Four Writers in Search of NEW CITIES

They've seen London, and most of France, but they wanted places they didn't know, or ones ready to be discovered anew. You too?

- BY KLARA GLOWCZEWSKA

The Warsaw Crescendo

"You're going to hate it," a friend in Warsaw told me last November, as I headed out one afternoon for the soft opening of the city's new museum of modern art (MSN in Polish, for Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej). "It's a box. And not even an interesting box." Be that as it may, the museum was 10 years in the making, and anticipation in town was running high. It was time to take a look at what was happening on Plac Defilad (Parade Square).

I was born in Warsaw and lived here as a young child. I emigrated with my parents, Lenta and Jerzy, in the 1960s, at a time when Poland's Soviet-controlled government was rigid and repressive, censorship was strong, and police surveillance pervasive. (I was way too young to be aware of it then, but I heard plenty in later years—of middle-of-the-night secret service searches in our apartment, of my grandmother’s nine-month imprisonment without charges, of the difficulty in obtaining passports.)

My father, Jerzy Glowczewski, a fighter pilot during World War II, had come back to Poland in 1947, despite the Sovietization in progress, to study architecture and help in Warsaw's rebuilding. His early work on the reconstruction of the city’s Old Town, and his designs for several modern industrial buildings, caught the attention of the Ford Foundation, which offered him a five-month scholarship in the U.S. After which came an offer to teach at North Carolina State University’s College of Design—and to bring his family to Raleigh. I returned to Poland for the first time for a visit at 17 and have continued to come back, sporadically, for decades—for the pleasures of familiar streets, for the language and the culture, and, always, to see how Warsaw is changing.