Wrocław Reborn

After being decimated in World War II, this Polish city has risen from the ashes. On a quest for family roots, Laura Moser discovers a vital cultural crossroads.

-  Laura Moser

I WENT TO WROCŁAW, POLAND, in search of my grandfather, who was born and grew up there, back when this picturesque city on the Oder River was Breslau, Germany. With a list of his old addresses culled from the scattering of papers he'd left behind, I tried to track down his former homes. But the German street names had long since been changed to Polish, and the few buildings I was able to locate were all modern.

I probably shouldn't have been surprised by the frustrations of my genealogical hunt. Though Breslauunlike other German cities like Cologne and Hamburgmade it through the first five years of World War II remarkably intact, a Soviet bombing campaign from January to May 1945 left 80 percent of the city in ruins.

"We say only eighty percent," Rafal Dutkiewicz, Wrocław's mayor from 2002 to 2018, told me at the rooftop restaurant of the Hotel Monopol Wrocław (doubles from $177), "because Warsaw was ninety percent destroyed."

He gestured out at the pastel façades of the Neo-Baroque buildings beneath us. The Hotel Monopol-from whose balcony Adolf Hitler once spoke, and where luminaries like Marlene Dietrich and Pablo Picasso once stayed-was among the 20 percent of buildings that survived. These structures are rare enough that locals point them out, though casual visitors would struggle to differentiate between them and those that have been artfully reconstructed, often according to the original plans.