Kino Palladium: Warsaw Fights on Screen
Why is it significant?
Your last stop is the modest facade of the Palladium on Złota street, a cinema in the 1930s and today a theatre and concert hall. Imagine it in August 1944: a dark auditorium, the walls trembling from shells landing a few streets away, and a full house.
Key Facts
| Place | Kino Palladium: Warsaw Fights on Screen |
|---|---|
| Address | ul. Złota 7/9, 00-019 Warszawa, Poland |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.23280, 21.01180 |
| Part of Walk | Sixty-Three Days: The Warsaw Uprising of 1944, from Krasiński Square to Złota Street |
| Generated | Generated |
Your last stop is the modest facade of the Palladium on Złota street, a cinema in the 1930s and today a theatre and concert hall. Imagine it in August 1944: a dark auditorium, the walls trembling from shells landing a few streets away, and a full house.
In mid-August 1944 something extraordinary happened in this room. The insurgents screened a newsreel, Warszawa walczy, Warsaw Fights, the first edition of the insurgent film chronicle, shot by cameramen of the Home Army's Bureau of Information and Propaganda. People who had spent days in cellars sat and watched themselves on screen: fighters on barricades, nurses, children carrying messages, the flag over a captured building. In the middle of the catastrophe, the city saw itself as free.
Much of that footage survived the war. In 2014 the Warsaw Rising Museum turned it into a feature film, Powstanie Warszawskie, Warsaw Uprising: the black-and-white reels were carefully coloured, and lip readers were brought in to reconstruct what the people on screen were saying, so that actors could give them their voices back.
The museum itself stands about two kilometres west of here, on Grzybowska street in Wola, in a former tram power station. It opened in 2004, for the sixtieth anniversary, and if you have the strength for one more visit today, it is the one. Wola is also where, in the first days of August 1944, German forces murdered tens of thousands of civilians, men, women and children, in a few days.
Walk to the end of Złota and look up at the Palace of Culture and Science, Stalin's gift of 1955, standing on ground where dozens of streets lay in ruins. Almost everything around you was rebuilt or newly built after 1945, by people who came back to a city that officially should not have existed. And if you are in Warsaw on 1 August, stop wherever you are at five o'clock, when the sirens sound, and stand still with the rest of the city.