3-D film shows WWII devastation of Warsaw
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In this still from the film "City of Ruins," the ruins of bridges on the Vistula River are seen in Warsaw in 1944 after the uprising.
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WARSAW, Poland -- The plane slowly descends from white clouds and sweeps over a panorama of a city destroyed by the Nazis: the skeletons of bombed bridges jutting from a quiet river, the empty walls of burned-out houses, the Jewish ghetto totally flattened.
It is Warsaw in the spring of 1945, just after World War II.
The sea of rubble that Warsaw was reduced to during the war is vividly reconstructed in a 3-D film that historians and computer graphics experts showed for the first time in Warsaw last Wednesday. The goal of the film, which must be seen with special 3-D glasses, is bringing home to a young generation the scope of the wartime devastation of Poland's capital.
"Young people do not understand what it means that Warsaw was in ruins; they think it was just a few collapsed houses," Jan Oldakowski, the director of the Warsaw Uprising Museum, told reporters at a screening of the film "City of Ruins."
"Nor were we, at the museum, fully aware of what the city looked like," he said.
The 1939-45 destruction was the result of bombings carried out by Nazi Germany, which invaded Poland in 1939 and occupied it for six years, killing millions of people. Most of the damage resulted from the German army's revenge for the city's 1944 uprising against its brutal rule.
The uprising failed after 63 days of an uneven struggle, but as one of Europe's most dramatic acts of resistance to Nazi rule remains an important element of Polish national identity. The heroism shown by the insurgents -- among them women and teenagers -- is a source of deep pride to this day.
Mr. Oldakowski said it took 40 specialists two years to make the five-minute 3D aerial view sequence, a simulation of an imaginary flight of a British Liberator bomber over the city right after the war in 1945.
First Published August 4, 2010 12:00 am
