At 4:45 AM on September 1, 1939, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, anchored in Gdansk harbor on what its captain had claimed was a courtesy visit, opened fire on the Polish military depot at Westerplatte. The Polish garrison of 182 men was supposed to hold for 12 hours. They held for seven days. By the time they surrendered, World War II had been underway for a week. By the time it ended, the Polish nation had lost six million of its citizens; 17% of its prewar population, the highest national death rate of the war. The Polish road from that morning at Westerplatte to the German surrender at Karlshorst on the night of May 8, 1945, is the road this tour walks.
In American memory, WWII is mostly an American story. In Polish memory, it is something else. Poland was invaded twice in 1939, by Germany on September 1 and by the Soviet Union on September 17. Its government-in-exile fielded the third-largest Allied army in Europe by 1945, with Polish soldiers fighting in the Battle of Britain, at Monte Cassino, in Normandy, and at Arnhem.
It was the country in whose occupied territory the Germans built the death camps. Its underground Home Army, 400,000 strong, was the largest resistance organization in occupied Europe. And it was the country handed at war’s end to a Soviet sphere it had not chosen, in which it remained for 44 years. This tour walks the country that paid for the war.
This tour is 14 days long, from Gdansk on the Baltic to Berlin in the heart of Germany, with Warsaw, the Masurian forests, Kraków, Auschwitz, and the Lower Silesian forests in between. It runs from where the war began to where it ended.
Along the way, you will:
- Walk Westerplatte, the small Polish military depot in Gdansk harbor, where on September 1, 1939, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened the war with point-blank fire. The 182 Polish defenders, supposed to hold for 12 hours, held for seven days against air, sea, and infantry assault. The concrete walls of Guardhouse No. 1 are still pocked with the gunfire.
- Visit the Polish Post Office of Gdansk, where on September 1, 1939, about 50 postal workers and Polish boy scouts held the building against German SS and police troops for fifteen hours. After surrender, 38 of them were summarily executed. They had not been combatants. Most had been civil servants the day before.
- Visit the Solidarity Monument and the European Solidarity Centre at the Gdansk Shipyard, where in 1980 an electrician named Lech Wałęsa led a strike that began the movement that ultimately ended communist rule across Eastern Europe. Gdansk has watched two epoch-changing struggles in a single century, both of them fought from the same harbor.
- Walk through the ruins of the Wolfsschanze, Hitler’s heavily fortified Eastern Front headquarters in the pine forests of the Masurian Lake District, where he spent more than 800 days of the war. It is also the bunker where on July 20, 1944, Col. Claus von Stauffenberg planted the briefcase bomb that was meant to kill Hitler and almost did.
- Walk the streets of the former Warsaw Ghetto, where between November 1940 and May 1943 the Germans confined as many as 460,000 Jews behind a 10-foot wall. Visit the Umschlagplatz monument, marking the railhead from which roughly 300,000 of them were deported to death camps. Then visit the Mila 18 memorial, at the bunker where on May 8, 1943, the leadership of the ghetto uprising killed themselves rather than be taken alive.
- Walk Warsaw’s Old Town — every brick of which was destroyed by the Germans in retaliation for the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and rebuilt after the war from prewar architectural drawings and Bellotto’s 18th-century paintings. Stop at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the surviving fragment of the Saxon Palace, where Polish soldiers from every war the country has fought are honored.
- Tour the Warsaw Rising Museum, dedicated to the 63-day uprising of August 1944, when the Polish Home Army of roughly 40,000 fighters seized the city in expectation of Soviet support that never came. The Red Army stopped on the east bank of the Vistula and watched. By the end, 16,000 Home Army fighters and 200,000 civilians were dead, and the Germans had razed what was left.
- Walk up Wawel Hill in Kraków to the Royal Castle, the ancient seat of Polish kings, and the cathedral where most of them are buried. Among the tombs is that of Tadeusz Kościuszko, hero of the American Revolution and the man Thomas Jefferson called “as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known.” Stand in the rooms where Polish history was made for a thousand years.
- Walk Kazimierz, the historic Jewish quarter of Kraków, home before the war to about 70,000 Jews, almost none of whom survived. Visit the Galicia Jewish Museum and the historic synagogues of the district. Cross the Vistula to the former site of the Kraków Ghetto, and tour the Oskar Schindler Enamel Factory (now a museum of wartime-occupied Kraków), where some 1,200 Jewish workers survived the war.
- Walk through the gates at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the largest of the German concentration and extermination camps, where between 1940 and 1945 approximately 1.1 million people were murdered — about 90% of them Jews from across occupied Europe. Auschwitz I has been preserved as a museum since 1947. Birkenau, where the gas chambers operated, has been preserved largely as the SS left it.
- Visit Stalag Luft III at Żagań, the German POW camp for captured Allied airmen made famous by the 1963 film The Great Escape, where on the night of March 24, 1944, 76 prisoners crawled through a 100-meter tunnel and escaped into the woods. Three made it home. Fifty were summarily executed by the Gestapo on Hitler’s orders. Visit the museum and the monument to the murdered fifty.
- Stand on the Seelow Heights east of Berlin, where on April 16, 1945, Marshal Georgi Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front, the army that had fought west across Poland alongside the 1st Polish Army, opened the final Soviet offensive of the war with a bombardment from nearly 9,000 artillery pieces. The four-day battle that followed cost the Red Army roughly 30,000 killed and wounded. Berlin fell two weeks later.
- End in Berlin: at the Brandenburg Gate, where Soviet soldiers raised flags in 1945; at the Topography of Terror, on the site of the SS and Gestapo headquarters; and at Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, where late on the night of May 8, 1945, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed the unconditional surrender that ended the war the Polish garrison at Westerplatte had begun resisting almost six years before.
Poland was the first country to be invaded, the country with the highest civilian death rate of the war, the country whose underground was the largest in occupied Europe, and the country in whose forests the Reich placed the death camps. It was also the country that fought beside the Western Allies on every front, in the air over Britain, on the slopes at Cassino, in the hedgerows at Falaise, and was handed at war’s end to a Soviet sphere it had not chosen. The road from Westerplatte to Karlshorst is the Polish century. This tour walks it.
By the end of these 14 days, you will know what “the war began in Poland” actually means, not only the dawn of September 1, 1939, but the five years and eight months of occupation that followed.
You will have stood at Auschwitz. You will have read the names at the Mila 18 memorial. You will have walked the streets of Warsaw’s Old Town that were rebuilt one brick at a time. You will know who the Home Army was, what they fought for, and what the Red Army did not do for them across the Vistula in the autumn of 1944. And the Polish century will no longer be a footnote in your reading of WWII.
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