Pawiak Prison
A Gestapo prison that held 100,000 people — 37,000 of whom never left the building.
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Built 1829–35 on Peacock Street (ulica Pawia), Pawiak served tsarist Russia as central Poland's main prison before the German occupation turned it into a Gestapo detention centre. The numbers are stark: 37,000 people died on the premises through execution, torture, or detention; 60,000 more were transferred to Nazi concentration camps. Its co-designer, Fryderyk Florian Skarbek, was godfather to Frédéric Chopin. The prison was destroyed in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
What to look for
- The division between two wings: Pawiak (men) and Serbia (women), though Varsovians used Pawiak as the name for the entire complex
- The name origin — ulica Pawia means Peacock Street, making this a peacock-named place of immense suffering
- The designer credit: Skarbek was both a prison reformer and godfather to Chopin, and his descendant Krystyna Skarbek became Britain's first female special agent in WWII
The building was destroyed in 1944; the site on ulica Pawia in the former Warsaw Ghetto area now functions as a memorial.
Pawiak Prison is one of 36 sights worth the detour in Warsaw, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Warsaw pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Warsaw
- PGE Narodowy (Kazimierz Górski National Stadium)Poland's biggest football bowl hangs a retractable PVC roof from a central spire — when the mechanism works, it unfolds like a sail over 58,580 seats.
- Palace of Culture and ScienceStalin's skyscraper — Poles nicknamed it "elephant in lacy underwear" and never tore it down.
- Royal Castle in WarsawThe Nazis dynamited this building in 1944. Every room you walk through was rebuilt, stone by stone, between 1971 and 1984.
- Warsaw Old TownBombed flat in WWII and rebuilt from scratch — the world's first fully resurrected historic city core, now a UNESCO World Heritage site.
- National Museum in WarsawThe gallery that brought Nubian Christian art from a Sudanese cathedral to Warsaw.
- Wilanów PalaceBuilt for a warrior king while Poland still existed — and open as a museum since 1805.