Meet your guide In front of the Museum of the Second World War.

The main exhibition is an epic, comprehensive, clear and sombre retelling occupying 20 rooms lying on either side of the long corridor axis, which itself contains displays of everyday life during the war. From the first room with a semi-circular screen showing the rise of totalitarian regimes across Europe, everything is legible and meticulously researched and presented. The entire story of the war in Poland, across Europe and beyond, is conveyed at the geopolitical, the military and the personal levels, and the objects it contains range from Stalin’s pipe to a Sherman tank via Enigma machine. Onto the exhibition and you begin by learning about the background to the war. In the case of Danzig, it is unquestionably linked to the conclusion of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, which resulted in the city being left in a political limbo, governed neither by the newly recreated state of Poland nor by Germany who had governed Poland in the 146 years previously following partition.