What Was Destroyed Did Not Vanish

When I visited the Royal Castle in Warsaw, I was struck by the sheer improbability of it. Walking through its rooms, I saw gilded ceilings, frescoes, and polished parquet floors that looked entirely authentic. It was hard to believe that almost everything I was seeing had been reconstructed after the Second World War.My father was born in 1916 in Kamyk, a village near Częstochowa. At the time, Poland did not exist as an independent country. It had been partitioned by neighboring powers more than a century earlier and would not regain its independence until 1918, two years after his birth.The Royal Castle was one of the great symbols of that independence. For centuries it served as the seat of Polish kings and government. Most famously, it was here in 1791 that the Constitution of May 3 was adopted, often described as Europe's first modern written constitution.That history nearly came to an end during the war. After invading Poland in 1939, the Germans damaged and looted the castle.…