Dan Cruickshank: Resurrecting History: Warsaw

BELL CHIMES

It's Easter in Poland's capital, Warsaw.

The people gather to commemorate the crucifixion of Christ...

and the resurrection.

I haven't been back to Warsaw since I lived here as a child.

I was seven when I moved here with my family.

My father had a job in the city.

It is of course strange to be back.

I'm sure much has changed, but also much, to me, seems the same.

It is, in a sense, like coming home.

What is certain though, to me, is that what I saw here,

what I felt here as a child has had a huge influence on my life.

I'm going to explore my memories...

..the memories of the city...

..and the memories of its people.

Warsaw was victim of one of the most atrocious

crimes of the 20th century,

when Hitler's Nazis tried to wipe it off the face of the earth.

No city in modern history has endured such appalling

devastation and loss.

No city has had the courage

and willpower to rise up from the ashes...

and to rebuild the past.

We're now used to intolerance and to attacks on beauty and culture.

The Poles, in their courageous recreation of their lost city,

the regaining of their lost beauty, are an inspiration for all of us.

Warsaw is the city that came back from the dead,

in the most miraculous of resurrections.

In the summer of 1956,

the Cruickshank family sailed eastwards on MS Batory.

We were heading for a new home in Poland.

At the age of seven, this was my first adventure abroad.

It was all because my father, Gordon, had a job as a journalist

with the London Daily Worker, a communist newspaper.

Now that idea seems unusual, outlandish even.

After all, we were going behind the Iron Curtain to

Warsaw at the height of the Cold War.

It was a decade or so after the end of the World War II,

which had left the city devastated.

I was last here in Warsaw almost 60 years ago,

I was very young, but I have been back many times in my imagination.

I think about it an awful lot.

My memory is that the city was almost still a smoking

ruin from the war.

This is the stuff of my dreams, you know.

Absolutely amazing experience.

There are things I'm now noticing, these great statutes which,

for a child, would have been terribly attractive

and should be burnt into my memory.

And for a child of seven, it was utterly romantic.

I loved it. I loved the ruins.

It was a trip into the dark recesses of my mind,

a trip into what was one of the very dark places of Earth in the 1950s.

I'm on my way to the Old Town of Warsaw, where we used to live.

It dates back to the mid-17th century,

but had been almost levelled during the war.

When I was last here, most of it had been recently rebuilt.

HE LAUGHS

This is amazing. Walking back into my own childhood.

This is the market place, the market square - the heart of the Old Town.

This is where I grew up.

I often think about this space.

A wonderful, mellow atmosphere the buildings have, antique

and ancient in feel.

Charming, these astonishing moments. Stabbing memories. Laser-like.

Suddenly little things I've forgotten for nearly 60 years come back.

I remember being entranced by the Old Town.

The bold colours, yellow ochre.

And, of course, the vivid, Baroque detail everywhere.

It's hard to believe that most of this was meticulously

recreated just 60 years ago.

Amazing - I remember those, the putti with the goat,

and naughty little boys,

naughty fellows with their baskets of grapes, Bacchanalian scene...

musical parade, tambourines.

Now, the thing is...to work out exactly where I lived.

I've got here, as it happens... It may seem strange that

I should keep such things, but I didn't - my mother did, or my father.

It's my exercise book from school, when I went to school in Warsaw.

Here it is.

"5th of September 1957."

It's a mathematical problem that I had to solve then.

I fear... I don't know, I think I got it right.

But here we are, look.

"Swietojanska", which is St John's Street.

Number 33, flat two.

Swietojanska, St John's Street, number 33/2, first floor.

That's our living room and our kitchen up there.

What a lovely building. What a lovely place to live.

This is my door.

BUZZER Ah!

Oh, the staircase.

Ah, well, there you go, number two.

As on my school exercise book.

Good heavens. OK. Ah.

HE KNOCKS

HE LAUGHS

It's bizarre. Um. Ah!

-Hello.

-Ah, hi, my name is Dan Cruickshank.

I used to live here. Many, many years ago.

OK.

The new tenant of my old home is Bert Coslow from Texas.

-Can I just look through the window?

-Please, go ahead.

'It's a moment I've dreamt about for years.'

Well, well, well, well, well.

Now, I made a series of drawings from this very window.

-You made this from this window?

-From this window.

-And how old were you?

-Well, I was seven, I was about seven years old.

-It's quite good for a seven-year-old.

-Oh, is it?

-Thank you.

-You can clearly see, looking at this, to me there is

no doubt in my mind what's being portrayed.

I suppose what enthralled me was, of course, that these

are things calculated to really engage children.

I mean, the lion over there.

-And this sort of dragon finial at the top.

-Yeah.

And, of course, the amazing clock.

And then the view in to the square itself.

And these are very interesting drawings, I can say that myself.

It's such a long time ago, isn't it? It's hardly me.

But the detail, the loving detail,

the observation does suggest the beginnings of my passion

for architecture, which becomes the ruling thing of my life.

Seems to be, seems to be that the foundations

are certainly here in 1957.

Clearly, this drawing, this view from here,

-through this window, of this space, is where it all starts for me.

-Yeah.

Something big has changed since I was last here.

The old market square has a happy-go-lucky atmosphere...

not the muted, solemn place of my memories.

You see, the scene I just walked past, the chap in the wheelchair

with no legs, that's it, that's what I remember. Amazing.

Damaged people, physically damaged people from the uprising,

from the war. Mentally damaged people.

And here is a chap sitting there, as if it was 60 years ago.

That was very odd.

As a seven-year-old, I didn't understand how

dreadfully Warsaw had suffered during the Second World War.

I was fortunate not to witness the death and destruction.

But there were reminders of it all over the city.

Shrines commemorating the victims of the war.

It was a city risen from the ruins, a city mourning the dead.

It went far beyond the destruction that might be anticipated in war.

In fact, Warsaw was the victim of a war crime almost

unprecedented in history, a crime premeditated by the Nazis

even before the war started.

Hitler set out to eradicate Warsaw and annihilate its people.

The damning evidence is to be found at the Institute of National Remembrance,

which holds records of Nazi atrocities against Poland.

Hitler's intentions were clinically laid out in a series of plans

named after Friedrich Pabst, the Nazis' "Chief Architect for Warsaw"

This set of plans...is chilling...

shocking.

They detail the near total

obliteration of Warsaw

and its replacement by a smaller town

for German settlers and officials.

They're dated. Here we have the 6th of February, 1940.

And culminate with a proposal for its destruction.

This is why it's chilling.

A rather lovingly detailed and created model of the old city

of Warsaw, in the 17th century.

And then here we see its replacement,

removal, by this rather banal looking -

architecturally banal looking - German settlement,

Really depressing, really depressing.

But also another detail so revealing.

The parts of the Old Town,

of Warsaw's Stare Miasto, are left in place, because

the Nazis had perceived within the fabric of the Old Town

some Germanic qualities. They wanted to keep the Old Town

because, in a sense, preserving it suggested that

the Germans were here before.

It justified their...

determination to annexe Poland

and to create this Germanic settlement on the site of Warsaw.

This is, of course, an attack on architectural history

and on architectural beauty.

But the bigger thing is it reflects Hitler's and the Nazis' hatred

of Poland and the Poles.

To destroy Warsaw was to destroy

Polish pride, Polish identity,

Polish hopes for the future. That's what this is really about.

Poland's descent into hell began with the German

invasion on 1st September, 1939.

It caused the outbreak of World War II.

Wanda Traczyk-Stawska lived through the horrors of Nazi occupation.

It would be almost five years before Warsaw fought back,

when the Polish home army tried to drive the Germans out of the city.

The uprising, which started on the 1st August, 1944,

lasted 63 days.

The Poles exhibited great heroism and self sacrifice.

But, in the end, the Nazis crushed them with shocking brutality.

Wanda was one of many women who took up arms against the Nazis.

How do you feel now, 70 years on or so, from the uprising?

Do you feel it was doomed from the beginning?

Was it worth the destruction of Warsaw?

But the consequences were appalling, as Hitler ordered

Warsaw to be razed to the ground.

This computer graphic reveals

the enormity of the destruction.

The Old Town, one of the centres of Polish

resistance during the uprising, was systematically destroyed.

Historic buildings, including the castle, were set ablaze

and blown up with high explosives.

The Jewish ghetto, the largest in Nazi-controlled Europe,

had been levelled in 1943 and its population virtually wiped out,

either in the city or extermination camps.

By the end of the war, nearly 90% of Warsaw lay in ruins.

But this was not the end of the nightmare.

The Poles had been encouraged to rise up by the Soviets,

who were closing in on Warsaw.

But then they stood by and let the Nazis destroy the city

and undermine Poland's battle for independence.

They had plans of their own.

The human cost of the uprising was huge.

The population of Warsaw had been crushed by the brutal

and vengeful Nazis.

Around 200,000 people had died.

And now they faced a future under the yoke of the Soviet Union,

which had betrayed them in their hour of need.

The future of Warsaw as a capital city hung in the balance.

All hope of Poland regaining its independence was finally dashed,

as it passed from one totalitarian overlord to another.

It became a Soviet puppet state, led by a hardline Stalinist government.

By 1956, the regime had arrested 250,000 Poles

regarded as "traitors" for fighting to establish a free

and independent nation.

20,000 died in prison and 3,000 were executed...

their fate kept secret.

Given what we now know, it might seem shocking that it was

my father's communist convictions that brought us to Warsaw.

Gordon Cruickshank is the correspondent here for London Daily Worker.

In 1957, he was interviewed by Christopher Chataway for the BBC.

What proportion of the ordinary people do you think are really communists?

I would say that the vast mass of the Polish people,

to my mind and from my experience...

..support a socialist economy.

That is to say they don't want landlords back,

they don't want private ownership of factories and industry back at all.

My father was not alone in his beliefs.

Like many, he'd become a communist in the late 1930s to fight fascism.

And, despite the brutal reality of Stalinism,

he still believed that communism could help build a better world.

Back in 1945, Poland's Stalinist government had taken

the decision to rebuild Warsaw as the capital.

But they weren't interested in the old city -

they had a vision for a socialist utopia.

They built a state of the art transport network,

with brand-new trams to replace the ones destroyed during the war.

I remember being frightened of trams as a child here.

There weren't trams in London.

I was particularly fearful of the junctions.

I saw an accident at a junction, which of course confirmed that

I was right to be fearful of these frightful devices, these trams.

Um... Ah, I press the button to get on.

Ah, here we go, this is lovely.

We're going down this great avenue,

the great Stalinist avenue in reconstructed Warsaw.

Each side are these neo-classical blocks, clad with stone mostly.

This was, of course, the Soviet vision for the new Warsaw.

Oh, look, there's the Palace of Culture.

'The Palace of Culture and Science - Russia's gift to Warsaw -

'looks down on the Polish capital's National Day parade.

'The Poles are a determined people and their capital is rapidly

'regaining its position as one of Europe's most beautiful cities.

'And it's not only their buildings that look good.'

The Palace was completed in 1955,

so, virtually new when I arrived in the city.

And, even as a young child, I soon learned that the people of Warsaw

did not like this unwelcome gift from the Soviet authorities.

They regarded it as a cynical and calculated imposition,

and hardly a gift as it was largely paid for by the Soviet exploitation

of Poland's natural resources.

And, architecturally, there were already seven towers like this

in Moscow, called Stalin's Seven Sisters,

so, for the people of Warsaw, this was no more than a Soviet brand

burnt into the soul of their city.

At 231 metres,

it's still Poland's tallest building

and, love it or loathe it, it has become THE symbol of Warsaw.

The rebuilding of Warsaw after 1945 was a complex business.

Very quickly, two parallel visions started to emerge.

One was for the creation of a typical Soviet-style city

with straight boulevards - you can see one over there,

lined with stone-clad apartment blocks,

for the official families, I suppose.

And concrete-built housing estates over there,

rather grim, for the workers.

The other vision was inspired by Warsaw history,

for the recreation of the Old Town.

And you can see the Old Town over there, ultimately recreated,

characterised by low-rise red pantile roofs,

a dash of exotic colour.

That vision was driven by the people of Warsaw.

The loss of the beloved Old Town to Nazi barbarity was intolerable.

It had to be recreated.

A great wrong had to be put right.

As a seven-year-old boy, I wasn't aware of this clash of styles -

the gargantuan Stalinist edifice that touched the sky

versus the quaint 'old' houses and beautiful square

which I loved.

What I didn't know then was that rebuilding the city had been

one of the most daunting reconstruction jobs in history.

In January 1945, it must have felt like the end of the world in Warsaw.

The man who led the campaign to convince the Communists

to rebuild the past was Warsaw architect Jan Zachwatowicz.

I've come to visit his daughter Krystyna,

who, as a teenager, had fought in the Warsaw uprising.

Your father's spontaneous reaction was to rebuild the city

because it represented their identity, their pride,

but this had to take place within a changed world -

the world of a new communist regime. These things had to be reconciled.

How did your father find it possible? Was it difficult?

Did he have to persuade the new authorities

to recreate the historic quarter?

This was Warsaw's year zero.

But the people needed more than just memories

to bring the past back to life.

With the city so utterly flattened, they needed something more tangible

to go on.

Plans, paintings or photographs.

I've come to a Warsaw peep show,

which is not what you might think it is, despite appearances.

It is in fact the Fotoplastikon -

a remarkable institution that survived both World Wars.

It is now an invaluable time machine

containing photographs of Warsaw before its destruction in 1944.

Oh, well, that's lovely.

That is, I suppose, a late 19th century, exotic, Edwardian scene.

They're 3D. It's amazing. Oh, this a fantastic image.

This shows the Castle Square.

Now we get insight into the cosmopolitan and rich

and romantic life of Warsaw before the destruction.

This is 1895.

Here's a lovely...

big avenue.

looks like Paris.

Oh, the famous steps Of the Old Town.

A narrow alley of steps. Not much has changed.

I can probably see myself walking through that, actually.

This is a fantastic document

to inform the reconstruction.

Essential...that's the sort of essential information needed

to rebuild the city after the war.

Not just information, but architectural detail,

which was essential, but also, in a sense, I suppose,

they encapsulate memories of the city as a lively, romantic place -

a place with a Parisian quality.

You can fully understand why the people of Warsaw,

having lost their city, they also lost the life that went with it.

So it was to recreate, of course, the architecture

and also, as far as possible, to recapture and recreate the life

lived within the theatre of the ancient architecture,

this historic architecture.

Amazing vignette, amazing little time machine back to what had been

a lost and much regretted period in the history of the city.

The photographs were a good start,

but the architects delved further into the past

for a more picturesque muse.

A superb collection of paintings of Warsaw in this room

were made in the late 1770s

by an Italian artist called Bernardo Bellotto.

But he tended to use the name

of his more famous artist uncle - Canaletto.

As a court painter to the king,

he produced 26 cityscapes for the royal castle.

The second half of the 18th century

was the era of the Polish Enlightenment

when the nation was at the height of its prestige, power and prosperity.

These paintings contain lots of lovely detail, of course,

therefore perfect to use for the reconstruction of Warsaw.

But there is also, I must say, a lot of poetic license.

The artist is creating an ideal vision of Warsaw

and contrives to make it look, occasionally, rather like Rome.

Why not? The model.

So this, in a way, is a dream of Warsaw -

a late 18th century dream of Warsaw.

Warsaw as it ought to have been.

Well, certainly as far as Bellotto was concerned.

Look at this. It is absolutely wonderful.

Almost photographic, but not quite,

because things have been slightly manipulated

for the most powerful visual architectural effect.

A bit like how Canaletto made London look like Venice.

Perfectly understandable.

In the grim 1940s,

Bellotto's magical images were far more real,

more compelling than reality.

They captured the beauty of the lost past.

Bellotto's paintings alone were not enough to rebuild the lost city.

Precise, technical drawings were needed.

Miraculously, plans of the old town, drawn by architectural students

before the war, also survived.

They were smuggled out of the city after the uprising under the noses

of the Nazis and hidden in a church in the coffins of monks.

Here are copies of some of the drawings.

They're a wonderful quality.

These are really good and informed architecture students.

They knew their classical details.

Here is the elevation of the block of buildings opposite me

in the Market Place.

You can see, here they are, drawn in the 1930s

as they were before destruction

and then as recreated.

And much of that recreation is based on, inspired by, informed by,

this drawing.

Then there are wonderful details.

For example, one of the houses opposite is shown in some detail,

there it is, with that interesting door.

And then there are drawings of windows and doors.

This one dated 1932.

There's another thing to be extracted from studying these drawings.

Some of the buildings as recreated

don't exactly correspond to the 1930s surveys.

They've been tweaked.

Some later details, for example, 19th century doors or shop fronts

were not reconstructed.

Instead, the architects returned to the world of the 18th century.

So one can see mostly shops and ground floors

and some windows, as shown here,

are distinctly different from the recreation,

which is to say, therefore, that the Old Town of Warsaw

is not an absolute replica of what was destroyed in 1944,

but a very spirited, very moving return

to a sort of 18th century ideal.

The plans were the key to reconstructing the Old Town.

But there was still a terrifying amount of work to do.

The people didn't want a Disney-style theme park.

It had to be faithful to the past

so the Old Town became a huge research laboratory.

Archaeologists sifted through rubble, salvaging what details they could.

Everybody played their part in an inspiring grassroots movement

to save their history and rebuild their past.

Among them was Irena Dawozianska.

As I walk around the old Market Square,

I try to spot architectural details that were salvaged from the ruins

or those that were recreated from scratch.

Memories flood back.

All the charming details that I sketched as a boy.

Even with all my years of experience,

I am, at times, hard pushed to spot the difference.

Among the few buildings to survive the war, damaged but not destroyed,

was the city museum.

It's a place I loved as a boy.

I long to return so I meet Anna Zasadzinska,

who works for the museum, which is currently closed for repairs.

Before the war, the three houses that we can see in front of us -

the three in the centre - were bought by the city,

just to create a city museum there.

Are they about the only ones that survived

in the whole of the Old Town?

There were five in total that survived

and three of them we're just seeing now.

Out of many, many hundreds, five is heartbreaking, isn't it?

90% of the buildings were destructed.

Oh, gosh.

It must have been very hard to have lost so much.

But then the reconstruction is very good, isn't it?

Exactly.

Because after the 60 years, the Old Town really looks quite old.

Exactly. That's good. That's exactly right.

It's developed a pattern of age. The materials have weathered well.

I mean, because, presumably, the materials that were used -

good stucco, good bricks -

it's aged, it's weathered very convincingly.

-Do you like it?

-I do. I love it.

Anna, thank you very much.

OK. Up I go.

-You're going to stay here. Very wise.

-Good luck.

-Thank you.

Oops.

When I see scaffolding, my spirits soar.

This group of three houses that survived the war

gives me the chance to compare the old with the new.

Now, here we are.

This is one of the authentic elevations

and it's very exciting to be so up close to it.

Erm, lovely. Ah, there's the Moor's Head.

We know this is new, recreated since the War,

but very well done.

The original is in the museum now.

The key thing is to look at the materials.

Of course these buildings...

are rendered with lime render,

not, of course, not cement.

And this is a patch of original treatment.

A soft, undulating, sensuous surface.

Lovely to touch.

So important to get that right in the repaired buildings.

Looking around, one can see that mostly in the early '50s,

lime render was used.

That's the great key to giving repaired or recreated buildings

an authentic, artistic feel.

Almost 60 years since I last came here with my school,

I've been given privileged access to go inside.

Let's have a look.

'Like outside, the interiors are a happy marriage of what survived

'in place, what was salvaged, and what was recreated.'

Oh, my goodness me. Look at this.

God, this is wonderful!

I mean, some must be repaired, but mostly it seems authentic.

I had no idea of the quality. It's just not facades that survive.

This is an entire historic building.

'It was down to a stroke of good fortune

'that these interiors survived.

'The houses had been fireproofed just before the war.'

Oh! A huge staircase. Look at this.

A wonderful face,

but not enough wear and tear as the centuries.

So a brilliant piece of recreation, I suppose,

but, my goodness me, it's thoroughly done.

Oh, look, a lovely bunch of grapes.

So one knows we're in the world of good wine. Feasting.

So up to the bedroom level,

originally, the family level.

I'll go through...and along.

Oh...oh! Good heavens.

They're full of treasures, these houses,

completely amazing, unexpected discoveries.

A miraculous survival.

Biblical scenes on this painted ceiling.

Look at it.

I had no idea this was here.

Early 18th century, I suppose.

A...picturesque scene.

A ruined castle, a chap crossing the bridge with his cow.

The colours now muted, of course.

But isn't it amazing it's here, this ceiling?

That it survives at all.

The epicentre, this heart of darkness,

this mouth of hell in late 1944,

everything being consumed by fire, set by these vengeful Nazis,

yet, in some magical way, this fragile ceiling of timber,

with these biblical scenes survived.

Good heavens.

While the people of Warsaw tried to put the horrors of the Nazis

behind them, they lived under the shadow of Stalinism.

But when I arrived here in late 1956,

the tide of Soviet oppression seemed to be turning.

Stalin was dead and all over Eastern Europe,

people were rejecting rule from Moscow.

The political killings had stopped in Poland,

but people were still struggling for a brighter future.

My father, Gordon, was posted here to report on the momentous changes.

He used to meet fellow journalists in the bar of the Bristol Hotel.

Wiener Schnitzel.

This was my treat as a child in Warsaw.

A Sunday treat. Lovely.

I've got articles in front of me written by my father,

published in the Daily Worker.

October, 1956, headline:

"The Warsaw Way To Socialism.

"These stirring pictures of the great mass movement that swept Poland

"a week ago have come to us from our Warsaw correspondent

"Gordon Cruickshank.

"The enthusiasm and happiness written on their faces

"as the changes become known

"give hope for the future of a democratic socialist Poland."

Pictures here of smiling people, clapping people.

There's a picture here of my father taking notes.

The objective reporter.

My father loved Poland,

he loved Warsaw, he loved the Poles,

because of their spirit, because of their resilience.

And, also, here he saw a nation that was a communist socialist state.

Socialism and communism with a more humane face,

more humane than that associated with Stalin and the Soviet Union.

But history had horrible things in store.

Things started to go wrong and, by 1958, this newsletter,

headline on the front page:

"Gordon Cruickshank Quits Daily Worker And The Communist Party.

"Cruickshank disagrees with the party's fundamental political line,

"and in particular with its attitude to the treatment of Jews

"in the Soviet Union."

For my father, any...

form of anti-Semitic behaviour,

any racism, was intolerable, impossible.

He believed in a world of equality.

He'd supported the idea of communism for decades

but had to give it all up on principle.

The fact that...

he had to resign from the party must have been just absolutely appalling.

Appalling for him, appalling for anybody whose life

had been dedicated to an ideal and the ideal crumbles.

What do you do? Gosh.

The weird thing is that as a child I was not aware.

He did protect me, protect the family

from what must have been terrible, terrible turmoil,

turbulence of mind.

Gosh.

In the end, of course, it all, sort of, in a way...

came to nothing.

The world he supported and hoped he would see triumph

crumbled and was swept away

or, worse than that, worse than that, of course,

it was...

revealed to be rotten under the Soviets, under Stalin.

Coming back here after so many years has allowed me to fill in the gaps

in my memories.

There's still one that stands out, though.

It's of the biggest bombsite of all.

It was at the end of my street.

What I didn't know was that it signified a hole in the heart

of the rebuilt Warsaw.

It was the site of the city's grandest pre-war building -

the Royal Castle.

For years, it was a step too far for the Communists to embrace

the glories of Poland's royal past.

But the people fought long and hard to get their castle back.

Finally, their dream came true, and work started in 1971.

The story of the reconstruction of the castle

is one of the most heroic stories in a city of heroes.

It was paid for with money collected from Poles throughout the world,

with some money deposited in a box on the site.

You might think that after 25 years or so,

there wouldn't be much left to rebuild.

But Warsaw had planned for this day as far back as 1939.

The castle had been seriously damaged by German bombs

during the invasion in September of that year.

Curators and architects risked their lives

salvaging the treasures of the castle.

Within three weeks, 80% of what survived had been carried off

to safe storage in the vaults of the National Museum.

But, even after Nazi occupation of Warsaw,

the work continued with panelling, fireplaces,

fragments of plasterwork and doors being carried off,

but they had to be clever.

Sometimes, the doors would be used to carry off rubble,

the rubble disguising the historic door,

and then the door put in storage.

But the post-war politics of Poland

meant it was 30 years before these fragments were reused,

in the last great stage in the reconstruction of historic Warsaw.

The castle enjoyed its apogee during the 18th century

under King Stanislaw August.

It's my first visit here

and the vainglorious portraits of the King and the lavish interiors

show why a communist government might balk at the idea of rebuilding it.

It's the very stuff that inspires revolutions.

Like all buildings, the Royal Castle has had its ups and downs.

And, in a nation like Poland, with such a turbulent history,

these ups and downs have been very extreme,

so it makes sense, in the recreation of the castle's interior,

to commemorate those moments in the history of the nation

when Poland has been at its most prosperous and most independent.

Rebuilding the castle in all its 18th century finery

was a huge challenge because it was a work of art in itself,

with the most elegant neo-classical interiors,

renowned around the world.

This is one of the great 18th century royal rooms of Europe.

And the world was shocked

when it was virtually destroyed by German bombing in 1939,

and now it lives again...

..bright and sparkling...

..as good as the day it was first completed in the 1780s.

Wonderful, isn't it?

The reconstruction was an extraordinary labour of love.

Teams of conservationists and artists

worked painstakingly to salvage what they could

or else recreate details from old photographs.

This is the Royal Chapel.

It's a splendid neo-classical design of the 1770s.

It contains eight columns, six of which are old.

How on earth they survived buried amongst the ruins,

I've absolutely no idea.

Also, a lot of those rosettes are old as well.

Here, old work and new work has been very skilfully integrated

to recreate a most wonderful thing.

It's as if the war never happened,

the horrors of war never befell this place.

I suppose that's just the point.

Goodness me, look at this.

What's really exciting about the castle

is the way its brilliantly recreated interiors, sumptuous and gilded,

so convincingly evoke those days of Poland's power and glory

when, in the 18th century, Warsaw was one of the world's great cities.

This is the throne room and it's almost overwhelming.

Behind me is the throne

and its display of Polish eagles made out of silver bullion.

The originals were looted in 1939 by German soldiers,

but, incredibly, one of these eagles

was found in 1991 in the United States

and that was brought back here and copied to reproduce the others,

giving the whole thing a sense of utter authenticity.

Of course, it shows that recreating the past

is a never-ending journey.

The reconstruction of old Warsaw raises many big questions,

especially today.

It works aesthetically, but was it ethically the right thing to do?

To ponder this, I've come Lazienki Park.

It's an enchanted place.

I can see my younger self here,

playing hide and seek with the statues.

It's all neo-classical pomp and opulence.

No wonder the Germans occupied the Palace during the war.

They did their damnedest to destroy it before they left.

After the war, the Palace and gardens were rebuilt like the Old Town.

The large scale of the reconstruction of the Old Town

and its meticulously correct detailing

was unprecedented in the 1950s.

Then, the prevailing architectural philosophy

in approaching the reconstruction of war-damaged historic towns

was to be truthful and to rebuild in a generally modern manner.

That approach was rooted in 19th century theory

represented very well by the art historian and theorist John Ruskin,

who, in the mid-19th century wrote that it was impossible,

as impossible as to raise the dead,

to restore anything that had been great or beautiful in architecture.

But, of course, recreating the dead

was exactly what the people of Warsaw wanted to do.

They wanted it to appear that the war and the Nazi barbarity

had not happened.

What the Poles wanted to do was to recreate it as a vital,

total work of art.

Fast-forward 70 years and World War II is a distant memory.

Poland is now a member of the European Union

and Warsaw has become a boom town,

with high-rise buildings dominating its 21st century skyline.

The latest is called the Spire.

When completed, it'll be the city's second tallest building,

after the Palace of Culture.

Warsaw's resurrection is miraculous.

70 years ago, nearly 90% of the city had been destroyed.

A place of despair and desolation.

Now, as you can see, it lives again.

In a world where history is once again under attack from extremism,

there is much we can learn from Warsaw.

A revived confidence in the future

is expressed through the new architecture.

Old buildings have been reconstructed with passion and verve.

Is it possible to bring back the dead?

Yes, if done with commitment,

with determination and with love.