the basis for the new framework. Our plan was based on giving the city a functional structure, rebuilding it around four main functions — residential, industrial, services and recreation. The original plan was for a rebuilt city of only 800,000.”
Immediately, the planners found theory clashing with reality. “The terrifying destruction of the town had given priceless value to every remaining house, every tumble-down shelter, and every dwelling room,” recalls Stanislaw Dziewulski, co-author of the general plan of Warsaw. “It was impossible, despite the planners’ profound conviction of the correctness of the redevelopment plan, to demand that accidentally preserved houses be demolished or to prohibit reconstruction of partially destroyed buildings.”
Ideology, even more than reality, set the course the planners were to follow. Not only was Warsaw to be rebuilt but it was to be reshaped in a socialist mold to eliminate class differences and other “evils of capitalism.” At a time when the situation was most conducive to imaginative new approaches, Warsaw was to be rebuilt under rigid standards aimed at achieving uniformity.
The Guiding Principles
Professor Jack C. Fisher of Cornell University outlines four principles of urban planning, influenced by Marxist philosophy, which have shaped the standards for planners in Eastern Europe. Each has relevance to Warsaw’s rebuilding. They are:
- The Neighborhood Unit — “The basic tool of socialist planners in their attempts to create ‘urban uniformity’ is today the division and construction of cities by neighborhood units,” Fisher says.
Warsaw’s planning, according to Mrs. Niemczyk, has been based on the development of neighborhood units of about 6500 people. Each unit is provided nearby the everyday services such as an elementary school and the basic shops.
Six to eight neighborhood units are classified as a neighborhood group and have an average of 40,000 people per group. Plans call for providing each group with more specialized facilities — a cinema, clubhouse, library, health center, department store and the like.
Several neighborhood groups together make up a town of 150,000 to 300,000 people, she explains. The town center should provide nearly every kind of good or service. Warsaw has seven such town centers.
- The City’s Center — “The earliest postwar communist pronouncements stressed that the distinctive character of the socialist city’s center should be its political-cultural-administrative function rather than an area of retail concentration,” Professor Fisher explains.
The town centers, says Mrs. Niemczyk, should provide a level of services comparable with the city center. Warsaw’s city center should primarily serve to provide the services of Warsaw as the capital of the nation and of the region. The city center, however, is considered still the most attractive for shoppers and for the city’s private merchants.
- Standardization — Fisher says, “In order to achieve urban uniformity and, perhaps even more important, to maximize the effectiveness of limited investments, ‘it is necessary to regulate in a socially correct way, the standard of satisfaction of housing needs.”
He asserts, “The effect of strict regulation of housing has been a gradual equalization of per capita ‘living space’, an equalization which, due to faulty construction methods, particularly the inefficiency of prefabricated construction and the lack of sufficient investments in housing, has generated year-by-year a decrease, until most recently, in the average per capita ‘living space.’”
In Warsaw, this norm is seven square meters (about 75 square feet) per person for room size and 11 square meters (118 square feet) per person of total floor area. A family of five is entitled to a flat with about 600 square feet, including kitchen, bath and hall.
- Proper Size of a City — “Another planning assumption is that the growth and size of cities will have definite restrictions, “ Fisher explains. “It appears that most arguments for limiting urban growth are ideologically based, derived in part to counter the bigness and thus inhumane conditions supposedly characteristic of major Western cities as well as the belief that, by means of size limitation, one somehow can equalize the differences between the city and the countryside…”
The planned growth of Warsaw, which has far exceeded the earlier estimates, calls for the city to reach a population of 2,350,000 by 1985. Migration to the city is restricted (though at least 20,000 people axe estimated to live here “unofficially”) and a policy of deglomeration is underway. The policy is aimed at moving those employers out of Warsaw who do not require location here and freezing the employment of other enterprises.
The Product
“In 1945,” one leading city planner told me, “they said it would take 100 years to rebuild this city. But we did it in 20.”
Warsaw in 1968 is not the 1939 Warsaw rebuilt. It is different in size, composition and style.
The physical size of the city is now 158 square miles, more than three times the size of the old Warsaw, and includes many undeveloped areas. The population of the city is now about 1,275,000 or some 80,000 less than in 1939. The net effect is a great decrease in total density, although some areas are very densely populated and others almost barren.
Industrialization has changed the nature of the people here. Almost two-thirds of today’s Varsovians did not live here before 1945. The new citizens have come in large part from rural areas to work in the new factories, bringing with them a culture much different from the urbane 1939 Warsaw.
Official figures say that 750,000 people now work in Warsaw, including 130,000 who commute to the city from peripheral areas, compared with only 317,000 jobs in the city before World War II. One reason for the great difference appears to be the number of persons who hold two jobs, a common practice in present-day Warsaw.
Of course, socialism makes the great difference in life style. It has changed everything from the food Varsovians eat to the books they read.
Profit Motive Removed
The difference between Warsaw now and in 1939, says economic planner Stefan Mizera, “is the difference between capitalism and socialism. Before the war, land was used for profit. Now the profit motive has been removed. The city center before the war was for the rich and the suburbs for the poor. There was no interaction between them. Now people in housing have greater green space and more light. In the pre-war period, the kind of housing a person received was based only on his income. Now it is coordinated to his need.
Removing the profit motive in Warsaw was accomplished, in part, by nationalizing land. Of the city’s 44,575 hectares of land, about 40,000 are now owned by the government. The nationalization of land in Warsaw helped the city speed reconstruction.
“Since 1945, more residential rooms have been reconstructed in Warsaw than it had before the war,” asserts a city report. “In 1966, the global (total) number of residential rooms was about 905,000, the average size being 18.6 square meters (200 square feet). A flat has, on average, 2.3 rooms.”
Warsaw’s Nowy Swiat Street in 1939
“The greatest part of the Warsaw population,” the city report continues, “(70 percent) is living in neighborhoods built after the war in compliance with the modern town planning standards. They are equipped with all the necessary utilities: water, and gas supply, central heating, sewerage system. Each housing estate has the full set of service facilities, such as schools, nursery school, creches (for infant care), and a shopping centre. There are also playing grounds for children and rich interior green spaces…
“Thanks to a systematization of functions of the city, it was possible to group the large industrial establishments within the integrated industry estates and complexes built for the most part after the war, while a number of small-scale production plants of inoffensive effect have been located also in residential areas.”
The Shape of the City
Warsaw’s mortar takes a thousand shapes.
Stare Miasto — the medieval quarter of the city rebuilt after the war as an act of love and pride in Polish history — is the most charming part of Warsaw. Recreated on the basis of photographs and paintings by the Master Canaletto, it has been rebuilt to incorporate modern conveniences and provided with additional open space through large inner courtyards. Its historic churches have been reconstructed with great care and its houses made distinctive, giving the quarter a strong attraction for tourists and for the people of the city. The best single achievement of the rebuilding here was the construction of a highway tunnel under the quarter, removing traffic congestion from the area and leaving it free for pedestrians. The idea is worth copying.
Nearby, on Kradowski Przedmiescie, and elsewhere about the city, other fine historical buildings live again, brought back to life with great skill. Many of them were but a foundation in 1945. The restoration work shows what is possible with valuable old buildings.
Clashing violently with the classic baroque of State Miasto’s churches is the massive Stalinest architecture of Marszalkowska Street (and elsewhere in the city), crowned by the Palace of Culture and Science. The building (with Joseph Stalin’s name now gone from it) towers 747 feet over Warsaw and was a gift from the Soviet Union. Varsovians say the best view of Warsaw is from the top of the palace because you can’t see the palace from there. The Stalinest buildings are called politely by planners “Certain mistakes made prior to 1956.”
The marks of the war are still in evidence on many buildings — from the rake of a machinegun marked on a single-family house to small shall holes in an apartment building, which survived. There are even a few major buildings still in rubble, such as the old Bank of Poland. And work continues on the removal of the remaining rubble from the city.
The residential areas of Warsaw constructed after the war include everything from wooden prefabricated houses from Finland to a few expensive apartment buildings. Predominating, however, are the great housing estates built under the neighborhood unit concept9 using prefabricated materials. More than 90 per cent of the new housing is being constructed by prefabrication. The technology combines with the planning to produce great blocks of buildings with the same shape, size and color and the same dullness.
The Old Town Castle Square reconstructed and as it looked in 1945
The emphasis in the housing program has been on quantity, not quality, and the program has succeeded in building great numbers of new flats. They are served with those facilities considered necessary for “good dwelling conditions.” No more or less. They are small but solidly built. Aside from size, the only thing, which seems to require improvement, is the lack of consideration of certain human factors. Examples of this lack are those flats with windowless kitchens and housing estates without sufficient parking facilities.
The abundance of green space in the city, used primarily to separate various functions, could be envied by many cities. Too often, however, the open space seems a contradiction when nearby a new housing estate teems with people. It seems at times that the open space exists only because the rules say it should and not because it benefits anyone.
The Sum
The most surprising thing about this city is the lack of surprise it offers. To walk in the city is interesting but seldom surprising or exciting. Walking in Warsaw is a means of getting from here to there, not a form of recreation. The sidewalks are filled with people moving briskly, but seldom stopping to chat or loll.
It is easy to marvel at Warsaw’s mere existence after getting a glimpse of this city in 1945- It is difficult to criticize what has been done here when you consider the handicaps faced in the rebuilding and the spirit which overcame them. Still, it does not seem right to praise the city. It deserves compliments and its people have earned deep admiration. But not praise.
For the Warsaw produced here in the past 23 years is a grey city, with a life style, which seems imposed on it and without the humanism of a warm city.
Warsaw has numerous monuments recalling the events of World War II here. You cannot walk far without seeing a sidewalk shrine marking some execution from those terrible days. Buildings are often identified not by their present use but as to their fate in the war. The city does not need war monuments. It is itself a monument. The second Warsaw — 1939-1945 — almost overshadows the city of 1968. Even while understanding the reason for this, the fact saddens you.
If anything, the city is over planned. It seems to have been built and its people inserted. It does not seem to have been shaped around them.
“Warsaw is a cryptic city,” says Budrewicz,” — neither the finest in the world nor the easiest to live in. Its strength lies in the vitality of its inhabitants, in their constant readiness for sacrifice, their éclat and unique spirit, ability to improvise, and their gift for laughing at authority. Characteristic of Varsovians is not to be surprised at anything, to be patient and dogged, not to fear death, and not to threaten with it at every opportunity “…So Warsaw is, above all, its people and only then its streets and houses.”
Its people deserve more than has been given them.
Housing estates in the Bielany quarter (above) provide homes for workers of the Warsaw Steel Works. The Praga quarter (below) is on the right bank of the Vistula River. Shops are in the one-story buildings in foreground.
The best new development in Warsaw is this section of Marszalkowska Street. The three 22-story towers are apartment buildings. To their left are modern new shopping buildings. The round building is a bank.
Received In New York June 51, 1968.
Mr. Meeker is an Alicia Patterson Fund award winner, on leave from the St.. Louis Post-Dispatch. This article may be published, with credit to David A. Meeker, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Alicia Patterson Fund.
