Saska Kępa

This guide to Saska Kepa in Warsaw follows architect Lucjan Korngold, who in the 1930s designed a sleek modernist villa on Francuska Street for a rising automobile executive, part of a wave of bold interwar houses built across this riverside district. It traces what happened when Germany invaded in 1939 and Korngold, who was Jewish, fled Warsaw for Sao Paulo, leaving the villa behind. The neighborhood sits across the river from central Warsaw, on the far side from the fighting of the 1944 uprising.