One of the city’s most compelling museums, Warsaw Rising tells the story of the Polish underground and the 63-day resistance against the Germany occupation. It is an emotional and oddly inspiring experience and hugely recommended.
Warsaw Rising Museum
After nearly 5 years of Nazi occupation, the Polish underground resistance undertook a major operation to liberate Warsaw, through August and September of 1944. This engrossing museum, in a former power station, opened in 2004 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of this heroic struggle. It is an engrossing, inspiring, and emotional experience, and it’s safe to say that Warsaw Rising made the most enduring impression on me of all the museums in the city. This is largely thanks to the interesting decisions made in how the telling of this story.
Tours are available via Get Your Guide, often in combination with other excellent Warsaw museums. However, it should be noted that only official guides are allowed within the museum, and the experiences offered here will often only include tickets and an audio guide and not a personal guide to the museum. Check what is included before you book a place!
What To See In The Warsaw Rising Museum
Resistance fighter with a submachine gun
The Warsaw Rising Museum makes an excellent companion to both the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and, particularly, the Schindler Museum in Kraków. It has a similar design to the latter and both give a powerful account of the scale of the damage the German occupation did to Poland. I also somehow came away from both museums with something like hope, despite the utter wretchedness they portrayed.
This is a deceptively big museum, especially considering the core events it covers lasted only a matter of months. Events are covered in a clear, sequential narrative, spread over two main floors and a mezzanine, with a supplementary basement, which I interpreted as a wry piece of Polish humour – see below.
There are highlights, such as the Liberator Bomber in the main hall, and I found the Monument that runs up through the building to be very effective, but it is the cumulative experience that really counts here. The image that stays with me is of smiling resistance fighters.
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What To Expect When Visiting The Warsaw Rising Museum<
Warsaw Rising cafe terrace (and Warsaw Spire)
When you first enter the gate, you’ll find lockers to the left. You are required to leave larger bags in here.
Warsaw Rising Museum lockers
There is a large courtyard directly in front of you. The small building at the back is the ticket office and the museum entrance is to the right. If you’ve bought tickets in advance, you can just show them at the door.
There are grounds beyond the ticket office with various memorials and gallery space.
Warsaw Rising Museum courtyard
This is the cloakroom directly inside the entrance, complete with anti-Nazi graffiti, including the turtle, to symbolise work sabotage and deliberate inefficiency.
The quote above the door – “We wanted to be free and we owe this freedom to nobody” – is from Jan Stanisław Jankowski, a key figure in the resistance movement.
Warsaw Rising cloakroom
Carry on through the next door to enter the museum itself.
The exhibition is divided into five parts, as follows, with additional temporary exhibits and a short film.
Before The Rising
The first gallery takes up the right-side of the ground floor and covers the years of German occupation leading up to the start of the Warsaw Rising. It is divided into 13 sections.
This is what you see when you first enter. There is a timeline directly to the left, with the gift shop behind it, where you pick up audioguides. The toilets are downstairs to the right. The first part of the museum is about contextualising the Uprising.
Warsaw Rising entrance
To the right is the Little Insurgent’s Room, which examines the experience of children during the Uprising. It replicates a school room and has activities for young visitors to take part in. The walls have drawings by children, trying to make sense of the situation.
The Little Insurgent’s Room
The museum dramatises the damage done to Warsaw by the Nazis, and how German culture was imposed over the Polish, by renaming streets and introducing draconian laws. There are sections on the Warsaw Ghetto, including the Ghetto Uprising of 1943, and the Polish Underground government in exile.
Nazi destruction
A key feature of the museum is the Monument, which reaches up through the different floors and throbs with a loud heartbeat, resonating through the space. You can hear a collage of different sounds from the Uprising when you press your ear against it.
For me, the most interesting aspect of the museum is its insistence on what one section calls “Insurgents‘ Joy”. Even though the Uprising was crushed and the Nazis took an almost unthinkable revenge on Warsaw, the spirit of independence represented by the movement is a lifeforce that will ultimately outlive fascism. The reconstructed Warsaw of today is a manifestation of this. The photographs of smiling resistance fighters, proudly brandishing their guns, are incredibly moving.
The base of the Monument
This section of the museum ends with this clock, permanently at 5pm, known as the W Hour, when, on August 1, 1944, hundreds took to the street in coordinated attacks against the Germans and the Uprising began.
W Hour
From here, there is an elevator to the mezzanine, where the exhibition continues.
Fighting In August
The mezzanine focuses on the first month of the Uprising, when the insurgents initially take control of the city centre, the Old Town, Powiśle, Wola, and other parts of the Warsaw.
Syrenka – the symbol of Warsaw
A large part of this floor focuses on the weaponry used, such as the Błyskawica submachine gun, covertly produced by the Home Army, and more handmade equipment, such as the “beanbag grenade”.
Insurgency weaponry
The floor also looks at everyday life during the Uprising, with a focus on nurturing and protecting children: “Milk for children – they must survive”.
Life during wartime
The movement used every means of communication available, including producing newspapers and newsreels that were shown at the Kino Palladium – an incredible communal engagement under the circumstances.
Kino Palladium
The Nazis took swift revenge, systematically murdering up to 50,000 people from the 5th to 12th August, in what is known as the Wola Massacre, after the district in which the genocide took place. Unbelievably, the main perpetrator, Heinz Reinefarth, went on to have a successful post-war career in Germany, eventually becoming Mayor of Sylt.
Polish Red Cross exhumation documents of Wola massacre victims
The exhibition then moves down to the first floor, which covers the terrible events of September 1944 and beyond.
September And Surrender
The Uprising was supposed to be a temporary campaign, to coincide with the advance of the Red Army bringing in support. However, it appears that Stalin tactically delayed in order that the campaign fail. The Lublin–Brest offensive captured land to the east of the Vistula river but instead of advancing on Warsaw, efforts were put into securing bridgeheads instead.
The Lublin–Brest offensive
Members of the 1st Polish Army, known as Berling’s men, attempted to cross the Vistula river but incurred heavy losses. The Nazis began systematically destroying what remained of Warsaw. Here is the Prudential House being struck by artillery. The building is now the Hotel Warszawa.
Prudential House
Despite Allied airdrops, the resistance were locked into a grim war of attrition and running out of supplies. Defenders were evacuated through the sewers but often caught and transferred to concentration camps, or simply shot on sight.
Heavy losses
Despite the defeat of the Uprising, this part of the museum examines the pragmatism and fighting spirit of the campaign. There are rooms on secret communications and even a postal service. The space is cleverly designed to give a sense of guerilla warfare amongst the bombed out buildings.
City in ruins
Notice the Monument that continues up through the first floor of the museum.
The Monument
The first floor also includes a space for temporary exhibitions.
Liberator Hall
The museum then moves back down to the ground floor where the star is a full-size replica of a Liberator bomber that the Allies used to drop supplies to the insurgents.
Liberator bomber
The hall also features information about this outside help, as well as a temporary exhibition space.
Liberator Hall
There is a short 3D flyover of Warsaw after the Second World War. It is simply astonishing to compare this flattened landscape with the city you return to after you leave the museum.
City of Ruins
Finally, there is also a cinema space on the ground floor, showing documentary films, and a chapel.
Basement
Whereas many museums would make the Nazis the main characters, accidentally glamourising them, Warsaw Rising pushes them into the basement with a final gallery called Germans in Warsaw.
Germans in Warsaw
This presents a rogues’ gallery with details of the crimes they committed in the Polish capital they occupied.
Nazi criminals
The gallery is presented alongside a fun recreation of the Warsaw sewers that the resistance movement used for movement and communications. You can go into them to get an idea of what it was like to move through them.
I like to think the placement is deliberate, as an ironic comment that this is where the Nazis belong, the human effluent down amongst the sewers.
Warsaw sewers
After you have finished in the basement, you can see if the observation tower is open at the top of the building or hand your audioguide in and leave the museum.
Around the museum
The grounds of the museum are also interesting. There is a Wall of Remembrance, with the names of those killed during the Uprising. Movingly, most are also given their call signs or codenames, such as “Bigos” and “Motor”.
Wall of Remembrance
The Rose Garden includes artworks and photographs, including amazing portraits of the smiling freedom fighters.
The Rose Garden
This photo shows two boys with stacks of the underground newspaper. The resistance used every form of communication channel available.
Resistance newspaper distributors
There is a bunker and this replica of Kubuś, the improvised armoured vehicle, put together one in a car repair shop one week after the Uprising began.
Kubuś
Freedom Park, at the back of the museum, has a number of commemorations, including a fragment of the Prince Józef Poniatowski monument, that was blown up in December 1944. A new cast of the sculpture now sits in front of the Presidential Palace on Krakowskie Przedmiescie.
Fragment of the Józef Poniatowski monument
How To Visit The Warsaw Rising Museum
View of Warsaw Rising from Towarowa street
The museum is served by any of the Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego bus or tram stops on Towarowa, the main road parallel. The bus lines are 102, 105, and 190. The tram lines are 1, 11, 22, and 24. You can also get the 106 bus to the Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego stop on Grzybowska, or the Metro 2 line to Rondo Daszyńskiego Station – a 4-minute walk from the museum.
You can recognise the museum by the unique observation tower, marked with the symbol of the Polish underground, and the red brick buildings. The entrance is through a gate near the top of ul. Grzybowska. Signs on the walls point the way.
Warsaw Rising Museum address: ul. Grzybowska 79, Warsaw 00-844 Poland
The Warsaw Rising Museum is open as follows:
- Mon / Wed-Fri 8am-6pm
- Sat / Sun 10am-6pm
Last entry is 30 minutes before closing.
The museum is closed on Tuesdays, and on 1st / 6th January, Easter, Corpus Christi, 1st November, and 24th / 25th Dacember.
Tickets cost 30zł (concessions 25zł) and guided tours are available in English for 200zł – contact the museum to arrange. Children under 7 get free admission.
The museum is free on Mondays – just turn up at the ticket office on the day.
You can buy tickets in advance online. I found the interface pretty frustrating to use and recommend paying on the door instead. If you do buy online, tickets will be emailed to you as a PDF, which you can either print or show on your smartphone.
Muranów, Mirów, and Powązki Districts: To the north and to the west, these districts include two powerhouse Warsaw museums: The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and The Warsaw Rising Museum – both are exceptional and highly recommended. There are new restaurants popping up in these areas all the time, including SZUM, and you’ll find some budget hotels, such as the ibis Warszawa Centrum.
Tips For Visiting The Warsaw Rising Museum
Warsaw Rising retro cafe
- There are no time slots, so tickets can be used at any time for the day purchased.
- Expect to spend at least 3.5 hours in the museum – longer if you really want to do it justice.
- You can hire an excellent audioguide from the small gift shop as you enter. Though there is a fee of 10zł. Check the headphones before you leave, as mine didn’t work!
- This is a deceptively big – and very popular – museum, which gets pretty cramped in places. I was exhausted by the end. Wear comfortable clothes, with an upper layer you can remove. I found it quite warm. There are toilets just inside the museum and halfway through.
- Oddly the lockers are in the yard outside the building. They require a 5zł coin to use. There is also a cloakroom for coats directly inside the lobby.
- As with most museums in Warsaw, photography is allowed, though the use of flash and tripods are not. You are supposed to ask permission before filming.
- Although the museum’s subject matter won’t be appropriate to all children, there are sections that should be engaging. The Little Insurgent Room, early on, explores the experience of children during the Uprising, and has activities.
- The museum is accessible with lifts between floors. However, there are some cramped spaces and the floor is cobbled in places and there can be a big queue for the elevator. The official website has a small explanation of the museum’s accessibility features.
- There is a splendid cafe halfway through the museum, which is modelled on Pół Czarnej, an actual Warsaw café popular with artists during the occupation. There is also a courtyard cafe during the summer.
- There is a small gift shop, just inside the main entrance to the museum, selling books, as well as some excellent t-shirts and posters, and some items aimed at kids.
- You can use cash, card, or contactless in the museum.

Where Is This Place Located?
Find this location on the Warsaw Visit Google map:- Open the Warsaw Visit map
- Click on a marker and it will give you the name of the landmark, with a brief description and links for more information and directions. You can pan, scroll, and zoom around the map, or use the + or – buttons in the bottom left of the map to zoom in and out
- You will see the list of places on the left hand side, sorted by category. Scroll down or use the map search (the magnifying glass icon) to find the place you want
- Click the name of the place in the list. Its location pin will be highlighted on the map.
- Each category is on a different layer, which can be switched on and off. So you can just see the Hotel or Restaurant pins, for example
- If you are using the map on your phone, open the map and then search for the name of the place. The map will then zoom in on its location
Map pins are color coded:
- YELLOW: Warsaw Sightseeing
- BLUE: Warsaw Hotels
- RED: Warsaw Places To Eat – Michelin restaurants are DARK RED
- ORANGE: Warsaw Nightlife
- PURPLE: Shopping In Warsaw
- GREEN: Warsaw Transportation
Start Planning Your Warsaw Trip Now!
:: Get to know Warsaw with a professional guided tour – Get Your Guide has a large range of activities, including harbour tours and day trips.
:: Find available Warsaw hotels on Booking.com – you can usually reserve with no upfront payment. Pay when you check out and, if necessary, cancel for free.
:: Find Warsaw flights with 12go - a single search shows times and prices from all available airlines for your trip, saving you time and money.
:: An airport transfer is the hassle-free way to arrive. A driver will meet you in Arrivals and take you direct to your hotel.
:: World Nomads offers simple and flexible travel insurance. Buy at home or while traveling and claim online from anywhere in the world.