In July 2010 I went back to Warsaw, the capital of Poland second time after 2009. We drove from Brussels, crossing southern Netherlands and then driving across Germany from the west to the east close to Berlin. Crossing the border between Germany and Poland, we made it to the town of Stargard from where we took a 5 hour train to Warsaw.

Poland is a big country with Europe and has a complex history being situated between Germany and Russia. The last 100 years particularly have transformed Poland into what it is today effected by the political vendetta of Hilter’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Communist Russia.

In the 1700s Warsaw was referred to as the Paris of the east. Warsaw was the capital of the commonwealth between Poland and Lithuania till it was annexed by the historical Prussia/German Kingdom and eventually after being liberated by the French Napoleon army, in the 1800s it came under Imperial Russia. Warsaw remained an important Russian territory till the 1920s when the battle of Warsaw was fought and Poland was liberated after over 100 years of Russian control– referred to as the second Polish Democracy.

As the Nazis rose power in Germany, one of first countries to be affected after Czech/Slovakia was Poland. Hitler came after Poland and he went after Warsaw’s Jewish population which comprised of about 30 percent of the city– several hundred thousand were brutally killed. Infact it was the Hitler’s pursuit of Poland that drew the allied forces and eventually resulted in the World War II. During the II World War almost 80 percent of the building in Warsaw were destroyed by the German Army assisted by Stalin’s Red Army as part of a planned destruction of the city.


Destroyed Warsaw during the II World War (1945 AD) (Image Source – Creative Commons)

During the war, German forces, under direct order from Adolf Hitler, set up six major extermination camps, all of which were established on Polish territory; these included both the notorious Treblinka and Auschwitz camps.


Various Concentration Camps Map
Image Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Jewish victims make up the largest percentage of all victims of the Nazis’ extermination program. It is estimated that around 90% (or about 3 million) of pre-war Poland’s Jews were put to death by the Nazis during the Second World War. In total Poland lost the highest percentage of its citizens: over 6 million perished– nearly one-fifth of Poland’s population.

Finally, in 1945 AD Warsaw was liberated by the Soviet Red Army only to be setup as a communist city and Poland directly in the Soviet control. During this period several blockhouse estates were constructed like all former communist countries.

It was only in 1989 that Poland was finally liberated from Russia and a democratic republic was formulated– the third Polish Democracy.