International charity worker Chris McIvor, from Wick, considers the central role the Polish capital has played throughout our modern history
Fragments of the red ghetto walls in Warsaw. Picture: iStock
In 1944, in retaliation for what turned out to be a failed uprising against the German occupation, Hitler ordered the complete destruction of Warsaw, no building to be left standing.
His army largely succeeded in removing it from the map with almost 90 per cent of the city destroyed and much of the population with it.
There were discussions after the war when Poland was under Russian occupation whether it should be rebuilt at all, with Stalin convinced it was not worth the trouble.
But the Polish people believed there was too much history to be ignored and too many personal memories that would be buried and so they rebuilt the entire city over the next few decades.
Warsaw today is a busy, modern metropolis with the usual high-rise offices and apartments, large shopping malls advertising products from all over the world, a fair number of parks to call the city green and the ever-popular MacDonalds and KFCs on numerous street corners.
The modern city of Warsaw, beneath which lies a long history. Picture: iStock
The history of the city is now largely preserved in museums and some reconstructed buildings made to look like their original. Which is why when you stumble across a piece of actual history it reminds you that, despite its veneer of 21st-century modernity and optimism, there is a settlement buried somewhere beneath it that dates back a thousand years.
Unfortunately, during the more recent part of its past, Warsaw witnessed some of the worst atrocities of modern times.
At the end of a small alley overlooked today by a block of apartments and barely signposted so that you would need a guide to find it, there is a small, preserved section of red, brick wall in the centre of the city.
Its significance is only evidenced by some flowers scattered in front of it and a plaque that indicates the former edge of the Jewish ghetto. This is a portion of an original wall that once surrounded a population of almost 400,000 Jews incarcerated for several years behind it.
Many were starved or worked to death. Others were executed after a one-month uprising of the Jewish population against their better-armed German captors. But the majority were ferried by train to a host of concentration camps that surrounded Warsaw, with place names that are now infamous in history – Auschwitz, Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka.
With a precision that would probably better modern times, the system ran like clockwork – with occupants of the death trains to Treblinka unloaded in a maximum of two hours after which the train would depart for its next load of human cargo.
Chris McIvor in Wick. Picture: Alan Hendry
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Above the noise and bustle of a modern city going about its business and a population preoccupied with the World Cup this month (despite Poland not qualifying), it is a stretch to imagine what actually happened here.
Only 10,000 of Warsaw’s once-thriving Jewish population, the largest in Europe before the war, survived the atrocities. Out of these remaining few that made it, most chose to abandon their former homes and emigrated elsewhere when the Russians finally allowed it.
Engaging with the Jewish history of Poland and the events of the Holocaust is now a regular part of the tourist itinerary, and for a few days in Warsaw I also participated in the experience. It left me with a few confused emotions.
Firstly, some embarrassment that as a passing and privileged visitor I could contemplate the suffering of an entire people from a comfortable distance after which I could return to my hotel in the evening and enjoy some of the country’s fine local cuisine.
Secondly, being half German there were some feelings of guilt that the country of my mother could have descended into such barbarity. Despite Beethoven and Goethe, Germany would forever be connected with an almost successful attempt to remove another race from our human fraternity.
I asked the guide on one of my tours how Warsaw’s youth viewed this history, whether they were familiar with what had happened and aware that one-third of their former population was Jewish compared with only a few thousand today.
He shrugged his shoulders and said that despite the commendable museums, monuments and attempts of the city to preserve some relics of this difficult past, the preoccupation of young people with contemporary social media and its various fashions diverted most of their attention. Pretty much like everywhere else, he added.
Which left me with a third emotion, and some concern as a father of two young children thinking about their future. Could populist leaders today manipulate their populations into believing everything they tell them and succeed in inciting hatred towards others who are different?
Are values of tolerance and respect sufficiently robust to withstand the claims of prejudice and discrimination? Could a ghetto like the one in Warsaw ever happen again?
Not so long ago I would have considered this unlikely but now I see my past conviction as naive and misplaced. Evil can often appear banal and ordinary, which is exactly when we need to be most vigilant.
The few bits of red-brick wall that remain in Warsaw remind us of what happens when we look away.
• Chris McIvor is head of programmes for the HelpAge International charity. His forthcoming novel, The Island of Crossed Paths will be published by Olympia Publishers towards the end of the year.
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