Polish underground fighters seized the building, which Varsovians traditionally call the Pasta tower, after 20 days of ferocious fighting during the Warsaw Uprising, the bloody 1944 revolt against Nazi German occupation.

The victory by the Poles resulted in the surrender of 115 German soldiers and the capture of a significant amount of munitions and supplies for the insurgents.

Ryszard Mączewski, a historian from the Warsaw Uprising Museum, told TVP World: “It was one of the most significant military victories of the Uprising because it was then the second-highest building in Warsaw. Germans stationed there effectively controlled the downtown.”

The Germans also used the building as a strategic communication center with the Eastern front.

“The Polish insurgents positioned themselves on the second floor of a next-door building to send flammable liquid via a motor pump to set the building alight. Then they cleared the floors one by one,” said Mączewski.

Once Pasta was liberated, it stayed in the hands of the Polish underground until the fighters of the Warsaw Uprising capitulated in early October 1944.

Pasta was for a time the tallest building in Poland, a crown that it lost in 1934. Before WWII, the building housed a modern telephone exchange belonging to the Polish Telephone Company.

The building’s mock medieval facade was heavily damaged during the Warsaw Uprising and, after the war, the communist government planned to demolish it, though ultimately that never happened.

Krzysztof Sołoducha of Sztuka Architektury Portal explained to TVP World the significance of the Pasta tower: “It is a building of both symbolic and architectural value, created in 1904 in a modernist Chicago style. Its then-towering height of eight floors was a testament to Warsaw's metropolitan and corporate ambitions.”

The Pasta is now surrounded by many more imposing skyscrapers but, unlike them, it stands as a marker of Warsaw’s tumultuous past and its post-war rebirth.