Things Recover – Poland

My Mum and I share a fascination with World War Two history. So, when the opportunity came to travel together to Poland, Warsaw, Krakow and Auschwitz, we took it without hesitation.

Warsaw first. A city that was almost entirely destroyed, first the Jewish ghetto, then the rest. The Nazis intended to erase it entirely. Today Warsaw is a thriving, beautiful, delicious city full of young people and good food and genuine energy. It rebuilt itself from rubble and decided to live.

From Warsaw we made our way south to Krakow, one of Poland’s most beautiful cities, largely spared from the destruction that levelled so much of the country. And from Krakow, a day trip west to Auschwitz.

Walking through Auschwitz you begin to understand scale in a way that no book or documentary prepares you for. It happens gradually. And then the ordinary objects finish the job. Shoes. Thousands of them piled behind glass. Suitcases with names written on them. Hairbrushes. Reading glasses. The belongings of people who packed for a journey they didn’t know was their last.

The garden setting makes it stranger still. Trees. Grass. Birds. The natural world is entirely indifferent to what happened on this ground.

My mum and I walked through mostly in silence. Some things don’t need commentary.

The question that stays with you, the one that has occupied historians and philosophers for eighty years, is how. How did a modern, educated, culturally sophisticated society produce this? How did ordinary people become perpetrators? How did bureaucracy become murder at an industrial scale?

There are no comfortable answers.

But Poland teaches you something else alongside the darkness. That cities survive. That people endure. That life has a stubborn insistence on continuing.

Warsaw is proof of that. Standing in its streets, eating its food, watching its people, you feel it.

Not everything. Not everyone. But Warsaw is still here.

Paul Mercuri
Wake Up Here Founder

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