Ten days in Poland: Kraków to the Baltic, and the century in between

Land, drop the bags and walk to the square. It is 200 metres on each side, set out in one plan after the Tatars burned the city in 1241, and the first sight of it is worth arranging: come in from a side street rather than a boulevard so that it opens all at once.

Do the church first, because it closes to visitors in the late afternoon. Veit Stoss spent twelve years carving the altarpiece inside and the wings are opened late each morning. On the hour a trumpeter plays from the taller of the two towers and breaks off mid-phrase, in memory of one who was shot through the throat sounding the alarm.

Then the long trading hall down the middle of the square, and then a table. Kraków eats late. The first evening is for sitting outside rather than planning the rest.

Walk the old royal route south to the hill. Wawel has been fortified for as long as there are records, and the castle on top housed Polish kings until the court moved to Warsaw at the end of the sixteenth century. The courtyard and the grounds cost nothing; the state rooms, the armoury and the treasury are separate timed tickets sold in limited numbers, so get there early or accept that you will not see all of them.

The cathedral needs an hour on its own. Every Polish monarch of consequence is buried under it, along with poets and generals, and the chapel with the gilded dome on the south side is the finest Renaissance building in the country. Karol Wojtyła said his first mass here in November 1946.

In the afternoon carry on south into Kazimierz. It was a separate town from 1335 until 1800, it was emptied in 1941, and it was left to fall apart until the 1990s. Now half of it is restored synagogues and museums and the other half is the best bar district in Poland, which is a strange combination and works better than it sounds.

Leave early. Buses and minibuses run from the terminal beside the main station and take about ninety minutes; organised tours pick up in the old town, cost more, and remove all the arrangements. Entry is free and the timed slots are limited, and for most of the day a guided tour is compulsory, so this has to be booked in advance.

Auschwitz I is the smaller site and where the exhibitions are: the brick blocks of a requisitioned Polish army barracks, the confiscated belongings, the punishment cells, the wall where several thousand people were shot, and the one surviving gas chamber, rebuilt after the war to its wartime layout with a sign inside saying so.

A shuttle runs the three kilometres to Birkenau. What is there is mostly absence: the gate, the rail spur, the ramp, one row of surviving barracks, and then rows of chimneys with nothing between them running to the horizon. The four crematoria at the far end are heaps of concrete, blown up by the SS in the last weeks. The distance is the thing you have to walk to understand.

Take a late morning train. A little over two hours through flat farmland and pine, and you are in the middle of Warsaw by lunchtime with the whole afternoon left.

Start at Castle Square at the top of the old royal route. The castle was dynamited in 1944 and left as a hole in the ground until the 1970s, when it was rebuilt largely on public donations posted in from all over the country and from abroad. Some of the interiors are original fittings that had been carried out and hidden; some are educated guesswork; the museum tells you which is which.

Then walk into the old town itself, which is smaller than you expect and entirely a reconstruction of the 1950s, put back on the original plan using surviving fragments, photographs and Bellotto's painted views of the city in the 1770s. UNESCO listed it in 1980 as a statement about what reconstruction can be. Sit on the sunny side of the square and remember that all of it was brick dust in 1945.

Go west to Wola early. The Warsaw Rising Museum, in a converted tram power station, is about the insurrection that began on 1 August 1944, lasted 63 days, and was followed by the deliberate demolition of what was left of the city. It is loud, dense and heavy on film, it assumes you know nothing, and it is the single thing most likely to change how you see this place.

Walk back east through streets that were the ghetto. There is nothing standing to see, which is the point: the Germans sealed the district in 1940, the fighting there ended in 1943, and the buildings were pulled down block by block afterwards. Two fragments of the wall survive in courtyards, with plaques.

End up the tower. The observation deck is on the thirtieth floor of Stalin's gift to the city, a building Warsaw has never decided whether to love, and the view from it is the only one in town without the thing itself in the middle of it.

POLIN stands on the ground where the ghetto was, facing the monument to the 1943 uprising, and it is not a Holocaust museum. It runs a thousand years of Jewish life in Poland forwards, through the market towns, the printing houses, the arguments and the politics, so that by the time the twentieth century arrives you know exactly what is being destroyed. Timed entry, so buy online, and take the audio guide.

Then get on a bus south and change the subject entirely. Łazienki was the private park of Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last king of Poland, and it is 76 hectares of lakes, follies and eighteenth century garden buildings with peacocks walking about as though they own it.

The little palace standing in the water was his summer house and is the best thing in the park. On summer Sundays there are free Chopin recitals under the monument at the northern end, at noon and again at four, and half the city sits on the grass for them.

The second leg is two and three quarter hours, and the country changes on the way: flat and forested for most of it, then the land opens out and you are on the coast.

Walk straight into the old town from the station, fifteen minutes, and take the main street from the landward gates down to the water. It takes ten minutes at a normal pace and an hour at the pace everybody actually walks it, because no two house fronts on it are the same and almost all of them are reconstructions of something specific.

The town hall halfway down has the best view in the city from its tower and a council chamber whose gilded ceiling was carried out and hidden before the bombing. At the bottom, the gate opens onto the river and the crane, a wooden hoist between two brick towers that was lifting masts when this was one of the busiest ports in Europe. Eat on the far bank looking back at the gables.

Fifteen minutes north of the old town the scale changes completely. The shipyard gate is still standing, with the twenty-one demands the strike committee posted on it in August 1980, and beside it a building faced in rusted steel holds the museum of what happened next: the strike, the sixteen months of legal Solidarity, martial law, the underground years and the round table of 1989. Go up to the roof afterwards and look over the cranes; that part costs nothing.

In front of the gate stand three steel crosses with anchors on them, put up in 1980 for the workers shot here in 1970 and the first monument in the eastern bloc to victims of a communist government.

Then south to the war museum, which is almost entirely underground beneath a leaning glass shaft. It opened in 2017 and tells the war from the civilian side, which was a deliberate choice and one that started an argument reaching all the way to the government. Three hours is a minimum.

Start with the church, which is among the largest brick buildings of its kind anywhere and holds a crowd of twenty thousand. It is plain inside, whitewashed and enormous, with an astronomical clock of 1464 whose figures parade in the last minutes before midday. The tower is a long climb and the view from it is honestly no better than the town hall's, so save your legs unless you collect towers.

Then take a boat. Water trams leave from the waterfront by the crane and run down the harbour past the shipyard, the container cranes and a brick fortress at the bend, which is forty-five minutes of working port and far more interesting than the bus.

At the end is the spit where the shooting started on 1 September 1939. Around 180 Polish soldiers held it for seven days against a battleship and repeated assaults. There is very little to look at now, a few smashed bunkers and a monument on a mound, and it is worth going anyway, which is true of most places where something began.

Do Mariacka before the shops open properly. It runs from the water up to the church and every house on it has a raised stone terrace out front, with steps and an iron gargoyle waterspout, which is what a Gdańsk merchant's front garden looked like. This is the one street the rebuild got completely right, and it is also where to buy amber if you are buying any: warm to the touch, light in the hand, and ask whether it is solid or pressed.

Then the guild hall a few doors up the main street, five minutes away and half an hour inside. The guilds and the patrician brotherhoods met, drank and did business in it through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, under a tiled stove the height of the room.

The airport is forty minutes out by bus, and the train south to Warsaw takes under three hours. Either way you leave from a city that has changed hands more often than any other on this trip and has been rebuilt every time in the same shape.