Wzgórza z gruzu: the rubble hills of post-war Wrocław

Just off Ślężna in Wrocław, between the University of Economics and Aquapark, is a strange topographical feature that rises 140 metres above sea level in a city that's otherwise very flat. Wzgórze Andersa is laid out in four tiers, has a kind of parkour gym near the bottom, a pump track at the top, and when you get up close you can tell that the entire hill is formed of millions of broken bricks.

If you understand anything of the history of Wrocław it won't take you long to figure out how the bricks got there. It's been estimated that Breslau, as Wrocław was known during Prussian and German rule, had been reduced to almost 18 million cubic metres of rubble by May 1945, the result of several months of aerial and artillery bombardment followed by intense street fighting. 70% of the city was damaged, and entire streets in what's now the Grunwaldzki district were demolished to build an airstrip intended to supply the city during the impending Siege of Breslau. Only a couple of aircraft ever landed there as the Soviet Air Forces quickly achieved air superiority.

In order to reconstruct the city, vast quantities of rubble and unsalvageable building materials had to be disposed of, with some being used to form huge artificial hills in the worst-damaged districts south of the river. The rubble hill in the Gaj district (Wzgórze Gajowe) appears to be the biggest in the city, according to the hypsometric map on the Spatial Information System of Wrocław Municipality website. However, it's worth bearing in mind that these hills are easily confused with city defenses (including bastions) and landfill sites (Wzgórza Maślickie i Gajowickie).

The hill off Ślężna is located just a few city blocks from Charlottenstraße/ul. Krucza, where my grandfather and his family lived in a tenement building devastated during the Battle of Breslau and subsequently demolished after the war. I'm confident that many of the bricks used to construct Charlottenstraße 22 are somewhere in the midst of that huge pile.

It's also likely that some of the bricks made their way to Warsaw, as part of the "Bricks for Warsaw" programme that compelled battle-scarred western Polish cities to give up their salvageable building materials so they could be used to help reconstruct buildings in the capital. Wrocław, for example, was instructed to supply 150 million bricks a year, with citizens mobilised to contribute to the cause and organised into labour brigades. Warsaw's famous Barbican was reconstructed almost entirely from bricks transported from Wrocław and Nysa. Buildings that were ultimately repairable were razed, and even buildings that had already been repaired and were habitable. Entire streets of barely damaged buildings in Szczecin were levelled in order to satisfy Warsaw's thirst for bricks.

Warsaw's old town never looked so good, but you have to wonder to what extent this effort diminished the cultural and architectural heritage of the rest of the country.

I've included photographs in this post by Krystyna Gorazdowska and Ewa Faryaszewska, two remarkable photographers who made work during the Second World War and whose stories remain little known outside Poland. In the future I'll be publishing short profiles of their lives and work, and to introduce a regular series here devoted to lesser-known photographers whose work I find compelling, or who, despite their relative obscurity, have exerted some influence on historical photographic practice.