Gdańsk is one of Europe’s best kept secrets. Expecting a glum commie city? Think again. The Old Town captivates, and couldn’t look any sweeter if it was built by the good Mr Kipling and his little helpers. But while you’re bumbling round the cobbles and annoying the locals with your map flapping consider this; the spot you’re standing in was a smoking heap of rubble little more than 60 years ago. What looks like an ancient city borne of centuries of development is a ghost of what it once was, and still in the process of rediscovering itself.

This neck of the woods took a battering during WWII, with Poland losing twenty per cent of her pre-war population. Worse was to follow. The Yalta conference saw Stalin, Churchill and Roosvelt carve up Europe, shifting Poland’s borders westwards. What had been the German city of Danzig became the Polish city of Gdańsk overnight. Locally the situation was tragic. The German population either died during the war or were expelled thereafter, while the city was shown no mercy; Hitler had made a point of incorporating ‘the free city’ into the Reich, and he was fervently supported by the majority of locals. The fruit of this support was the wholesale destruction of the city, primarily caused by US and British bombers. Anything which survived was destroyed by the firestorm which engulfed the city as the Red Army forced the remaining population of the Eastern Prussian territories into the sea as they marched westwards onto Berlin.

By May 1945 Danzig was derelict and deserted. Remaining children cheerfully played with loaded anti-aircraft guns in the deserted Targ Weglowy while their neighbours waited nervously for the rear units of the Red Army to pour into the city and exact their revenge. Conservative estimates suggest 90% of the city centre lay in total ruin, and if that sounds impossible to comprehend then just visit the History of Gdańsk Museum (see What to See section) to view pictures of the Hiroshima-style destruction. Only 38 houses in the whole of the city centre survived the siege, with debris mounted up to the height of several metres. In fact, such was the ferocity of the Soviet advance that fires in the old town were blazing a month after the fighting had ceased. The indefatigable St Mary’s Cathedral, a defining mark on Gdańsk’s skyline, burned so fiercely that some reports claim the bricks and bells in the tower melted, while the granary buildings on Wyspa Spichrzów took an even harder hit; the inferno there continuing to rage until well into autumn. The material and economic cost was immense, the human cost incalculable.

The pre-war population had stood at 400,000, of which 16,000 were registered to be of Polish descent. By the time hostilities ceased that figure was 124,000, of which only approximately 3,200 were Polish. How many of the pre-war population died and how many simply fled is impossible to compute, either way Gdańsk was a shattered shell of its former self. Reprisals against the remaining German population went unchecked, with murder and theft de rigeur by drunken bands of Soviet soldiers. But it was rape that was to become the most virulent problem. It’s estimated that two million German women were violated by Red Army troops and the local Danzigers – regarded as particularly keen Nazis – fared worse than most. Having been terrorized at night, the surviving Germans were expected to work next day. On April 25 the Mayor of Gdańsk decreed all Germans report for rubble clearing duties every day at 7am. It was backbreaking work, and not without its grisly diversions; six thousand bodies were cleared under the detritus in April alone. But this was only to be a short term measure; verification panels were set up to interview individual German citizens to determine if they could stay in the city of their birth. These were essentially pre-determined kangaroo courts, and within a matter of years all traces of the German population had been driven out.

The place of the exiled Germans was filled by Polish refugees, displaced from the eastern territories that now came under Lithuanian, Belarussian and Ukranian control. It was these displaced Poles, as well as the surviving local Polish and Kashubian communities, that rebuilt the city and made it their own. Amazing to think, therefore, the Gdańsk you see today came within a fine hair of being turned into a grey, concrete forest; the city was being swamped with settlers, and understandably the priority was not to honour history and aesthetic values, but to provide these war weary pioneers with a roof. With people living in squalid, overcrowded conditions it wasn’t long until several bright sparks began campaigning for a plan which would have seen St Mary’s rebuilt, but the rest of the area surrounded by the Orwellian style blocks you’d nowadays find in Warsaw. Not only was this master plan practical, it also gained support from the patriotic lobby. The argument was straight forward – the Poles didn’t want to rebuild the German city of Danzig. They wanted a new city, one that was indisputably Polish. No-one captured the spirit of this movement more eloquently than Edmund Osmiańczyk, and his fire and brimstone words made it into an issue of the influential Odrodzenie: ‘We are not going to cry over ashes, we won’t rebuild these reminders of the Teutonic Knights and the power they once wielded. We don’t want to remember. We will build in the Polish style, not that ofthe Teutonic invaders’.

Unfortunately, this Polish style they spoke of verged on the moronic. Plans that were floated included the construction of a skyscraper between ul. Korzenna and ul. Podwale Grodzkie, as well as a great big four storey, 125 metre long concrete carbuncle by the train station (this design, devil be damned, was partially realized). Heated discussion continued over the next couple of years, but nothing was agreed and the job of clearing the city clanked on in the background. Efforts to tidy the town were doubled in 1947, and over 300,000 cubic metres of rubble were cleared in that year – some of which would be used in the production of breezeblocks, the rest dumped unceremoniously in Gdańsk’s 48 pre-war cemeteries. Indeed, the organization of the clean-up operation was a fiasco. Chaos reigned, accidents were frequent, and worse still for the workers, bodies were still showing up everywhere – 1948 brought with it the discovery of a particularly nasty mass grave, that of 40 women buried between the Covered Market and St. Nicholas Church.

However, the year also brought with it the long overdue decision with what to do with downtown Gdańsk. The rebuilding commission chose to reconstruct six of the central streets that now form the meat and bones of the Old Town – ulica Długa, Ogarna, Chlebnicka, Mariacka, Św. Ducha and the Motława Embankment. However, even this was a compromise. While the structures that sprang up here suggest the buildings were rebuilt to the last detail, that is in actual fact a fallacy. The majority are in effect little more than socialist, utilitarian blocks that have been graced with fancy townhouse facades. Either way, ultimately two major aims were reached: the construction of quick, suitable housing, and the construction of a quarter that retained the atmosphere of a historic town centre.

It’s interesting to note that architects did use some semblance of artistic license. Reconstructed burgher houses once adorned with German motifs and mottos were given a Polish language makeover, while historic buildings that hadn’t been alive for hundreds of years were resurrected from the grave, and built once more to the designs detailed in recovered manuscripts and aging watercolours. By the same mark other buildings inexorably linked to German rule were condemned to memory; one such structure was the Danziger Hof on what is now Wały Jagielońskie. Designed by Karol Gause of Berlin this neo-renaissance masterpiece survives only in postcards, and a damn shame too. Built between 1896 and 1898 the 120-room hotel was the most prestigious in town, its quarters hosting the Tsarist prince Alexei, members of the Vanderbilt dynasty, Kaiser Wilhelm II and even the regional HQ of the British & Polish Trade Bank.

But history is a funny animal, and don’t bet on never seeing it again. The reconstruction of Gdańsk didn’t halt in the 50s, it simply took a break. The rebuilding of this city is very much an ongoing process, and you can bet a set of diamonds you haven’t seen an end of the jack hammers and scaffolds.