在去华沙之前，我对这座城市了解甚少，只知道它是波兰的首都。我当时并不知道，华沙的许多现代建筑，包括其美丽的历史中心，都是在第二次世界大战后重建的。
Before I went to Warsaw, I knew little of the city beyond the fact that it was Poland’s capital. I had not realised that much of present-day Warsaw, including its beautiful historic centre, was rebuilt after World War II.
华沙在战争期间的毁灭不仅仅是战斗的后果，更是纳粹德国占领者蓄意实施的破坏行为——他们的目的是彻底摧毁这座城市。1944年8月，华沙起义爆发了：这是华沙地下抵抗组织发起的一场武装反抗运动，旨在解放华沙。德国军队竭力镇压这场起义，并对华沙进行了持续不断的轰炸。
Warsaw’s wartime destruction was not merely the consequence of battle, but a deliberate campaign by its Nazi German occupiers to erase much of the city. In August 1944, the Warsaw Uprising – a Polish armed revolt by the city’s underground resistance against German occupation – began with the aim of liberating Warsaw. German forces fought to crush it, subjecting the city to sustained bombardment.
起义在持续九周后被最终镇压，幸存下来的居民被驱逐出境，数以万计的波兰人被送往集中营。这座被清空的城市随后遭到了系统的破坏：德国的拆毁部队四处破坏或炸毁了那些在战斗中幸存下来的建筑物。教堂、宫殿、学校、剧院、图书馆以及历史遗迹都变成了废墟。
When the uprising was finally suppressed after nine weeks, the surviving population was expelled, with tens of thousands of Poles sent to concentration camps. The emptied city was then systematically destroyed. German demolition units moved through Warsaw, wrecking or blowing up buildings that had survived the fighting. Churches, palaces, schools, theatres, libraries and historic monuments were reduced to rubble.
到1945年1月，华沙近90%的建筑物已被摧毁。文化上的损失尤为惨重：那些保存了数百年波兰手稿、书籍、地图等珍贵资料的图书馆被蓄意焚毁，无数艺术品和历史文献也消失了。华沙沦为了一片废墟，其历史中心只剩下一片熊熊燃烧的废墟堆。
By January 1945, almost 90 per cent of the city’s buildings had been destroyed. The cultural losses were particularly devastating. Libraries containing centuries of Polish manuscripts, books, maps and other collections were deliberately burned, while countless works of art and historical records vanished. Warsaw was left in ruins, its historic centre a smouldering pile of debris.
这场破坏行为背后隐藏着一种令人难以理解的冷酷与无情。阿道夫·希特勒与海因里希·希姆莱针对华沙下达的命令，堪称战争期间最令人毛骨悚然的文件之一；该命令明确指出：“华沙的每一个公民——无论男女老少——都必须被杀死；华沙必须被彻底摧毁，以此向整个欧洲树立一个可怕的警示。”然而，华沙人民并未屈服。在德国投降、战争结束后的几十年里，华沙人民依靠照片、图纸、幸存的记录甚至绘画作品，开始了艰苦的重建工作，努力恢复被毁掉的一切。在战后物资匮乏的年代，他们本可以选择清除废墟后用钢铁和混凝土重建城市（这无疑会更容易、也更经济），但他们却选择了重建那些被摧毁的文化遗产这一更为艰巨的任务。
The destruction was driven by a calculated ruthlessness that remains difficult to comprehend. Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler’s Order for Warsaw, which stands among the war’s most chilling documents, reads: “Every citizen of Warsaw is to be killed including men, women and children. Warsaw has to be levelled to the ground in order to set a terrifying example to the rest of Europe.” Yet Warsaw was unbowed. In the decades after the German surrender and the end of the war, the city undertook an extraordinary reconstruction, drawing on photographs, plans, surviving records and even paintings to restore much of what had been lost. In the lean post-war years, the Poles could have cleared the rubble and built anew in steel and concrete, which would have been an easier, cheaper option. Instead, they chose the far more arduous task of reconstructing what had been destroyed.
如今，华沙重建后的历史中心已被联合国教科文组织列为世界遗产，这一成就被誉为文化遗产保护方面的典范，同时也是民族韧性的象征。
Today, Warsaw’s rebuilt historic centre is a Unesco World Heritage site, recognised as an exceptional achievement in the restoration of lost cultural heritage and a powerful symbol of national resilience.
华沙并非第一个遭遇毁灭性打击、其历史记忆面临消失威胁的伟大城市。早在2000多年前，秦朝的首都咸阳也曾遭遇过类似的灾难。公元前206年，军阀项羽攻陷秦朝后下令纵火烧毁了咸阳。这场持续了三个月的大火不仅摧毁了众多宫殿和建筑，还毁掉了中国统一前几个世纪积累下来的大量知识财富。
Warsaw was not the first great city whose destruction threatened to erase a people’s memory. More than 2,000 years earlier, a similar catastrophe unfolded at Xianyang, the capital of the Qin dynasty. When the warlord Xiang Yu vanquished the Qin in 206BC, he set Xianyang ablaze. The fire, which burned for three months, consumed far more than palaces and buildings; it also destroyed a vast store of knowledge from the centuries before China’s imperial unification.
秦始皇作为秦朝的第一位皇帝，因焚书而臭名昭著；然而，一些重要的文献还是被保存了下来。尽管普通民众被禁止拥有书籍，但医学、农业和哲学方面的著作仍被保存在秦朝的宫殿图书馆中。这些文献不仅仅是书籍，更是整个文明的智慧结晶。当咸阳被焚毁时，这些珍贵的文化遗产也随之消失了。
Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the Qin, is remembered for his burning of books, yet important texts had survived. While the general population was prohibited from owning books, works on medicine, agriculture and philosophy were preserved in the libraries of the Qin palaces. These collections were more than books: they were a civilisation’s intellectual memory. When Xianyang burned, these works disappeared with it.
这场大火还烧毁了秦朝征服地区的大量官方档案，包括记载了数百年历史的编年史、地图以及行政文件。由于这些第一手资料被毁，后人只能通过零星的残片和人们的回忆来重建中国古代的许多历史事件。
The conflagration also consumed official records from the states conquered by Qin – chronicles, maps and administrative documents recording centuries of history. With these first-hand sources gone, later generations were left to reconstruct much of China’s ancient history from fragments and recollections.
无论是2000多年前由项羽及其部下引发的火灾，还是1944年纳粹对华沙的蓄意破坏，人类肆意破坏他人财产的行为至今仍未减弱。借用波兰作家约瑟夫·康拉德小说的标题来说，这种“黑暗的力量”依然在世界上挥舞着它的恶意阴影。
Whether it was the fire lit by Xiang Yu and his men more than 2,000 years ago or the Nazis’ methodical destruction of Warsaw in 1944, the human capacity for senseless destruction remains undiminished. This heart of darkness – to borrow the title of Polish-born writer Joseph Conrad’s novel – continues to cast its malignant shadow over the world. By Wee Kek Koon