Dan Cruickshank's Warsaw. "Resurrecting history"

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Art and architecture historian Dan Cruickshank tells the remarkable story of the renewal and rebuilding of Warsaw after the Second World War. For Dan, this is a very personal and moving story - the city was his childhood home during the 1950s and a place he thinks shaped him both as a man and as an architectural historian. By 1945 Warsaw had been reduced to rubble, with the worst of the devastation caused during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. It had always been part of Hitler's plan to destroy Warsaw. He wanted to replace it with a Nazi model city - an idea laid out in the Pabst Plan. But when the war ended something incredible happened. The people decided to reconstruct the Old Town, using old master paintings, among other things, as a guide. Starting with his own childhood memories, Dan reveals how these individuals came together to recreate their culture in the midst of a world torn apart by the competing ideologies of communism and capitalism.