When I visited the Royal Castle in Warsaw, I was struck by the sheer improbability of it. Walking through its rooms, I saw gilded ceilings, frescoes, and polished parquet floors that looked entirely authentic. It was hard to believe that almost everything I was seeing had been reconstructed after the Second World War.
My father was born in 1916 in Kamyk, a village near Częstochowa. At the time, Poland did not exist as an independent country. It had been partitioned by neighboring powers more than a century earlier and would not regain its independence until 1918, two years after his birth.
The Royal Castle was one of the great symbols of that independence. For centuries it served as the seat of Polish kings and government. Most famously, it was here in 1791 that the Constitution of May 3 was adopted, often described as Europe's first modern written constitution.
That history nearly came to an end during the war. After invading Poland in 1939, the Germans damaged and looted the castle. Following the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, they systematically destroyed what remained, reducing the building to rubble.
Yet the castle did not disappear. After the war, Poles decided to rebuild it. Citizens donated money. Historians, architects, and artisans worked from prewar drawings, photographs, and surviving fragments. Between 1971 and 1984, the Royal Castle rose again.
For me, the improbability ran deeper than architecture. My father was born before Poland existed as a country. Decades later, much of that recovered Poland was devastated again. The rebuilt castle is proof that what was destroyed did not vanish forever — and in our family, we knew something about that too.