Category: Poland

This rather ornate shield is the sign of the locksmiths’ guild in Wrocław, dating back to something around 1750. It’s a hefty wooden piece which is divided neatly into compartments, each one proudly displaying the tools of the trade, namely keys, locks, hinges and other hardware that you’d hope a locksmith of the eighteenth century would know what to do with.

Guilds were serious business in Wrocław (or Breslau as it was then) and they weren’t just trade associations, but social and political powerhouses. Signs like this were part branding, part authority, telling the world that this was a guild with standards and that they weren’t going to tolerate any sub-optimal locksmithing in their city. It’s functional and decorative, a former marker of belonging,

Wrocław, or Breslau as it then was, has the dubious distinction of being declared a Festung (fortress city) by the Nazis in 1944, meaning that it was to be defended at any cost. “Any cost” in this context turned out to mean the near destruction of the city and the needless deaths of tens of thousands, but those were details that didn’t particularly bother the Reich as long as orders were followed.

The concept of Fortress Breslau was meant to hold back the Red Army and protect the eastern flank of Germany, though in reality it was mostly about Hitler’s refusal to admit the war was already lost. The city was ringed with defences, civilians were pressed into service and resistance was supposed to be fanatical. The siege lasted from February until May 1945, outlasting even the Battle of Berlin. By the time the Soviets finally took it, Breslau was a ruin, its medieval heart and baroque splendours reduced to rubble.

The human toll was staggering with around 170,000 civilians trapped, food shortages, forced evacuations in the depths of winter and an estimated 40,000 dead during the siege. The city held out because orders said it had to, not because there was any realistic hope of changing the war’s outcome. It’s one of those decadent exercises in futility that twentieth-century Europe specialised in.

The capitulation itself came on 6 May 1945 when General Hermann Niehoff, the German commander, finally accepted the inevitable and surrendered the city to the Soviets. Accounts describe Niehoff as weary rather than defiant, the fight having gone on long past the point of sanity. It was also the end of the city’s German identity, it became part of Poland just months later. Niehoff himself lived until 1980, it must have been a strange career to look back on.

This is the same location now where the surrender took place. Everything has changed, I can’t imagine anyone in 1939 could have predicted what would happen to this city.

I had somehow managed to miss that the excellent Polish brewery Browar Stu Mostów is actually from Wrocław and they have a couple of venues in the city.

It’s a bright and vibrant interior. There was a friendly welcome and the option to sit inside or outside, but I felt I’d done enough al fresco drinking for the week, so opted for inside.

They call this outlet a bistro, so there’s a focus on the food and beer. The online reviews are generally very positive and I rather liked, in the response to an angry drunk customer, that the venue commented on the Sobriety Education Act which is a rather lovely name for the Polish drinking laws.

I ordered a tasting board to try four different beers from the brewery, or, in one case from another brewery. From left to right:

(i) Fruited Tango from Browar Stu Mostów. This was thick, fruity, lightly soured and packed with mango. An exceptional beer.

(ii) Green Diamonds from Other Half Brewing which is an incredible brewery that I went to when I was in New York. The beer was hoppy, dank, fluffy, creamy and really quite decadent, another delight.

(iii) Cake Drop from Browar Stu Mostów. This is one of the best beers I’ve had this year, it tasted of carrot cake and was lightly soured and tasted of liquid gold. A punchy flavour with so much fruit that it must be healthy.

(iv) Blueberry Shake from Browar Stu Mostów. Just as I was thinking the Cake Drop would be the best of the evening, this was the icing on the carrot cake, packed with blueberries, thick, luscious mouthfeel and one of the best beers I’ve had.

In short, I liked the beer here.

The food was pretty decent, this is the pastrami brisket sandwich with fries. The thinner pieces of pastrami were a delight, the larger pieces were a bit fatty for my liking, but there was a depth of flavour to the whole arrangement and the chips were particularly decent.

Anyway, this was an absolute delight and the beer quality was exceptional, which was the main point of my visit. The atmosphere was welcoming, the venue was clean, the service was polite and the beer was lovely. Next time I’m in the city, I’ll try and head for the brewery’s main taproom which is just a little way out of the city centre.

This is the memorial to the massacre at Katyn, or to give its full name “the Memorial to the Victims of Katyn, Kharkov and Mednoye Massacres and Camp Prisoners in Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov.” It commemorates the 1940 massacre of thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals by the Soviet NKVD, one of those bleak moments of twentieth-century history where humanity was entirely and completely absent. It was a desperate attempt by the Soviets to destroy the Polish military leadership and an attempt to erase statehood. The Soviets had been humiliated by the Poles in the years after World War One with the Polish-Bolshevik War and I can understand their complete terror about needing to face another conflict.

The memorial, which is rather substantial, was erected in Juliusz Słowacki Park in 1999 and the official unveiling was on 22 September 2000. At the rear of this photo is the representation of the Angel of Death.

This represents the Mother of the Polish state cradling an executed prisoner who has a bullet hole in the back of his head and his arms tied together behind his back.

A small plaque notes that Tadeusz Tchórzewski was the sculptor. The monument is now under the care of the Lower Silesian Katyn Family Association which comprises of family members and descendants of those who were murdered. Wrocław was still Germany during the Second World War, when it was Breslau, so the impact in the city during these years were very different from other parts of Poland.

Powerful. There’s an information board nearby which reads:

“In the spring of 1940, on Stalin’s orders, 22,000 Polish officers, policemen and other prisoners of war from the Kozelsk, Ostashkov and Starobelsk camps were murdered with a shot in the back of the head in Katyn, Mednoye, Kharkov and in unknown places in the former USSR. In tribute to the murdered, this monument was founded by the compatriots of Wrocław in 1999 on the initiative of the “Lower Silesian Katyn Family” association.”

The Soviets covered up evidence of their executions after the end of the Second World War as they sought to bring Poland under their control. After 1990 and the collapse of the USSR the truth outed and evidence of the war crimes became much clearer after a series of exhumations. It’s evident that this powerful sculpture was needed in the 1990s to start spreading information about Katyn, something that had been kept from the Polish population by the Soviets. The Soviets never really convinced the Polish population that they were somehow their protectors in the post-war period, the collapse of the communist state in Poland was perhaps always inevitable and it’s maybe surprising that it lasted as long as it did.