(Was a) Deacon's Blog

Today marks the 67th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising. The on-line Polonia community has commemorated the day in many ways. I begin with John Guzlowski’s poetry from The Warsaw Uprising, August 1, 1944

On August 1, 1944, the Polish resistance and the people of Warsaw rose up to throw off the Nazi oppressors. The Poles fought with guns, bricks, stolen grenades, sticks, and their hands and teeth. The Nazis retaliated with tanks, bombers, and fire.

63 days later the last Poles surrendered to the Germans.

250,000 men, women, and children were killed in the fighting, and the city of Warsaw was leveled by the Germans.

As a boy growing up, I would often hear my father talk about the fight the Poles made in the face of German military superiority. He would talk and sometimes he would weep for the dead.

My father wasn’t there, of course. He had been taken by the Germans to Buchenwald Concentration Camp several years before. But when he talked about the Warsaw Uprising, he spoke like a man who had been touched by something that he would never forget.

I tried to capture this in a poem called “Cross of Polish Wood…”

A historical timeline for the Warsaw Uprising can be found at the Warsaw Uprising 1944 website. And, remember to support Wisia’s Story, and projects like it, so to preserve first hand accounts of these events.

The History Channel aired Betrayal: The Battle for Warsaw in 2009. The film’s description is a fitting synopsis of the events that began this day:

The Warsaw Uprising was the largest and perhaps most heroic underground campaign of World War II. It was also one of the most desperate and little known battles of the war. Yet even as the Poles rose up against the Germans in the heart of Warsaw, they were callously betrayed. Not by their enemies but by their allies.

They were promised help that never came, so they took matters into their own hands. In the summer of 1944, more than 20,000 Polish Freedom Fighters and 220,000 Polish civilians died at the hands of the German Army during 63 days of hellacious battle in Poland’s capital city of Warsaw.

On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s Nazi forces invaded Poland from the West, and two weeks later, Russia invaded from the east. There they formed a resistance movement with the hope of eventually overthrowing German occupation in their homeland and re-gaining freedom. Polish soldiers, who had escaped, joined Allied forces around the world to battle the Axis, while in German-occupied Warsaw, the Polish underground published newspapers; plastered the city with fliers urging resistance; bombed supply trains; assassinated German officials in public; and gathered a force of 400,000 known as The Home Army.

The Germans responded with the brutality that was their trademark, setting up gallows around the city for public executions, rounding up suspected sympathizers and herding them onto trains bound for work camps and gas chambers.

By 1944, the Russians had switched sides and were allied to Britain and America. And as the Russians pushed the Germans out of Russian territory and back through Poland, the Polish underground prepared to rise up against the Germans in Warsaw. The plan was to liberate their capital just before the Russians reached Warsaw and liberate the city.

But to prevail the Poles would have to join forces with Joseph Stalin, the same man whose forces had massacred 22,000 Polish soldiers and buried them in mass graves only a few years earlier. On August 1, 1944 at 5 p.m., with the Russian army just miles away, The Home Army launched a surprise attack against the Germans … the Warsaw Uprising was underway. Yet, just when the Poles expected the Russians to join the battle, the Russians stopped as the Germans in Warsaw decimated the Polish insurgents. There was a reason: Stalin had no use for the insurgents; his plan was to install a communist puppet government in Poland after the war. Yet perhaps the most appalling aspect of the story is that Churchill and Roosevelt let Stalin get away with it.

Consisting entirely of archival footage and interviews with survivors, BETRAYAL: THE BATTLE FOR WARSAW is an inspiring and heartbreaking retrospective of one of the greatest fights you’ve probably never heard about. Highlights of BETRAYAL: THE BATTLE FOR WARSAW include:

• The little-known Polish perspective on the latter years of World War II, when the under equipped Home Army struggled against superior German forces and waited for help from Allied forces that never seemed to come.
• The historic summit in Tehran, in which Churchill and Roosevelt each separately promised Stalin that Poland would be his once Germany fell, paving the way for a half-century of Communist rule there after the War.
• Tales of the heroic efforts of the Polish insurgents, including carrying the wounded to safety through the city sewers, the special efforts of the women of Poland both on the battlefield and as nurses in makeshift hospitals, and the efforts to find food and water in the war-torn streets of Warsaw.
• Survivors share memories of German brutality, including pouring gasoline on living people and lighting them on fire. “These were not soldiers,” one survivor recalls, “They were rapists and murderers.”
• The horribly botched efforts at support by the Russian and American Armed forces, which included supplying the Polish with thirty-year-old rifles that didn’t work and dropping relief supplies directly into the hands of the Germans.
• The eventual surrender of The Home Army to German forces, after which Hitler placed the entire remaining population in concentration camps and leveled the city, building by building.

From YouTube and The Wall Speaks: Krystyna Rutczyńska, a courier for the AK (Home Army) speaks about her experience during the first day of the Warsaw Uprising. / Krystyna Rutczyńska, łączniczka AK w Powstaniu Warzawskim opowiada o przeżyciach pierwszego dnia Powstania Warszawskiego.

From Polskie Radio on commemorations in Poland: Warsaw Rising remembered

Ceremonies marking the 67th anniversary of the Warsaw Rising of Polish Home Army partisans against occupying Nazi German forces have begun in the Żolibórz district of the capital, where the Uprising began in the early afternoon hours on 1 August 1944.

Memorial events are also planned for tomorrow and Sunday, when President Bronislaw Komorowski will host a meeting with former insurgents who are arriving to Warsaw for the occasion from various parts of the world.

On Monday, the anniversary itself, in line with a long-standing tradition, sirens will wail across the city, buses and private cars will draw to a halt and pedestrians will stand still for a minute’s silence on the stroke of 5 pm, the exact time chosen by the Home Army to launch the uprising. The main ceremony, attended by top-ranking politicians, will be held hour at the Powązki Military Cemetery.

Special concerts, theatre performances, city games and sing-a-longs are also planned.

Fought in a bid to secure Poland’s post-war independence, the Warsaw Uprising was led by the Home Army – commanded by Poland’s government-in-exile in London – which secretly deployed around 50,000 fighters. Around 18,000 of them died in the sixty-three day-long battle.

Some 180,000 civilians were massacred, or killed by crossfire or bombing, as the Germans took Warsaw back street by street.

And: President Komorowski gives thanks to Warsaw Rising insurgents

President Komorowski was with his aunt and veteran of the 1944 Warsaw Rising Helena Wołłowicz today, to mark the 67th anniversary of the insurgency against Nazi occupation, which began on 1 August 1944.

Bronislaw Komorowski was at the Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw as part of a day of ceremonies and events to mark the uprising, which was eventually crushed by the Nazis.

Later, President Komorowski led a ceremony at the Warsaw Rising monument outside the parliament building in honour of those fallen 67 years ago.

President Komorowski told the dignitaries and veterans that Poland’s wartime underground state could be an example for his countrymen today.

Komorowski declared that theclandestine state, which included underground courts, universities, theatres and publishing houses, “was a phenomenon then, and today it can also be a source of pride and an important point of reference for contemporary Poles in thinking about their country.”
Komorowski alluded to the parallels between the wartime generation and his own, in their desire for “the reconstruction of the Polish state”.

“So today, here in this place, where the monument to the Polish underground state stands… the Polish president bows his head low, not only before those who created this state, but also before those who fought for this country, and to those who are able to respect the Polish state,” the head of state said.

From YouTube: The Nazis – A Warning From History, The Wild East (Episode 4, Parts 1-4) discussing the Nazi German policies toward Poland during World War II.