In Europe

forced to dance naked. In the background of the photograph taken in 1940, the city rolls on, big and modern. Today there is a Pizza Hut on the corner. The only surviving point of reference is an old stone wall to one side. The gate, of course, has disappeared, but the most amazing thing is what has happened to that background: where Nalewki Street once stood, a busy shopping street with cars, trams and department stores, is today a quiet park. Only the rusty tram rails, which come to a stop somewhere under the grass, show that once this really was a busy urban neighbourhood, that the whole history is not a hallucination.
    I leaf through other books of photographs. The earliest pictures of Warsaw show a city of well-to-do citizens, broad streets full of pedestrians, horse-drawn trams, churches and palaces in the familiar eclectic and pseudo-styles. Around the turn of the twentieth century the city was experiencing the same rapid growth as other European metropolises: industrialisation, prosperity in the city and poverty in the countryside, farmers who came pouring in by the tens of thousands, expansion after expansion, a growth from 261,000 inhabitants in 1874 to 797,000 in 1911.
    Then came the start of the Polish Republic, the panic of the Russian Revolution – the Soviets advanced to just outside the city – and then the photographs show the cheerful, elegant Warsaw of the 1920s and 1930s, with coffee houses, theatres, universities, boulevards, newspaper boys and clanging trams. Then the war.
    Pictures of Warsaw in 1945 resemble pictures of Hiroshima. Only aquarter of the city was still standing. Ninety per cent of all the large buildings had been reduced to rubble. Of the 1.3 million people who lived in Warsaw in 1940, only 378,000 were still there. Almost two thirds of the city's population was either dead or missing.
    Now, at the end of the twentieth century, the city has something artificial about it, as though the old city centre has been reconstructed by expert stage designers. Every crack seems to have been put there for effect, many of the houses actually look older and more authentic than they ever were. And that impression is correct: almost every stone here was first blown away, then returned to its place. In the Rynek, the central square of the Old City, a melancholy organ-grinder is turning the crank on a fake antique barrel organ, handsome men are selling ugly paintings, the beggars have crutches and infants, the American ladies are just asking to be swindled. Polish vendors lurk around the ghetto, selling souvenir dolls, funny Jewish figurines, laughing and dancing rabbis; the folklore lives on, but the dancers have died.
    This is a city full of memorial plaques, probably because nothing else is left. Every street corner has its monument, every house saw the birth of a poet or the death of a hero, and new plaques are being put up all the time. Just outside the centre of town I pass a brand-new monument for an entire army corps. A little group of old ladies is standing there in the twilight, looking at the gleaming pillar. A woman in a black suit dress walks up to it, searches among the many, many names, brushes one of them lightly with a gloved finger.
    Warsaw's parks are the most pleasant place to be on long summer evenings like this. They lie in a circle around the Old City, often behind the gardens of the homes themselves. Neighbours are talking across the hedges, children are running around, little boys are playing soccer, babies and prams are out on parade, the girls are the most beautiful in all Europe.
    I take a walk around one of the ponds with Wladyslaw Matwin. Matwin is a historian and former politician, he was born in 1916 and has himself gradually become a living chronicle of history. ‘My life was a time full of violence,’ he says. ‘There were always huge forces at work that kept turning it all upside down.’
    He studied in Poznań, was a member of a communist youth organisation, was arrested for ‘some innocent work among children’, and afterthat no university would have him. ‘In 1938, at the time of the Munich Agreement, I was studying in Czechoslovakia. I had to pick up everything and run for it. When Hitler invaded Poland I had to run again, this time to the East. In 1941 I worked in a steel mill in the Ukraine, but I had to leave there too. In Poland I was taken for a Russian agent, in Russia I was suddenly a Polish agent. The fourth time I had to run from the Germans