WARSAW — The reduction of Warsaw to a sea of rubble in World War II has been vividly reconstructed in a 3D film historians and computer graphics specialists showed for the first time in the city yesterday.
The destruction from 1939 to 1945 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 film, made after the war in Europe ended in 1945, shows a panorama of the bombed city, including the skeletons of bridges jutting from a quiet river, the empty walls of burned-out houses, and the Jewish ghetto totally flattened.
The goal of the film, which must be seen with 3D glasses, is to bring 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, said at a screening of the film, “City of Ruins.’’
“Nor were we, at the museum, fully aware of what the city looked like,’’ Oldakowski said.
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.
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 ended.
It reconstructs the route that Royal Air Force bombers took when bringing arms and supplies to the insurgency. The uprising began on Aug. 1, 1944, and the release of the film is timed to mark the 66th anniversary.
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