Warsaw for World War II enthusiasts – private tour with hotel pickup

Begin your private tour in central Warsaw, where the scars of the Second World War are still woven into the cityscape. The Żuk retro minibus allows you to comfortably cover a variety of locations while maintaining a clear historical narrative.

Your guide will introduce the political climate of the late 1930s, the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and the simultaneous Soviet occupation of eastern Poland. Learn how these events shaped life in Warsaw and led to the emergence of an extensive resistance movement.

A central chapter in the history of the Second World War in Poland is the tragedy of the Jewish population, persecuted and murdered by Nazi Germany. Before the war, around three million Jews lived in Poland, approximately 300,000 of them in Warsaw. In 1940, the Nazis established the Warsaw Ghetto, where almost half a million people were forcibly confined.
Today, several fragments of the former ghetto wall remain hidden between buildings and along pre-war plots. Your guide will take you to one of these preserved sections and help you understand how the ghetto’s boundaries once divided the city and shaped daily life during the occupation.

In 1941, the ghetto was divided into two parts by Chłodna Street, which was used for east-west transit.
A wooden footbridge was built near the intersection of Chłodna and Żelazna Streets to connect the two parts. It reached the building’s third floor, allowing “Aryan” trams, German military transport vehicles, and cars to pass underneath, as we can see in many photographs.

The tenement house on Waliców Street is, as we say, the last ghost of the ghetto, as it remains a ruin to this day. A fragment of the ghetto wall has also been preserved at the same location.

The next stop is the Muranów district. Here too, the first impression is that it is simply an ordinary neighborhood filled with square apartment blocks. But with the help of a guide, there is much more from the past to discover.

The tour includes a visit to the area around the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes and the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews—two important symbolic sites connected with the Warsaw Ghetto. Both are located near the place where the first armed clashes of the 1943 Ghetto Uprising took place. Today, the area also represents decades of dialogue, remembrance, and reconciliation between Polish, Jewish, and German communities.

On September 17, 1939, two weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe, Poland was attacked by the Soviet Union, and the eastern part of our country was lost forever. After the fall of the USSR, the Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East was erected in honor of Poles deported to the gulags in Siberia, killed in executions, and victims of the Katyń massacres.

The final chapter concerns the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, the city’s last attempt to regain its independence before the arrival of the Red Army. After the uprising’s defeat, Nazi forces systematically destroyed most of Warsaw. The Soviet army entered the empty ruins in January 1945, beginning a new era of communist rule.