Długa Street: The Manhole and the Hospital
Why is it significant?
Stop in front of the grand classical palace at Długa 7, today the home of the Central Archives of Historical Records, and then glance back towards the corner of the square behind you, where a commemorative plaque marks the manhole of September 1944.
Key Facts
| Place | Długa Street: The Manhole and the Hospital |
|---|---|
| Address | ul. Długa 7, 00-263 Warszawa, Poland |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.25000, 21.00830 |
| Part of Walk | Sixty-Three Days: The Warsaw Uprising of 1944, from Krasiński Square to Złota Street |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop in front of the grand classical palace at Długa 7, today the home of the Central Archives of Historical Records, and then glance back towards the corner of the square behind you, where a commemorative plaque marks the manhole of September 1944. Two scenes from the same days meet on this short stretch of street, and neither of them belongs in a holiday photograph.
By the end of August the Old Town had been encircled and bombarded for weeks, from the air and by heavy artillery. The command decided to save the surviving fighters by taking them underground. In the night of 1 September and through the following day, a long column of several thousand people went down through the manhole by the square and into the sewers, heading for the city centre, more than a kilometre away. The passages were low and narrow, the water and sewage often knee-deep, and silence was an order, because German soldiers listened at the manholes above and sometimes threw grenades down. The journey took hours. People held on to the belt of the person in front, in total darkness.
In 1957 Andrzej Wajda turned those passages into the film Kanał, the first great film about the Uprising made in communist Poland. It won a prize at Cannes the same year. Veterans said it was almost unbearable to watch, precisely because it was so accurate.
Now the palace. During the Uprising the Raczyński Palace at Długa 7 housed an insurgent field hospital. On 2 September, when German troops entered the Old Town, they murdered the wounded who had been left behind here, hundreds of them, and set the building on fire. There were similar killings in other Old Town hospitals that day. Those who could not walk into the sewers had nowhere to go.
It is worth knowing that the people who went underground did not disappear: most of them reached the centre, and many fought on there for another month. Continue east along Długa towards Freta street, then turn right into the Old Town and find the narrow lane that drops in stone steps towards the river.