I visited my grandfather’s resurrected Polish hometown, which was destroyed in World War II – this is what I found

I traveled to Wroclaw, Poland, to search for my grandfather, who was born and raised there when this picturesque city on the Oder was still called Breslau. Using a list of his old addresses, compiled from the scattered papers he left behind, I tried to locate his former residences. But the German street names had long since been changed to Polish ones, and the few buildings I could find were all modern.

The frustrations of my genealogical search probably shouldn’t have surprised me. Although Breslau survived the first five years of World War II remarkably unscathed – unlike other German cities such as Cologne and Hamburg – a Soviet bombing raid from January to May 1945 left 80 percent of the city in ruins.

“We say only eighty percent,” Rafal Dutkiewicz, Wroclaw’s mayor from 2002 to 2018, told me in the rooftop restaurant of the Hotel Monopol Wrocław, “because Warsaw was ninety percent destroyed.”

He pointed to the pastel-colored facades of the neo-baroque buildings below us. The Hotel Monopol – whose balcony Adolf Hitler once spoke of and where celebrities such as Marlene Dietrich and Pablo Picasso once stayed – was among the 20 percent of buildings that survived. These buildings are so rare that locals point them out, although casual visitors would have trouble distinguishing them from those that have been artfully reconstructed, often from the original plans.

It must be said, however, that Breslau’s destruction was by no means inevitable. It depended entirely on Hitler’s decision in late 1944 to declare the city “Fortress Breslau,” the last German stronghold to be defended at all costs against the advancing Soviets. For this reason, after serving as a refuge for people fleeing areas of more intense conflict for most of the war, Breslau was razed to the ground by bombs and tanks in the first months of 1945. This, combined with bloody street fighting, claimed the lives of tens of thousands of civilians. Hitler’s command in Breslau held out until three days before Germany’s unconditional surrender to the Soviets.

My grandfather, who was living far away in Houston at the time, would never see his hometown again, but I often wondered what he thought of the unrest that continued to rock the region even after the war. In July 1945, at Joseph Stalin’s behest, the city was renamed overnight from German to Polish, and ethnic Poles from Lwów, now Lviv in Ukraine, were expelled from their homes and resettled in the city, which was renamed Breslau. The more than 600,000 Germans living in what had been Breslau were expelled westward.

No wonder my grandfather’s ghost was hard to find in such a place. I had hoped to see him in Salt Market Square, outside the melon-coloured palazzo of the Old Stock Exchange – one of the few original buildings still standing – where his father traded grain a century ago. Today he looms behind a 24-hour flower market.

On my first night in the city, I sat on a bench in front of the Spiż microbrewery and enjoy an IPA. (Wroclaw has no shortage of microbreweries, kombuchas, cold brew coffee, and vegan/gluten-free/low-carb menu options.) I marveled at the somehow harmonious layering of past and present that surrounded me. Once a major trading post at the intersection of the Silk and Amber Roads, what is now a thoroughly Polish city has been ruled by Bohemians, Habsburgs, Prussians, Nazis, and Communists over the centuries. And it’s this fusion of cultures and influences that makes Wroclaw, the country’s fourth-largest city and one of the fastest-growing cities in the European Union, seem so magical today. Cross the Oder here—Wroclaw, the so-called “Polish Venice,” has more than a hundred bridges—and you’re in Prague; walk through this gate and you’re in Vienna. Down this street, the towering red-brick post office is a reminder of the Weimar Republic. Looking northeast, you will see “Manhattan,” a brutalist complex of commercial and residential skyscrapers typical of Iron Curtain-era architecture.

After my beer, I continued my exploration of the Rynek, the city’s pastel-colored central market square built around a late-13th-century Gothic town hall. In what I consider a typically Polish fashion, I ordered a plate of pierogi at the upscale Pierogarnia. Over the course of the evening, I saw a Hare Krishna procession, a woman juggling fire sticks, a man riding a unicycle on a tightrope, and a small protest against oppression in neighboring Belarus.

I spent the next few days on cultural excursions along the Oder, including the Wroclaw National Museum, an ivy-covered former German city building that houses one of the country’s largest collections of contemporary Polish art, and Hydropolis, a “water knowledge center” with educational exhibitions. The rest of the time was spent enjoying almost exclusively fine meals.

That was perhaps the biggest surprise of all for me: the consistent excellence of Wroclaw cuisine. There was the trout risotto at La Maddalena, from where you have a breathtaking view over the Oder to the (reconstructed) yellow facade of the university where my grandfather graduated in law in 1921. There were poached eggs with chili butter and dill in the dinette, followed by beetroot salad at Mleczarina, in the courtyard opposite the recently restored White Stork Synagogue, the only synagogue in the city to survive Kristallnacht. And of course, I can’t forget to mention the sunflower pie and flaky cod at Restauracja Tarasowa., a restaurant using only local ingredients, located in the centre of the Centennial Hall complex in Wroclaw, which also includes a huge multimedia fountain that hosts wild water and light shows in the summer.

On my last night in Wroclaw, I wandered down a lane full of galleries and artists’ studios to the Neon Side Gallery at Ruska 46, a dead-end street decorated with salvaged neon signs from disused cinemas, hotels and industrial plants, and which also has (of course) a charming bar, Recepcja. After that, I took a long walk back to the river, past dozens of kitschy bronze gnomes—the city has 600 of them and counting—commemorating the Orange Alternative, the Wroclaw-born opposition movement that helped bring down communism in the 1980s. I ended my evening on Ostrów Tumski, the “Cathedral Island,” which has been inhabited for more than a thousand years. On any given evening, one might see groups of nuns watching the sun sink into the river, young seminarians strolling past the rebuilt 13th-century Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, or locals enjoying yet another first-class riverside meal, this time of New Polish cuisine at Lwia Brama.

The Cathedral Island is also home to the city’s best new luxury hotel, the Bridge Wrocław, which offers beautiful river views and (get ready for it) first-class food. The Art Hotel, a popular meeting place in the Old Town, is housed in a converted tenement building, parts of which have survived since the 14th century. Across the street is the medieval Meat Market, which, like so much of Wroclaw today, is a collection of small galleries and craft shops. Look closely and you’ll spot statues commemorating the animals that were slaughtered there over the centuries.

What would my grandfather, dead for more than half a century, have thought of his hometown, which has undergone so many tectonic changes? An impossible speculation, I accepted that early on. He is dead now, and so is his town; even his father’s gravestone in the New Jewish Cemetery has long since disappeared. But that’s just how history works – and nowhere is it more evident than at this tortured crossroads of Europe. It razes, rebuilds, and paves over everything that was before. Sometimes there is continuity, sometimes a break. But in Wroclaw, a difficult past has finally given way to a place that feels thoroughly like the future.

A version of this story first appeared in the June 2024 issue of Travel + Leisure under the heading “Wroclaw Reborn”.”