Set in the midst of a rose garden it was erected in 1926, the work of acclaimed sculptor Wacław Szymankowski. As part of the Nazi brutalization of Warsaw it was dynamited by German Nazi's on May 31, 1940. The following day an unknown patriot had placed a placard on the smoldering ruin declaring: ‘I don’t know who destroyed me, but I know why; so I don’t play the funeral march for your leader’.