Westerplatte

At 4:48am on 1 September 1939, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish military transit depot at Westerplatte, a spit of land guarding Gdańsk harbour — the opening salvo of the Second World War. A garrison of around 200 Poles, expected to hold for twelve hours, resisted the German assault for seven days under aerial bombing and naval shelling before surrendering. Their stand became a symbol of Polish defiance, immortalised in the wartime slogan and later in Gałczyński's poem imagining the fallen defenders marching into heaven. A towering monument and the ruined guardhouse now mark the site where the war that killed some 60 million people began.