Museums and monuments in Warsaw

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine had stopped all air travel to the country, my journeys to Kyiv in the autumn of 2022 and again in the summer of 2023 passed through Warsaw. With events in Ukraine very much on my mind, I took the opportunity to visit a couple of the monuments to the resistance in Poland during the Second World War.

The Warsaw Uprising Monument commemorates the battle of Poland’s resistance to seize control of the capital from the retreating German occupiers before the arrival of the advancing Soviet forces. The uprising, which began on 1 August 1944, was both heroic and tragic, as the Soviet army stopped short of the city and waited while the Germans brutally suppressed it and then destroyed the city in its aftermath. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died, as Stalin refused to allow any meaningful supplies to the resistance. The uprising may be seen as the beginning of the Cold War, as the Polish Home Army’s vision of a pro-Western Polish state clashed with the Soviets’ determination to crush any independent Polish spirit and to subsume the country into its expanding empire of proxy states in central Europe. The people of Warsaw paid the price for the Nazi brutality and Soviet callousness.

The Warsaw Uprising monument

The monument depicts Home Army soldiers in action amid the ruins of the shattered city, as well as a group emerging from the sewers, which had been an important way for the insurgents to move around. It was only erected in 1989, at the very end of communist rule in Poland. Until then communist Poland had downplayed and distorted the importance of the uprising. Home Army veterans were disparaged and, in the immediate post-war period, even arrested. No commemorations of the Home Army or the uprising were permitted. The cynicism with which the Soviet army stood back and watched as the Germans destroyed Warsaw meant that the uprising was an uncomfortable event for the communist regime.

The Warsaw Rising Museum opened in 2004, to mark the 60^th anniversary of the uprising. A big, sprawling museum over a number of floors, it is packed with artefacts, weapons, photographs, displays, videos and audio. The subdued lighting and a loud background noise, like a beating heart, produced a forbidding atmosphere. The museum was crowded, with large school parties rushed around. Disturbing impressions were thrown at me, but the thread of events through that terrible two months was hard to follow. I picked up some printed flyers that seemed randomly distributed around the museum, but which explained the course of events. I left with the feeling that they had tried to pack in too much, and that coherence had been lost along the way.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising monument

Another monument commemorating the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was unveiled in 1948, in the area where the ghetto had been. It consists of a large stone wall representing both the walls of the ghetto and the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, with two large menorahs to either side. Inset in the wall are, on one side, insurgents of the uprising, and, on the other, a depiction of the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people. Next to the monument is the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which was opened in 2013. This striking postmodern building has become a considerable landmark in Warsaw. The name Polin means both “Poland” in Hebrew, as well as “rest here”, which relates to the legend about the first Jews’ arrival in Poland. The museum relates a thousand years of Jewish history in Poland, once the largest Jewish community in the world, from its beginnings in the Middle Ages up to the holocaust and beyond.

The Polin museum, Warsaw

The museum’s layout draws visitors through the different phases of Jewish history in Poland. That Poland attracted such a large Jewish community reflected its exceptional tolerance among European states. Although Poland was not immune to antisemitic violence, its Jews were in general protected by the Polish Kings, who valued their contribution to the economy of their realm. As elsewhere, Jews in Poland thrived as traders. The Polin museum does not shy away from presenting uncomfortable aspects of Jewish history in Poland, including their engagement in the slave trade. It explains that, despite the Catholic Church’s objections to the enslavement of Christians, Poland’s kings were loath to act against it, because they profited from the trade. Catholic clergy in general opposed the tolerance shown towards Jews, but their objections were largely ignored by the country’s rulers.

With my mind on Ukraine, an especially striking section of the museum concerned the Bohdan Khmelnytsky rebellion of 1648. Ukraine was at the time part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Khmelnytsky’s Cossack rebellion against Polish rule especially targeted Jews, as well as Polish landowners and Catholic priests. Jews were seen as allies of the Polish landed aristocracy as they frequently acted as tax collectors. Tens of thousands of Jews were massacred. The museum explained how, for the Jewish community in Poland-Lithuania, the Khmelnytsky rebellion was a cataclysmic event that ended their feeling of safety and security in Poland. Furthermore, from a Polish perspective, the Khmelnytsky rebellion was an important stage in the weakening of the Commonwealth, leading to its eventual demise and partition among the neighbouring states. For Poland’s Jews, the demise of the Commonwealth was also negative, as it meant that they lost the protection Poland had offered them, and were left at the mercy of rising antisemitism in the Russian and Austrian empires.

In Ukraine, Khmelnytsky has usually been seen as a positive historical figure. One of the country’s regions is named after him. A banknote bears his image. And there is an equestrian statue of him in the centre of Kyiv. However, some Ukrainians have seen him unfavourably, especially because, with his rebellion failing, after initial success, he turned to the Russian Tsar for support, which led to the incorporation of eastern and central Ukraine into imperial Russia. For Russia, Khmelnytsky was seen as a heroic figure, for his role in, according to the Russian view, uniting Russian lands. Indeed, the statue in Kyiv was erected in the 19^th century, under Tsarist rule.

Since independence, Ukrainians have been reassessing their history, a process that has been accelerated by Russia’s aggression. There is a widespread feeling that Ukrainian history has for too long been written from a Russian perspective. This feeling has considerable justification. The point is relevant for western historians as well, who all too often had a largely Russo-centric view of imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, which did not give sufficient weight or importance to the non-Russian peoples under Tsarist and Soviet rule. But in addressing their history, Ukrainians need to take a critical look at uncomfortable episodes and historical Ukrainian figures whose records were far from unblemished. Polish-Ukrainian relations, as well as the treatment of the Jewish community, present difficult topics, and Ukrainians need also to consider the perspectives of others on their shared histories. As the Polin museum makes clear, Khmelnytsky is far from a heroic figure for some of Ukraine’s neighbours.

Kyiv under attack

The day before I travelled by bus from Warsaw to Lviv in mid-November 2022, Russia launched a mass-missile attack on Ukraine. A friend in Lviv contacted me and asked whether I was sure I really wanted to come? She had taken refuge in a shelter when the air raid siren had sounded, but she had heard the explosions when the missiles struck. Since the previous month, Ukraine had faced regular such missile attacks targeting its energy infrastructure every week or so in an obscene attempt by Russia to make Ukrainians freeze that winter. I had realised that such attacks were likely to occur during my stay. But I didn’t know quite what to expect. During my stay in Odessa that summer, people had largely ignored the air raid sirens. Would it be different now? Ukraine had not yet been provided with the kind of modern air defence systems that could more or less reliably shoot down Russian missiles. And even though they did shoot down many of them, the debris still had to fall to earth. Central Kyiv had been struck a short while before, and there had been victims, ordinary people going about their business, walking or driving in the city.

I arrived in Lviv on an autumnal evening just after the electricity had been restored. Meeting my friend for dinner, it was striking how normal things seemed, at least on the surface. The pizzeria we went to was packed with people out enjoying themselves. But of course, the situation was far from normal. The first snow of winter fell while I was in Lviv. Whether Ukraine could cope with the repeated missile attacks, whether the energy supply could be maintained, whether the heating could be kept on and the water kept flowing, these were all questions with uncertain answers that autumn. There was even talk of Kyiv potentially having to be evacuated if the city became uninhabitable.

Arriving in Kyiv after an overnight train journey, I took the metro and went straight to one of my favourite cafés, close to the Golden Gate. I drank coffee and ate an excellent almond croissant. It seemed extraordinary to be back. Having freshened up in my hotel, the same hotel where I had stayed many times before, I met a friend for lunch in an excellent nearby Georgian restaurant. Unlike Odessa during my visit in the summer, with its half-empty streets and closed shops and cafes, Kyiv seemed much more alive. Most of the cafes and restaurants I had previously frequented were still working normally. A city-centre shopping mall was bustling with people. The spirit of the city seemed undimmed.

Glass Bridge and Arch of Freedom of the Ukrainian People

But of course, all was not normal. Many streets around key government and administrative buildings were closed off. Statues were covered up for their protection: Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the leader of a 17^th century Cossack revolt against Polish rule; Princess Olha, who as regent in the 10^th century was the first ruler of Kyivan Rus to be baptised as a Christian; the author Mikhail Bulgakov, who was born in Kyiv. The glass bridge connecting two hills in the city centre was closed, having been damaged by a missile strike the previous month. The Soviet-era monument to Ukrainian-Russian friendship at one end of the bridge had been dismantled. The monumental arch that rose above it, which had been constructed un 1982 to commemorate Ukraine’s union with Russia, had been renamed the Peoples’ Friendship Arch after Ukraine’s independence, but after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine it had been renamed again, the Arch of Freedom of the Ukrainian People.

Graffiti on the Maidan Nezalezhnosti

Concrete blocks and iron-girder tank traps had been pushed to the sides of the road by Independence Square, the Maidan Nezalezhnosti. An artwork attributed to Banksy, painted on one of the concrete blocks, appeared to show a girl and a boy using one of the tank traps as a seesaw.

On the square in front of St Michael’s monastery, by Princess Olha’s covered statue, a selection of wrecked tanks, armoured personnel carriers and other military vehicles had been lined up as trophies of Russia’s defeats before Kyiv in the spring. People walked around them, clambered over them, and posed in front of them. President Zelensky had brought various visiting foreign dignitaries here. On some of the vehicles people had written graffiti, “for Bakhmut”, “for Severodonetsk”, “for Mykolaiv”, towns that had been subjected to Russian destruction. And alongside the wall surrounding the monastery, the lines of photos of fallen soldiers grew ever longer. Mostly young men, and some women, some of them posing formally in their uniforms, others smiling happily for the camera, lives cut short by Russia’s brutal aggression. On Independence Square, an impromptu memorial consisted of hundreds of little Ukrainian flags commemorating, according to placards, foreigners and Ukrainians killed by Putin.

The scrap of Russia's failed assault on Kyiv

The day before I left Kyiv, there was another mass-missile attack. I later heard that this was one of the most devastating strikes. Electricity and water were knocked out in much of the city. Somehow, although the streets around were without power, in my hotel the lights remained on, although we were without water. Many restaurants and cafes had generators and were still able to operate, although some of them, which had not prepared, were unable to provide tea or coffee, or anything that required water. Eating my lunch in a large basement self-service canteen, there were many people who had not come to eat, but were rather taking shelter, and using the opportunity to charge their phones and use the wifi. The shopping mall which had seemed so busy when I arrived a few days earlier was now quiet, with few shoppers.

That evening, before catching the overnight train back to Lviv, I ate in a burger restaurant. Generators were still whirring up and down the pitch-dark street. The restaurant was full of people, and, as at the self-service canteen earlier, many of them were not eating or drinking. Here was a place where they could sit in warmth, with electricity to charge their phones. As I had seen in other cafes and restaurants, no one objected to people sitting without ordering anything. This was the solidarity among the people of Kyiv. Facing the horror of Russia’s aggression, people pulled together and looked after each other. The government was establishing “invincibility centres” where people could go for warmth, a hot drink and a wifi connection. But the atmosphere that evening felt more subdued. Despite the resilience and determination that was so impressive, after several weeks of such attacks, people were weary. There was snow on the ground, the weather was getting cold. How would the city fare under these repeated Russian attacks?

As I pulled my suitcase up to the railway station, I felt sad to be leaving. The assistance the world had provided Ukraine was significant, but it was not enough. Ukrainians were being left to face the Russian missiles and drones without adequate protection, without the means to strike back at the places from which they were being fired with impunity, far away. The West had modern military aircraft and missile-defence systems far superior to those employed by Russia, but they were not being supplied to Ukraine. The suffering of the Ukrainian people would be on our consciences, as we could have done more to help. I was leaving, going back to a home where I had electricity and no one was trying to make me freeze. As Ukrainians anxiously faced winter under Russian attack, our slowness to provide the help they needed shamed us all.

A visit to wartime Odessa

Travelling down by bus from Chişinău to Odessa in July 2022, my first visit to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February, I was not sure what to expect. I had been following the news from Ukraine compulsively. I knew there was a night-time curfew, and that there were frequent air raid alerts. I had heard life in Odessa had normalised somewhat since those first fraught weeks when the threat of a Russian assault on the city from the land or the sea had seemed very real. The tank traps on the city streets had largely been removed. But how was life in the city? How were people coping? Having previously lived in Odessa, I had a huge attachment to this beautiful city, with its unique spirit and its frenetic nightlife. A largely Russian-speaking city with a significant pro-Russian element among its population when Russia began its aggression against Ukraine in 2014, Odessa had briefly appeared at risk of going the same way as Donetsk and Luhansk. How had the city fared in face of the new Russian onslaught?

Many of my fellow passengers were women who had sought refuge abroad and were returning for a visit. As men under 60 were mostly not allowed to leave the country, families had been divided, and several of the women said they were returning to visit their husbands. Crossing the border, I confess to feeling quite excited to be returning to the country and the city I loved. The roads near the border were chock-a-block with trucks. A deal had been reached a few days before between Russia, Turkey, the United Nations and Ukraine to enable ships carrying grain to leave Ukraine’s ports. But it hadn’t yet been implemented. In the meantime, as much as possible was being transported out by road.

I had travelled this road so many times before, crossing back briefly into Moldova to skirt the liman, the wide body of water at the Dniester estuary that separated southern Bessarabia from the rest of Ukraine, and then crossing the Dniester bridge at Mayaky. The traffic as we entered Odessa at the “Dva Stolpa” (Two Pillars, the joke being there are three of them) roundabout was as busy as usual, and as we drove into the city my first thought was that everything appeared quite normal. We arrived at the central bus station on a warm sunny evening, and I felt almost elated to be back in Odessa.

A friend had told me that that evening a band I had seen before would be playing at one of the best bars in Odessa. So I had to go. The bar was in the city centre, a good hour-and-a-half walk from my accommodation, but I decided to go on foot. It quickly became clear that my first impressions had been wrong, and that all was very far from normal. The main road into the city may have been busy with traffic, but most of Odessa’s broad boulevards were unnaturally empty. And while the tank traps had gone, there were numerous military checkpoints along the way, with barricades halfway across the road. The soldiers weren’t stopping people, but their presence underlined the uneasy atmosphere in a city which had been hit by missiles, which was not all that far from the frontline, and from which a large part of the population had fled.

The bar was packed, the music frenetic, and the atmosphere frenzied as the revellers danced and yelled their appreciation. It was glorious. The spirit of Odessa unbowed, unbeatable. What a joy. There were people I knew there as well. Next to the band there was a box for donations for the Ukrainian army, which was being filled generously. Between the songs, the singer spoke to the audience in Ukrainian, a significant and meaningful change in Odessa. It seemed extraordinary, almost surreal. My first evening back in Ukraine after the full-scale Russian invasion, and here I was enjoying Odessa’s nightlife, as intense and feverish as ever. Except that it all had to end quite early, in time for the 11pm curfew. I had imagined it would be easy to get back before the curfew. I would take a taxi at 10pm, no problem. Wrong. At 10pm it was completely impossible to find a taxi, and the marshutkas, minibuses that ferried passengers around the city, had all stopped for the night. It was too far to walk home in time. With the help of a friend, I tried to hitch a ride, but without success. By this point I was getting anxious. What would happen if I were caught out after curfew, I wondered? Thankfully my friend was still with me, and at 10.30 she said that I’d just have to stay at her place, which was close-by. What a first evening back in Odessa. A magnificent concert, and then I almost missed the curfew.

The Duc de Richelieu covered

Strolling in Odessa the next day, I was still more struck be the contrast between things that appeared quite normal, and the things that were absolutely not normal at all. Many cafes and restaurants had closed, including some of my favourites. While all the supermarkets were working and well stocked, many other shops, clothes shops etc., were closed. City centre shopping malls were eerily quiet. Self-service canteens that were usually bustling at lunchtimes were nearly empty, if they were still open at all, food sitting too long without customers, dried out and unappetising. The emptiness was sad. Yet there were cafes and restaurants working much as normal. One of my favourite places in the garden next to the opera house was open, and I spent a very pleasant lunchtime there, although there were few customers. City centre streets close to the seaside, above the port area, were closed off. Odessa’s most famous landmark, the Potemkin steps, were unreachable. The statue of the Duc de Richelieu, Odessa’s most famous mayor (and governor of Novorossiya province, which encompassed southern Ukraine), which stands at the top of the steps, was covered up for its safety.

By contrast, the nearby statue of Catherine the Great, founder of Odessa, was uncovered, unprotected. The writing was on the wall for the Russian Empress, as the pressure to remove all trace of Russian associations became irresistible. Some Odessans told me they would not like to see the statue removed, that Catherine was part of the city’s history. But times had moved on. The bust of Pushkin that stood at one end of the seaside boulevard, in front of the city council building, would probably also not survive, I thought. The great poet had lived in Odessa for a time, but for many Ukrainians these were no longer associations that they wished to celebrate.

On a warm Sunday afternoon I strolled with a friend along the seafront, as I had so many times before. People ate ice creams. Children ran about playing. We sat and drank iced coffees on a café terrace by the water’s edge. No one was in the sea. There was a risk from mines. But otherwise the impression again was of a striking level of normality. But there were always reminders of how abnormal things were. The closure of so many shops and cafes, the emptiness of the streets was not only because so many people had left Odessa, fled abroad or to safer regions of Ukraine, further from the frontline. It surely also reflected the collapse in economic activity. While some could still afford to eat in nice restaurants, many others had lost their jobs and incomes. We didn’t see them in the city centre because they had no reason to come there, no money to spend. Many were probably eking out a poor existence in modest apartments in the suburbs. How did they manage, I wondered? How did the elderly and vulnerable cope? Ukraine’s social welfare system was limited even in the best of times. No doubt volunteers and NGOs had stepped into the breach to some extent. But was it enough?

In Shevchenko Park, close-by the monument to the unknown sailor, there were plaques commemorating the hero cities of the Soviet Union for their courage in the Second World War. Now those commemorating cities in Russia had been covered over, leaving only the six in Ukraine and Belarus uncovered, including Odessa. But the spellings were in Russian, not Ukrainian. Would these plaques survive the cull of symbols, statues and street names associated with the Soviet Union and Russia? Following the full-scale Russian invasion, President Zelensky had designated several towns and cities as hero cities of Ukraine, marking their courage in standing up to the Russian aggression. It occurred to me that this repetition of a Soviet practice, naming hero cities, was rather odd in a country determined to reject all Soviet associations.

The first time I heard the air raid siren I was walking across Kulykove Pole, a large open square in the city centre. It was loud, a sound that had such associations for someone from London. It was a sound that would have been very familiar to my mother. To think that I was now hearing it in a European city in 2022. I looked around to see how other people reacted, the Odessans who had been living with this for months already. Everyone I saw completely ignored it and just carried on walking, without any change of pace or direction. So I did likewise. Odessa had already been hit a few times by missiles, including the port. But I was told by a local that when the siren sounded, it was not yet clear where the missiles were headed, and that several cities over a wide area southern Ukraine sounded the alarm. They rarely hit Odessa, although on that occasion I was told that a missile impact had been close enough for people in the city to hear it. I did not hear it myself. Missiles had several times hit smaller towns along the coast, perhaps targeting Ukrainian air defence systems, although that was only speculation as, naturally, the Ukrainian authorities did not divulge such information.

My sleep was disturbed by the sirens a few times during my stay in Odessa. I had asked whether people went to a basement in the building where I was staying, for shelter. I was told the advice was to go to a room with no exterior walls or windows, which in my case meant the bathroom. The first time I did just that. But Odessans I spoke to told me almost nobody bothered, so I didn’t either. Such a blasé attitude presumably was not the norm in towns closer to the frontline which had more often been struck by missiles.

I left Ukraine by bus to Bucharest, travelling down through southern Bessarabia. We stopped for a break at the roadside hotel and restaurant in Tartabunary where I had stayed on a number of occasions, and which had been a regular stop-off during journeys in this beautiful region. The first ships filled with grain had left Odessa under the UN-brokered deal while I had been in the city, but the roads were still choked with lorries, backed up for several kilometres as we approached the Romanian border. We crossed the Danube by ferry close to Orlivka, a little town where the head of the village council had talked excitedly about the potential of the this watery paradise for tourism when I had visited a few years earlier. He had told me of his plan to introduce water buffalo, which would control the vegetation in the area’s waterways, as well as producing mozzarella and drawing tourists. He had realised his dream as well, before Russia’s aggression struck.

As I crossed the Danube from Ukraine to Romania, it really struck me. A short river crossing, and on the other side no air raid sirens, no curfew, no roadblocks, no evil bastards wrecking the lives of innocent, peaceful people. Despite the awful circumstances, Odessa retained its wonderful spirit. Its resilience and that of all Ukraine was awe inspiring. I was very glad to have had the chance to be there, and to spend time with wonderful friends. And I was more than ever convinced that Ukraine would prevail.