Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (101 page)

Nonetheless, the breathing space supplied by the ‘Polish October’ facilitated the publication of important studies suppressed in the preceding period. Both of the historical teams whose work had been wrecked by the Stalinist regime regrouped and managed to find their way into print.

The study of the Warsaw Rising by Pepi, which saw the light of day in 1957, carried the subtitle ‘A survey of military operations’ and was clearly seeking to avoid political controversy:

Such public praise of the Rising had not been previously heard. ‘The extraordinary stamina of the defenders’, Pepi concluded, was partly due to ‘the in-born bravura of the Poles’ and to their deep hatred of the Germans. ‘But it was also bound up with an ungrounded belief in the miracle of victory.’
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What he could not say was that the Home Army
had not counted on a miracle, but on practical assistance from the Soviets.

The authors of school textbooks did not have an easy task. Faced with readers who possessed alternative sources of information at home, they must often have longed for the time not long gone when the Rising had been unmentionable. In retrospect, it is fascinating to see how the hard line imposed in the 1950s was successively softened and supplemented. In the 1960s, the censors were apt to present the People’s Army not only as the chief heroes of the Rising but also as one of the chief victims. In the 1970s, the Home Army and its leaders became mentionable, but only as the unhealthy forces of reaction that had caused a terrible setback to the onward march of socialism. At least, they had ceased to be portrayed as traitors and Nazi collaborators. Still, descriptions of the Warsaw Rising published after 1956 continued to omit some of the most crucial details:

On 1 August 1944, the population of Warsaw took to arms and threw themselves into yet another heroic but tragic struggle. The Germans hurriedly strengthened the line of the front along the Vistula, and halted the Red Army’s offensive near Warsaw.

The insurrectionary units fought with indescribable bravery . . . Our youth fought in the front ranks. People died under the bombs . . . and under the masonry of falling houses.

The hopeless struggle lasted until October. Almost 200,000 persons perished. Warsaw’s streets were transformed into cemeteries and heaps of rubble. Those who were left alive were ordered to leave the city immediately. Anyone whom the Hitlerites caught was carried off to the camps. The city was burned down.
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Few statements here were obviously untrue, but pupils would not have known who the ‘insurrectionary units’ were, whose orders they followed, or how long the Red Army’s offensive was delayed. The most important piece of information was contained in the phrase which indicated that the battling youth of the Rising was ‘ours’.

The military establishment eventually dropped its former vindictiveness towards people with insurgent connections. In 1972, for example, the Minister of National Defence funded an important change to the symbolic grave of Gen. Nile. An imposing gravestone was added, correctly stating the General’s dates, his rank, and his commissions – including ‘Chief of
the K-Div., AK Supreme Command’. Two other pieces of information appeared:

HE DIED A TRAGIC DEATH
POSTHUMOUSLY REHABILITATED
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In those same decades, most of the serious historical study of the Rising was conducted abroad, mainly in Britain. The Historical Commission of the Government-in-Exile and the Underground Study Trust pressed forward with their labours, and in time, several scholarly syntheses were produced. Two rival trends emerged – the condemnatory and the laudatory. The former was best encapsulated in the work of Dr Yan C., the latter in that of Professor Janush Z.
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Both authors had served as boy soldiers during the Rising, both had seen terrifying things, and both had established themselves as professional scholars. But each had reacted in opposite directions. The one felt betrayed by the ineptitude of the London Government and its subordinates. The other felt proud of his comrades’ stand against the Nazis, and was duly dismayed by the conduct of the Allied Powers. In consequence, two diametrically opposed interpretations were produced from the same sources and by the same academic methods.
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Dr C.’s work concentrated on the politics and the diplomacy, offering no coherent picture of the struggle, and picking out every conceivable fault in the leadership’s decisions. It conveniently glossed over the key factor of Soviet policy on the grounds that insufficient documentation was available for scholarly scrutiny. It was duly translated, and published in People’s Poland. Professor Z.’s work, in contrast, concentrated on the heroics and on the Home Army’s lonely fight both with the Wehrmacht and, on the political front, with its Allies. It spent much space condemning the condemners. It was never published in People’s Poland.

Dr C. concluded:

This statement begs more questions than it answers.

Professor Z. concluded:

Two names stand out, however, for their refusal to bend either to undue defeatism or to excessive glorification. ‘Kite’ was a pre-war socialist who had headed the Home Army’s Propaganda Section. His pithy, penetrating account of the Rising, regrettably not translated into English, has not been surpassed:

Dr Joseph G. (b. 1913) was a Home Army intelligence officer during the war, and a prolific historical author after it.
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He was not present during the Warsaw Rising, having been denounced by an informer, and transported to Auschwitz. But his Irish wife, Eileen, had lived through the Rising, where she had worked as a nurse. They were reunited in London in 1945. Dr G.’s account of the Rising is not uncritical.
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But he judged it a ‘historical necessity’.
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Fictional literature proved to be the best vehicle for examining contemporary events. The regime, though no longer paranoid, was still insecure. The censors were omnipotent. And the boundary between the permissible and the impermissible was opaque. In any case, readers often preferred hints, winks, allegories, and allusions to cruel facts.

Of course, much of the literature produced during the Rising remained on the Index. There was no chance that readers in the People’s Republic would be allowed to contemplate lines such as:

Or those addressed to Berling’s Army:

Even after 1956, if the censors could stop it, no one was going to hear the words of ‘The Scarlet Plague’ – the disease ‘that will save us all from the Black Death’.
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The sheer quantity of works that were banned needs to be set alongside the mere trickle of books about the Warsaw Rising that somehow slipped the net.

Zbig. H. (1924–99) became the leading poet of post-war Poland. He occasionally claimed to have participated in the Warsaw Rising, though critics suggest otherwise. Nonetheless there can be no doubt that his verse of 1956 about ‘The Fall of Troy’ was not really about Troy:

It was not clear at the end of the war whether the poet ‘Christophe’ was alive or dead. In fact, he had been buried in the ruins of the City Hall on 4 August, on the day he died. But his family did not know his fate; and numerous false sightings had been reported. It was only at the very end of 1946 that his grave was exhumed. By then, fragments of his poems were circulating, and critical notices were being posted. The collected works
were finally published in 1961, and were soon accompanied by an authoritative study from the great Cracovian literary critic, Casimir W.
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Christophe emerged by general consent as the authentic voice of the lost generation. Casimir W.’s assessment of his poetry resonated with admiration. He was equally certain of Christophe’s prowess as a wordsmith and of his crucial role as a continuation of the romantic strand in national literature. In conclusion, he quoted one of his Cracovian colleagues: ‘We belong to a nation whose fate is to shoot at the enemy with diamonds.’
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In the meantime, the legend of the poet who had died on the fourth day of the Rising grew into a major literary phenomenon. It did not develop simply because a brilliant writer was cut down in the flower of his youth, but because it was the apotheosis of a much older tradition in which revolutionary poets were supposed to die tragically, but had rarely managed to do so. Polish history was filled with failed insurrections and with insurrectionary poets who had called their compatriots to battle. But very few of those poets had lived up to expectations and perished in the accepted manner. The national bard, Adam M., for example, whose writings greatly influenced the Risings of 1830 and 1863, had fought in defence of the Roman Republic but never in his native land. But now, with a century’s delay, Christophe could be Poland’s Byron, or Poland’s Pet
fi. Many of his lines were eerily prophetic:

How good you did not live to see the day
When they will raise a monument to heroes like you
And your murderers will place flowers on your tomb.
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For obvious reasons, there is always a limit to the amount of heroics which the reading public can take. Hence two works published around 1970 turned to the experiences of the civilian population during the Rising. Both explored the appalling consequences for people who were in no sense responsible for their suffering.

Maria D. was an established writer of social novels long before she was caught in Warsaw by the Occupation and the Rising. She was not an active insurgent, but she came to the defence of the Home Army in the post-war Conrad debate; and in the depths of the Stalinist nightmare, with no hope of early publication, she set to work on a fastidious description of the months spent in a single cellar. The result was a long chapter in her
Adventures of a Thinking Person
(1972), which finally saw the light of day eighteen years after completion and five years after her death:

Tell me, Joe . . . How will this hell end? And tell me, was it all a mistake?

No, it wasn’t a mistake
– he said firmly.
If somebody saw his mother drowning, and dived in to rescue her, even if he had no chance, and would probably drown himself, that wouldn’t have been a mistake, would it?

The defeated always have to pay
, whispered Joanna. Then shaking herself she suddenly said –
We have lost, and yet I don’t regret it . . . There were moments of such wonderful hope and excitement . . . And it is so good to have suffered so much, and to have survived. When it is finished, there’ll be such a blessed sense of peace . . .

Tom was silent, and slowly pressed the scrap of tobacco into the holder.

Only, we have to realize that this is rock bottom, that we can’t fall any further.

Then, carefully striking a match split into two, he answered himself.

But this might not be rock bottom yet.
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