Here there be monsters

Warsaw began when two brothers, Varsh and Sawa, hauled something that appeared to be half fish and half woman out of the Vistula. Knowing full well that this was something they couldn't bring home to their wives, the let the creature go. The mermaid — for that's what it was — was so grateful that she agreed to protect the brothers' home forever.

However, the mermaid was nowhere to be seen when the city was menaced by a basilisk, its deadly glare freezing everything in sight. Fortunately, a clever shoemaker thought to use a mirror on the creature, and the city was saved — showing the people of Warsaw that they didn't need any magical help to get rid of the monsters that crossed their path.

They certainly weren't going to get any help from the government. Poland's last king, Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski, was a terrific patron of the arts — he filled the city's red-towered castle with marble walls and Italian paintings, and invited artists and thinkers to his table every Thursday afternoon. But he wasn't much of a warrior, and Germany, Russia, Austria and Turkey swooped in to conquer the nation, wiping Poland off the map for more than a century.

Poland became a country again after the first world war, and enjoyed about 20 years of peace — with a president and parliament serving in Stanislaus' palace — before the worst monsters of all came to town. First came the Soviets, who slaughtered the cream of the Polish army and buried its doctors, professors and other intellectuals in a mass grave at Katyn. Then came the Nazis. They exterminated Warsaw's thinkers, forced the city's Jews to live in a walled ghetto that grew smaller every day, and sent those leaders who remained to concentration camps. Warsaw was conquered, but it never surrendered: Poland was the only occupied country in which not a single citizen collaborated with the Nazis.

In 1944, as news came of the Soviet Red Army advancing through Poland, members of the Warsaw underground felt the time had come. The will to fight was there, but weapons were few — in lieu of guns, boys were given paint, and traveled around the city drawing a stylized "PW" on Warsaw's walls, a symbol meaning "Poland will fight!" The Warsaw Uprising, when it happened, was brutal and bloody and bleak: 20,000 Poles died before their leaders were finally forced to surrender. Meanwhile, the Red Army waited on the other side of the Vistula, within sight of the fighting, and did nothing. The vengeful Nazis evacuated the city, and then destroyed everything they could — the castle, the beautiful Old Town with its brightly-colored shops and fountains, the churches where Chopin once played. Eighty-five percent of the city was completely obliterated.

Within a year, more than 250,000 people had returned, and set about rebuilding the city.

Of course, with a Soviet-imposed Communist government in control, the Poles weren't allowed to commemorate the Uprising, or even acknowledge it had happened. In the late 1980s, with the appointment of a new Party First Secretary, the moment finally came — and the memorial is something to behold. It shows men and women and boys, wounded, battered, some fleeing into the sewers, their backs against the wall, but still fighting.

There will always be monsters. And here, at least, there will always be people who know how to deal with them.