Ninety percent of Warsaw was rubble in January 1945, and almost everything standing was argued over, drawn and laid brick by brick afterwards. These three days follow the Mazovian dukes, the ghetto, the 1944 uprising and the Stalinist city built on the ruins.
Housed in the 1643 Royal Arsenal, the collection runs from Stone Age flints through Lusatian bronzes to the Biskupin lake settlement finds and Piast-era grave goods. The Mazovian rooms explain who lived here before Warsaw existed.
The half-moon brick barbican of 1548, designed by Giovanni Battista of Venice, guarded the Nowomiejska gate. Demolished in the 19th century and finished off in 1944, it was rebuilt from old drawings using bricks salvaged from Silesian towns.
Mazovian dukes were buried here from the 14th century and the 3 May 1791 constitution was sworn in the nave. The crypts hold Duke Janusz III, Sienkiewicz and president Narutowicz; a Goliath tracked-mine fragment from 1944 is fixed to the outer wall.
Founded around 1411 by Anna, duchess of Mazovia, on the escarpment above the Vistula — the oldest church of the New Town, with a free-standing Gothic belfry. Shelled to rubble in 1944 and rebuilt to its pre-Baroque medieval form.
Opened on the 60th anniversary inside a 1905 tram power station, it tracks the 63 days of the 1944 uprising hour by hour — the beating-heart wall of a working printing press, a replica B-24 Liberator and a crawl-through insurgent sewer.
Nathan Rapoport's 1948 bronze stands on rubble from the levelled ghetto; the labradorite slabs came from a block Hitler had ordered for a victory monument. Willy Brandt knelt on these steps on 7 December 1970.
Eight galleries walk a thousand years of Polish Jewish life, from medieval royal charters and a reconstructed painted roof of the Gwoździec wooden synagogue to the interwar street and the ghetto. Built directly over the ghetto's ruins.
Stalin's 1955 'gift to the Polish nation', 237 m tall and still the country's tallest building, raised by 3,500 Soviet workers with 3,288 rooms. The 30th-floor terrace lays out the grid of the rebuilt city at once.
Consecrated in 1792 and holding around a million burials under old limes: the vaulted Catacombs, the Avenue of the Distinguished, and the grey stone rows of Szare Szeregi scouts killed in 1944 alongside Bolesław Prus and Wanda Krahelska.
From this rail siding roughly 300,000 Jews were loaded into freight cars for Treblinka between July 1942 and September 1943. The 1988 white-and-black marble enclosure, shaped like an open wagon, is carved with 448 first names.
The Gestapo's main political prison in occupied Poland: about 100,000 people passed through and some 37,000 were shot. Only the gatehouse cellars survived the 1944 demolition; the bronze cast of the courtyard elm outside carries thousands of plaques.
Praga was taken by the Red Army in September 1944 and escaped the demolition squads, so its tenements are original 19th-century brick — bullet-pocked stairwells, courtyard shrines put up during the occupation, and the Koneser vodka works.