On this day in 1945, the Soviet forces under Marshal Ivan Konev liberated Cracow from Nazi Occupation. Marshal Konev took the Germans by surprise by attacking from the North West, not, as the Germans had expected, from the East.
It has become a part of Cracow lore that the Nazis had planned to dynamite the city's most distinctive landmarks. 'Cracow, an ancient German City,' spoke Hans Frank at the last session of the GeneralGouvernement, 'can never be lost for Germans,' he said of Poland's former Royal Capital.
As it was, the Soviets took the fighting away from the city, and although the Debniki bridge was destroyed, the majority of Cracow's buildings survived. Thus Cracow escaped the fate of Warsaw, 90% of which was dynamited by the Nazis.
The Winter of 1945 was an especially bitter one. Reports describe the Vistula River as frozen thick with ice and it's surface littered with the bodies of dead soldiers. The ice was so thick that even tanks were able to move over the river's surface.
The Soviets were initially welcomed by the Cracovians. However, these sentiments were relatively short-lived.
Fifty years later, when the Russian backed Communist party was eventually removed from power, the Cracovian monument of Marshal Konev was taken down. Meanwhile, a wooden cross was erected at the foot of the Royal Castle in memory of Katyn, the war-time Soviet action that eradicated thousands of the Polish officer class.
Now that the headiness of the 1989 liberation has passed, many Poles, even patriotic ones, feel that the Konev monument was too quick to go. 'It should be there so that people can make up there own minds about it,' says Marta Urbanska, an architect living in Cracow whose own grandfather was murdered by the Russian NKVD. 'The young Soviet soldiers who fell were forced to fight - they had no choice.'
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