00:00Warsaw today is a thriving European capital but beneath its skyline lies the trauma of a city
00:07nearly wiped from existence. In 1939, Warsaw was home to 1.3 million people. By 1945,
00:16more than 85% of the city was destroyed and tens of thousands of its citizens were dead.
00:22Yes, Warsaw was like a pile of ruins. Nearly nothing here but people returned to the city.
00:29People returned themselves. Nobody told them to do. They wanted to keep the identity,
00:36tradition of Warsaw so for the people, for the pre-war inhabitants to feel still like they are living in Warsaw.
00:47Part of the plan of Nazi Germany was to eradicate Jewish people,
00:51involving a systematic effort to dehumanize and murder on an industrial scale.
00:59Everything we see here is completely new. Nothing survived where we are. Nothing has survived from
01:05pre-war Jewish Warsaw. Everything was destroyed. There wasn't even a sea of ruins. It was a sea of rubble.
01:14All the remains of the Warsaw ghetto today are stone markers showing the boundaries.
01:18In April 1943, Jews in the ghetto staged an uprising. It was savagely put down by the Germans. In the aftermath,
01:29more than 35,000 survivors of the fighting were sent to extermination camps.
01:34They were brought here from the ghetto and were held and then transported in cattle wagons to
01:42concentration camps. We also see this gate here. This monument depicts the parting of the Red Sea from
01:48the passage in the Bible. The following year, a different uprising, this time involving the Polish Home
02:02Army, rose to fight the German occupation across the whole city. One of those who fought was Janusz
02:10Maksimowicz, then just a teenager.
02:16If a German was walking toward you on the sidewalk, a Pole had to step into the street so that the
02:22master of the world could walk freely. I still remember this one moment when I was walking along
02:27the street and on the other side of the road, a Polish man didn't yield to the German. They brushed
02:32shoulders. Then, without thinking much, the German unbuckled his holster, took out his pistol and shot
02:39him, and left him without even looking back. The Warsaw Uprising lasted 63 days. After surrender,
02:47the Germans destroyed what was left, building by building.
02:54I am often asked, was it worth it? Absolutely, yes. Why? Because there was no political and moral force
03:00that could stop us, the youth, from taking up arms and to take revenge on our occupiers.
03:07Reborn from the ashes. The view around Saint Augustine's church shows just how vast the rebuilding
03:14had to be. Even today, some buildings still bear signs of de-mining, where soldiers worked to make
03:21the city safe again. But people lived there for four weeks, for three or four weeks, and when they were
03:28coming back, so they met a supper, and he was writing, and they read it, and said, what do you say?
03:36There are no mines here? And he said, yes, I just checked. And sometimes he said, I just, I just
03:44cleared this mines. There were mines? Yeah, you were living on the mines. So it happened, and many times,
03:53people died before the mines, especially children. Behind me is Warsaw rebuilt, not only in glass and
04:00brick and in steel, but also in spirit. This city didn't just survive history, it remade it,
04:06and it continues to write its next chapter. Peter Oliver, CGTN, Warsaw.
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