Sixty-Three Days: The Warsaw Uprising of 1944, from Krasiński Square to Złota Street

Follow Warsaw's insurgents from the bronze monument and the sewer manhole of the Old Town to the captured telephone tower and the cinema that showed a city at war to itself

Warsaw · 11 stops · 28 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Krasiński Palace: The Library That Burned After the Battle

Plac Krasińskich 3/5, 00-207 Warszawa, Poland

Stand on the edge of Plac Krasińskich and face the long, pale Baroque palace on the western side of the square, with a crowded triangle of carved figures fighting above its entrance. This is the Krasiński Palace, and it is the right place to begin a walk about the summer of 1944, because it teaches the first lesson of this city: in Warsaw, whatever looks old is usually younger than you think.

The palace was built in the 1680s for Jan Dobrogost Krasiński, one of the great magnates of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, to designs by Tylman van Gameren, a Dutch engineer who became the busiest architect of Baroque Warsaw. The pediment reliefs are by Andreas Schlüter, who later made his name in Berlin. They show a Roman hero, Marcus Valerius Corvus, duelling a giant Gaul while a raven on his helmet attacks the enemy. The Krasińskis claimed him as their ancestor, and the raven became their coat of arms. Every great family wanted a Roman forefather... this one simply carved theirs in stone.

By the Second World War the palace held the special collections of the National Library: medieval manuscripts, early printed books, maps, music and drawings, gathered here for safety. Safety is a cruel word in this story. In October 1944, after the Uprising had surrendered and the population had been driven out, German burning and demolition squads went through the empty city building by building. The collections in this palace were set on fire on purpose. A huge part of Poland's written heritage turned to ash, not in battle, but after the shooting had stopped.

What you see is a post-war reconstruction, and today the palace once again keeps the library's special collections. There is one more ghost on this square. In the spring of 1943, while the Jewish ghetto burned behind its wall a few streets away, a carousel was turning here, with music and laughing riders. The poet Czesław Miłosz put that carousel into his poem Campo di Fiori, and it has never stopped turning in Polish memory.

Remember the date on which this walk is really built: 1 August 1944, five in the afternoon. Everything you will see today is a consequence of that hour. Now cross the square towards the great bronze group in front of you, where soldiers seem to burst straight out of the ground.
2. Warsaw Uprising Monument: The Hour Called W

Plac Krasińskich, 00-207 Warszawa, Poland

Walk around the great bronze until you face its larger half: a knot of soldiers charging out from under a toppling slab of concrete, helmets, rifles and torn coats, as if a wall had just collapsed behind them. A few steps away, a second, smaller group is climbing down into the ground through an opening in the pavement. Those two scenes, attack and descent, are the whole story of the Warsaw Uprising in two pieces of metal.

The monument was unveiled on 1 August 1989, the forty-fifth anniversary of the day the fighting began. The sculptor was Wincenty Kućma, the architect Jacek Budyn. Why so late? For decades the communist authorities treated the Home Army, the underground army loyal to the Polish government in exile in London, as an embarrassment at best and an enemy at worst. Many of its veterans were imprisoned after the war. A monument with their faces became possible only in the year communism in Poland began to fall.

The Uprising began at the hour the Home Army called W, five in the afternoon on 1 August 1944. Its commanders expected to fight for a few days, as the Germans retreated before the advancing Red Army. Around forty thousand insurgents went into the streets, and only a fraction of them had a firearm. They held out for sixty-three days. Around sixteen thousand insurgents were killed or went missing, and somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 civilians died. The Red Army, meanwhile, halted on the far bank of the Vistula and did not cross in force.

Every year at exactly five o'clock on 1 August, sirens sound across Warsaw and the city stands still. Trams stop, drivers step out of their cars, people freeze on the pavement for a minute, and red flares burn on this square. Look for the sign you will meet all day, on walls, on plaques, on lapels: a letter P whose foot opens into an anchor. That is the Kotwica, the symbol of Fighting Poland.

The smaller bronze group is heading for something real. Walk to the corner of Długa street, beside the square, and then along Długa towards the classical palace at number 7.
3. Długa Street: The Manhole and the Hospital

ul. Długa 7, 00-263 Warszawa, Poland

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.
4. Kamienne Schodki: A Rebuilt Old Town, Looking Across the River

ul. Kamienne Schodki, 00-272 Warszawa, Poland

Stand at the top of Kamienne Schodki, the Stone Steps, and let your eyes follow the narrow lane as it tumbles towards the Vistula between tall, thin houses in ochre, rust and cream. It is the only street of the Old Town made entirely of stairs. For centuries water carriers climbed it with buckets from the river, and the houses look as if they have watched them do it for four hundred years.

They have not. In August 1944 the Old Town was one of the strongholds of the Uprising, and the Germans attacked it with everything they had: dive bombers, heavy artillery, mortars, and remote-controlled demolition vehicles. By the time the defenders withdrew at the start of September, the district lay mostly in ruins. After the war, architects rebuilt it street by street, using pre-war measurements, photographs, and even the eighteenth-century views of Warsaw painted by Bernardo Bellotto, known here as Canaletto. In 1980 UNESCO put the Old Town on the World Heritage List, not as a survivor, but as an exceptional reconstruction.

Now look east, over the rooftops, to the far bank of the river. That is Praga. In mid-September 1944 the Red Army took Praga, and for the next four months the front line ran along the Vistula, a few hundred metres from the dying city. Soldiers of the Polish First Army, fighting alongside the Soviets, tried to cross and reach the insurgents in the second half of September, and suffered heavy losses. There was no major crossing. For weeks Stalin also refused to let Allied planes dropping supplies to the Uprising land on Soviet-held airfields.

The insurgents surrendered on 2 October. The Germans then expelled the remaining population and spent the following months destroying what was left of the city, systematically, district by district, with explosives and fire. When Soviet and Polish troops finally entered Warsaw in January 1945, they walked into a landscape of ruins.

So every stone under your feet here is a decision, made after 1945, to bring a city back rather than leave it as a memorial. Climb back up, cross the Market Square, and head out through the narrow streets to Podwale, the street that runs along the red brick city walls.
5. Podwale: The Little Insurgent and the Shoemaker with a Sabre

ul. Podwale, 00-252 Warszawa, Poland

By the red brick city walls, find a small bronze boy in a helmet far too big for him, clutching a submachine gun almost as long as his arm. Children stop in front of him, and so do grandparents, and they rarely say much. This is the Little Insurgent, Mały Powstaniec, by the sculptor Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz, unveiled in 1983 in honour of the children and teenagers of the Uprising.

Some of them fought. Many more served as couriers, running orders through cellars whose walls had been knocked through from house to house, and across barricades under fire. Scouts ran their own field post, collecting and delivering letters across the insurgent-held city, with post boxes and, later, their own stamps. The letters said what letters say in war: I am alive, where are you, is the house still standing. The helmet on the bronze boy is German: insurgents fought in captured helmets and uniforms, and often the only thing that marked them was a white-and-red armband.

Now turn to the big bronze man nearby, coat flying, sabre raised. Jan Kiliński was a Warsaw master shoemaker who, in April 1794, during the Kościuszko Uprising, helped lead the townspeople in the street fighting that drove the Russian garrison out of the city. His statue, by Stanisław Jackowski, first stood on Plac Krasińskich, where you started. In February 1942 a young scout saboteur, Aleksy Dawidowski, known as Alek, removed a German plaque from the Copernicus monument. The Germans retaliated by taking Kiliński off his pedestal and locking him in the National Museum. Soon afterwards, the story goes, a message appeared on the museum wall, signed by Kiliński himself, telling the people of Warsaw where he was.

Alek belonged to the Grey Ranks, the underground scouts. With his friends Tadeusz Zawadzki, Zośka, and Jan Bytnar, Rudy, he painted the Kotwica on walls all over the city. When Rudy was arrested and tortured in March 1943, his friends ambushed the prison truck near the Arsenal on 26 March and freed him with about twenty others. Rudy and Alek both died within days. Aleksander Kamiński told their story in Stones for the Rampart, printed underground in 1943.

Around the corner, on Kilińskiego street, pieces of a tank track hang on a wall. On 13 August 1944 a captured German tracked vehicle, unknowingly carrying a large explosive charge, blew up in a crowd and killed around three hundred people. Now walk south along Podwale and out of the Old Town towards the wide square of Plac Teatralny.
6. Jabłonowski Palace: The Town Hall of the Siege of 1939

ul. Senatorska 14, 00-082 Warszawa, Poland

Stop on the northern side of Plac Teatralny and look at the elegant palace with the slender clock tower. It is the Jabłonowski Palace, and for well over a century before the Second World War it was Warsaw's city hall. To understand 1944, you have to start five years earlier, with the man who worked behind these windows.

On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland. Within a week its armies stood at the edge of Warsaw, and the city was besieged. The mayor, Stefan Starzyński, an economist and former army officer, was asked to stay at his post as civilian commissioner for the defence. He organised fire brigades, food supplies and a civic guard, and almost every day he spoke to the city on the radio, calm and stubborn, telling people what was happening and asking them to hold on.

Warsaw Radio had a signal of its own. Between broadcasts it played Chopin's Polonaise in A major, the Military Polonaise, and listeners across Poland knew that as long as they heard it, the capital was still fighting. When the music stopped, everyone understood.

The bombing grew heavier towards the end of the month, the water supply failed, and on 28 September Warsaw capitulated. Starzyński refused offers to escape abroad. A few weeks later the Germans arrested him. He never came back, and his exact fate is still debated by historians; he most likely died in a German concentration camp. For Warsaw he became the face of 1939, the mayor who would not leave.

The palace itself did not survive the war. Its ruins were cleared and for decades the site stood empty, until the building you see was reconstructed in the 1990s. And keep the arithmetic in mind: the teenagers who heard the mayor's voice on the radio in 1939 were the young soldiers who went out at W-hour five years later. Now turn to the enormous colonnaded theatre that fills the southern side of the square, just a few steps away.
7. The Królewska Street Barricade & the Edge of Saxon Garden

ul. Królewska 16, 00-065 Warszawa, Poland

Walk out of Plac Teatralny along Wierzbowa street until you reach the corner of Królewska street and the leafy edge of Saxon Garden: where office workers now stroll in the shade of chestnut trees, in August 1944 stood one of the fiercest redoubts of the Warsaw Uprising. This was the legendary Barricade on Królewska street, the fortified frontline of the city centre.

The frontline through central Warsaw ran precisely along this curb. To the north, inside the German-held Saxon Garden, were German pillboxes, snipers and tanks; to the south, the insurgent-held city centre. For sixty-three straight days, young volunteer soldiers of the Kiliński Battalion and the Chrobry II Battalion defended this perilous corner from behind high piles of jagged cobblestones, overturned tramcars, furniture and heavy iron railings.

The Germans launched assault after assault supported by Goliath remote-controlled demolition carriers, heavy artillery and dive-bombers. Buildings on both sides of Królewska were pounded into smoking hollow shells, yet the insurgents held the line. Day after day, German tanks tried to break through into Marszałkowska street, and day after day they were repelled with sticky petrol bombs and anti-tank PIAT fire.

The barricade was dubbed the Thermopylae of Warsaw: despite being attacked dozens of times by superior forces, it was never captured until the final capitulation on 2 October 1944. A small bronze plaque on the building at Królewska 16 remembers the young boys and girls who manned this line under continuous fire, guarding the gateway to central Warsaw against overwhelming odds and keeping the red-and-white insurgent flag flying over the smoking ruins of the street.

From the corner of Królewska, walk a few steps east into Plac Małachowskiego, where the grand classical facade of the Zachęta National Gallery and a round Lutheran rotunda face the square.
8. Zachęta and Plac Małachowskiego: Art, Murder and Occupation

Plac Stanisława Małachowskiego 3, 00-916 Warszawa, Poland

Walk up to the white building with the columns and the sculptures on its roofline. This is the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, opened in 1900 by the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts. Zachęta means encouragement, and for over a century this has been the place where Polish art is shown, praised and fiercely argued about.

It is also a place where Polish politics bled. On 16 December 1922 the first President of the reborn Polish state, Gabriel Narutowicz, came here to open an exhibition. He had been in office for five days. In one of the galleries, a painter and critic named Eligiusz Niewiadomski shot him dead. The murder followed a vicious nationalist campaign against the new president, and it haunted the young republic for years.

Under German occupation the gallery was given a new purpose: the occupiers turned it into a House of German Culture. Around it, the city was divided by signs reading Nur für Deutsche, only for Germans, on trams, in parks and in the best cafés. Polish universities and secondary schools were closed, so Warsaw taught itself in secret: underground classes met in private flats, and thousands of young people passed exams that officially did not exist. Many of the insurgents of 1944 were those same secret pupils.

Across the square rises the round, domed Lutheran Church of the Holy Trinity, designed in the 1770s by Szymon Bogumił Zug. It burned during the siege of 1939 and was ruined again in 1944, and like almost everything you have seen today, it was rebuilt after the war. The gallery itself came out of the war damaged but standing, which makes its walls among the older ones on this walk.

Keep an eye on the pavements and doorways around here: shrapnel scars still pockmark some of the surviving facades in central Warsaw, if you know how to look. From Plac Małachowskiego, walk south down Mazowiecka street to Świętokrzyska and the square with the tall, pale tower on its corner.
9. The Prudential: Warsaw's Skyscraper and the Two-Tonne Shell

Plac Powstańców Warszawy 9, 00-039 Warszawa, Poland

Stand on Plac Powstańców Warszawy, Warsaw Insurgents Square, and look up at the tall, slim tower on its corner. Today it is a hotel. In the 1930s it was the Prudential building, the Warsaw headquarters of a British insurance company, and with about sixty-six metres it was the tallest building in Poland and one of the tallest in Europe. Its steel frame, designed by the architect Marcin Weinfeld, was the height of modernity.

That frame is the hero of this stop. On 28 August 1944 a shell weighing around two tonnes, fired by one of the gigantic German siege mortars brought in to crush the Uprising, struck the tower. A young photographer, Sylwester Braun, whose underground name was Kris, caught the instant of impact: a white plume bursting out of the side of the building. It became one of the defining images of the Uprising. And the tower? Gutted and burned, its steel skeleton stood.

Braun was one of several insurgent photographers and reporters who documented the fighting day by day. Many of his negatives survived the war, and much of what the world knows visually about those sixty-three days comes from cameras like his. Before the war this square was called Plac Napoleona; it took its present name, in honour of the insurgents, after the war.

Central Warsaw was not one battlefield but a patchwork. Insurgent-held districts were cut off from each other by German strongpoints, and couriers, often teenagers, carried messages between them through cellars, ruins and sewers. This part of the centre stayed in Polish hands until the surrender in October, under almost constant shelling.

After 1945 the Prudential was rebuilt as the Hotel Warszawa, with a heavy socialist-realist face, as if the city wanted to forget the elegant tower of the thirties. In recent years it was renovated and reopened as a hotel again, with the frame that took that shell still inside. Now walk west along Świętokrzyska to Zielna street, where a dark, heavy building with a tall tower stands on the corner.
10. The PAST Building: Storming the Telephone Tower

ul. Zielna 37, 00-108 Warszawa, Poland

At the corner of Zielna, look up at the dark, heavy building with the tall tower and the steep pointed roof. It was built at the start of the twentieth century as the telephone exchange of the Swedish Cedergren company, which ran Warsaw's telephones, and when it was finished it was the tallest building in the city. Warsaw knows it by the initials of a later owner, the Polish Telephone Company, PAST, which in local speech turned into Pasta.

Under occupation it was the heart of German telephone communications in the city, and the Germans fortified it. When the Uprising broke out, its garrison held on, and from the upper floors machine guns swept the surrounding streets. For almost three weeks the insurgents attacked again and again, and failed.

On 20 August 1944 they finally broke in. Soldiers of the Kiliński Battalion and other units pumped fuel into the building with a fire pump, set it ablaze, and then fought their way up floor by floor. More than a hundred Germans were taken prisoner, and the white-and-red flag went up on the tower. After three weeks of terrible news from Wola and the Old Town, the city had a day of pure joy, and people came out of the cellars to cheer.

Notice the battalion's name. Kiliński again, the shoemaker of 1794 you met on Podwale, lending his name to the young men and women of 1944. Warsaw has always fought with its own history in its pocket. And there is a quieter detail: many of the insurgents who stormed this building were office clerks, students and tram drivers a few weeks before, with only basic training snatched in secret.

The building was badly damaged and rebuilt after the war, and a plaque on its wall records the battle. Its tower is still a landmark of this part of the centre. Now walk south down Zielna to Złota street and turn left, heading towards Marszałkowska and an old cinema facade.
11. Kino Palladium: Warsaw Fights on Screen

ul. Złota 7/9, 00-019 Warszawa, Poland

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.