Short answers, pulled from the story.
Warsaw was systematically razed by German forces after the failure of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Hitler ordered the city destroyed in defiance of the agreed capitulation terms, and special Verbrennungs- und Vernichtungskommando units blew up monuments and government buildings and burned or removed library and museum collections. About 85 percent of the city was destroyed.
Warsaw became the capital of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth when Sigismund III Vasa transferred his royal court there from Kraków in 1596. It served as capital of the Commonwealth until 1795, and has been the capital of independent Poland since the re-establishment of the Polish state in 1918.
The exact origin of the name Warsaw is uncertain and has not been fully determined. One hypothesis links it to the Old Polish name Warcisław, with Warsz as a shortened form. Folk etymology connects it to a legend about a fisherman named Wars and a mermaid named Sawa who lived in the Vistula River.
On the 19th of April 1943, when German forces moved to annihilate the ghetto as part of the Final Solution, Jewish fighters launched the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Heavily outgunned and outnumbered, the ghetto held out for almost a month. When the fighting ended, nearly all survivors were killed, with only a small number managing to escape or hide.
Warsaw's population is officially estimated at 1.86 million residents within the city limits and 3.27 million in the greater metropolitan area, making it the sixth most-populous city in the European Union.
Warsaw's first stock exchange was established in 1817 and operated until World War II. It was re-established in April 1991 following the end of communist planned economy. As of late 2020, it lists 433 companies with total capitalisation of 1 trillion PLN, making it the largest stock exchange in Central and Eastern Europe.