Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
Adam B., in contrast, sometime member of the Watch 49 Battalion, studied medicine, and rose in due course to be a neurosurgeon. At one of the first occasions in the 1960s when veterans from abroad were first allowed to attend the unofficial celebrations in Warsaw, he met Yan B., a fellow ex-insurgent who had trained in the USA and who now worked like him as a neurosurgeon. From then on, to the end of the century and beyond, the two Home Army men who had turned to saving lives in the surgical theatre because their own lives had been spared could regularly be seen together at all the Rising’s anniversaries.
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Many ex-insurgents prospered abroad in a great many fields. It may well be that the trauma of their youth created an inner strength and a determination to live the rest of their life to the full. At all events, once they had found their feet and their métier, they often rose to the highest reaches of their calling, which, by rights, should have been theirs in Warsaw.
In Britain, where the hierarchy of Polish exiles was firmly occupied by the older generation, the Varsovians rarely figured prominently in communal organizations. But they made their mark in a great variety of walks of life. L.Cpl. ‘Jagiello’ reappears as a senior don and political philosopher at Oxford University. His colleague from Bashta, Cpl. ‘Julius’, in contrast, joined the throng in the BBC, whilst devoting much time and passion to his vocation as a poet. Courier ‘Hanka’, who in September 1944 had been spared when an SS man chose not to pull the trigger as she emerged from the sewers, lived to survive three husbands, to be a grandmother and great-grandmother, and to edit a short history of the battalion.
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In the USA, Wenceslas duly rose to become a successful lawyer and a professor of law at several US universities, including Indiana, Notre Dame, and Detroit. In 1944, he had been a special duties officer of the AK’s ‘Harnas’ Battalion and editor of the underground
Warsaw National News
. Both his sisters served in the Warsaw Rising.
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Zbysek. M., ‘Ed’, who lost a leg in the Rising, did not allow his handicap to obstruct a career as a director of a Californian engineering firm. Born in Zakopane, he became a world champion in legless skiing. On 31 July 1944, he had been sitting on a rooftop in Praga, making notes on the redeployment of the Hermann Göring Panzer Division. He made
his escape through the sewers on crutches, the stump of his leg protected by oilskins.
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The Varsovians are present in Canada in force. A retired Professor of Semantics at McGill, who lost her first husband on the first day of the Rising, spent nine years after the war in solitary confinement in a Communist jail, having earlier been held in the Paviak by the Gestapo. Her son, born during the Rising, is now a businessman in New York. Her daughter is a senior stewardess for Delta Airlines based in Florida. Her neighbour in Rawdon, Quebec was another insurgent from the Parasol Group.
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In Australia, there is no shortage of people with links to the Rising. A distinguished retired professor of sociology at ANU Canberra is one of the ‘fathers of multicultural Australia’. A graduate of LSE, in August 1944, as a second lieutenant in the Parachute Brigade, he was the chief briefing officer for RAF crews flying out of Brindisi for Warsaw.
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Cpl. ‘White’, who was wounded fighting in the ‘Thunder’ Battalion, emigrated to Australia in 1949, having obtained a technical diploma, and became the owner of a refrigeration firm at Lakemba, NSW. Maria G. (born 1917), known during the Rising as ‘Maria Kovalska’, had been an AK courier.
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She lost three brothers and a sister. After the Soviet capture of Warsaw in early 1945, she was captured by the Soviet Army, and subsequently spending ‘only forty-four months’ in the Arctic camps. A teacher by training, she emigrated to Australia in 1958 to join her brother. She married and settled in Melbourne. ‘We used to talk about returning home,’ she wrote, ‘but not to Communist Poland.’
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Wherever one meets these Varsovian victims – in Ealing, in Manhattan, in Toronto, or in Sydney – one easily receives the impression of dynamic, intelligent people who have integrated well into their host communities. Though they have been able to visit Poland without serious hindrance since the 1960s, they have put down new roots. They have beautiful homes. They have families who are considerably less Polish than they are. They are happy to know that their beloved Warsaw, like them, has been given a second lease of life, that the Communists who took away their birthright, have finally dropped down ‘the manhole of history’.
Yet, on one point, Varsovians around the world do have a grievance. Time and again, if one asks, one hears the same sad responses: that their neighbours know nothing about the Warsaw Rising, that their children have nothing exciting to read about it, that there is no disinterested person to tell the next generation what 1944 was all about. ‘Our neighbours here
have virtually no knowledge of the Warsaw Rising,’ writes a lady living near Manchester. ‘The cause lies in the shortage of literature on the subject in English, and too little mention of it in the media.’
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Or again, ‘Young Australians, like young Poles, don’t take much interest in history. I’ve met many Australians who make no distinction between the Ghetto Rising and the Warsaw Rising. One has to explain very calmly that the former was in 1943 and the latter in 1944.’
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By the end of the 1970s, the Communist regime was entering a deepening crisis. Its politicians were discredited; its economic strategy had failed; its standing among the working class was in free-fall. A series of strikes over food prices and living conditions was helping to swell an ever-more insistent chorus about the ruling party’s lack of legitimacy. By general consent, the visit of Pope John Paul II in June 1979 acted as a catalyst, which turned discontent into a much more focused body of opposition. The Polish Pope was the godfather of Solidarity.
The Pope’s visit did not lack allusions, and even open references, to the Warsaw Rising. In the course of his long homily on Victory Square in Warsaw on 2 June 1979, he returned to the topic repeatedly:
If it be right that the history of a nation has to be understood through each and every person in that nation, then simultaneously there is no way of understanding individuals other than through their national community. . . . There is no way of understanding this nation, whose past has been both so wonderful and so fearfully difficult, without Christ. There is no way of understanding this city of Warsaw, Poland’s capital, which in 1944 undertook an unequal battle against the invader, abandoned by its powerful allies, if one fails to remember that Christ the Redeemer, with his cross on the [Cracow Faubourg], lay under those same ruins . . .
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In that same homily, he remembered the ‘hundreds of thousands who perished in the Warsaw Ghetto’, ‘the people who lived with us and amongst us.’
Addressing the state authorities in the Belvedere Palace, he returned to the wartime theme:
For us, the word ‘Homeland’ possesses a conceptual and emotional meaning that, it would appear, is unknown to other nations . . . who
have never experienced such losses, such dangers and such injustices. The war ended thirty-five years ago . . . However, we cannot forget the experience of war and occupation. We cannot forget the Polish men and women, the victims, who paid with their lives. We cannot forget the heroism of the Polish soldier who fought on all the world’s fronts ‘For our freedom and yours’.We relate with respect and gratitude to all those who extended us their assistance. And we think with bitterness of all those occasions when we were let down.
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No one in the audience needed reminding who had tried to help them, and who had let them down.
Finally, speaking in St John’s Cathedral, the Pope turned to the very Varsovian theme of resurrection:
Warsaw’s Cathedral of St John the Baptist was almost totally destroyed during the Rising. The building in which we now find ourselves at present is completely new. It is a fitting symbol of the new Polish and Catholic life of which it is the heart. It is a sign of the Christ who once said, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days, I will raise it up.’
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The wave of pride and self-confidence which followed had incalculable effects. Poland would never be the same again.
During the sixteen months between August 1980 and December 1981, when the Solidarity movement functioned openly, Poland enjoyed the first period of free speech in the whole Soviet bloc.
Glasnost
came into being without the name of
glasnost
. Though the official censorship still controlled a broad range of publications and activities, no action was taken against people who gave a voice in public to ‘inappropriate opinions’. History was near the top of the list of subjects in which free debate flourished. The most popular subjects included the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–20, the Katyn Massacres, the Government-in-Exile, and the Warsaw Rising.
The supporters of Solidarity had many close links with the Warsaw Rising. Though most of them were far too young to remember much before 1956, and though they resolutely chose the path of non-violence, they saw themselves as the true heirs of the Home Army. They rejected the AK’s methods of fighting the enemy with guns and grenades. But they
regarded the struggle as one and the same. It was a struggle against totalitarian rule, against an inhuman ideology, and against foreign domination.
What is more, the ranks of Solidarity contained a formidable company of dissident historians. The younger leaders belonged to the generation who knew that the Rising was one of the great ‘blank spots’ of their parents’ lives. It was absolutely natural, therefore, that works related to the Rising should have poured out of Solidarity’s unofficial presses. One such product, written under a pseudonym, was typical of the period. It had three main objectives – to defend the Rising’s leaders against the more absurd changes of treason and criminal intent, to raise the issue of Soviet inaction, and to revive the moral standing of the insurgents. It indulged in some fundamental assertions:
Both legally and practically, the Home Army was an integral part of the armed forces of the state, part of the Polish Army subordinated to the legitimate authorities of the Republic . . . [But it] was more than a military organization; it was the core of the national Resistance movement with a well-defined ideological profile . . .
The tragic end to the Rising is well known. The leaders had not reckoned at all with the possibility that the Soviet Army might not enter the capital in the course of the battle. Yet, on the personal intervention of Stalin, the Red Army halted before restricting its activities in the Warsaw sector, passively observing the destruction of the Polish Capital and the ruin of the Polish Underground State . . .
Some time ago, [a commentator] said that the Warsaw Rising was a political mistake, a military nonsense, and a psychological necessity. Today, I am inclined to paraphrase the comment as follows: The Warsaw Rising was inadequately prepared and faultily directed; it was a political gamble of the highest order. Psychologically, however, it could hardly have been avoided.
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Equally important for the historical record were a number of extensive interviews and investigations, conceived or conducted in 1980–81, which drew the veil from issues relevant to the Rising and which helped to illuminate many of the subsequent distortions. One of these was a long conversation with Mark E., a sometime Bundist and leader of the Ghetto Uprising, whose views exposed many of the misconceptions about wartime Polish–Jewish relations.
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A second was a series of interviews with a selection of surviving Stalinists, like Berman, whose unreconstructed
opinions spoke with unmatched authenticity about the Communist takeover and the murderous post-war repressions.
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Forty years on, Berman made no apologies about the Communists’ totally undemocratic practices; he was still maintaining that the suppression of the Warsaw Rising had been a beneficial milestone in the onward march of progress.
In the brief Solidarity interlude, the ex-insurgents gained a definite success in the realm of historical memorials. Still frustrated in their hopes for an official monument to the Rising, they nonetheless persuaded the authorities to permit the erection of a statue to the ‘Boy Soldier’ or the ‘Little Insurgent’. Funded by public subscriptions organized by the Scouting Association, the diminutive statue was placed beside the medieval walls of the Old City and quickly became a popular landmark. It depicts a tiny lad with curly locks, swamped by an outsize helmet, but proudly gripping his Sten gun. It was inspired by the true story of the thirteen-year-old Cpl. ‘Antek’, who was killed nearby in combat on 8 August 1944.
Another success in the painful field of remembering was gained in the mid-1980s through the construction of the so-called ‘Observer’ monument on the eastern bank of the Vistula facing Cherniakov. Dedicated to Berling’s First Army, which suffered thousands of casualties in the attempt to cross the river in September 1944, it portrays a giant soldier trying to reach out to the insurgents on the western bank. Since, like Berling, his feet are cased in concrete the soldier can do no more than ‘observe’ the scene of the Rising. Gen. Jaruzelski, who in 1944 had been a young officer of the line in the First Army, had been among ‘the observers’. But he and his fellow
Berlingowcy
were denied their monument for forty years, just as the Home Army were. He only succeeded when, after 1981, he became Poland’s unchallenged dictator.
The day after martial law was declared in Poland on 13 December 1981, a survey of Polish history was published in Oxford.
God’s Playground
had a winning title, and the good fortune to reach the market at the point when the demand for knowledge about Poland peaked. Moreover, it was the first prominent study to challenge the Communist version of modern Polish history in a systematic and non-nationalist way. A review in
The New York Times
called it ‘
the
book about Poland’. Another, totally dishonest, which appeared in Warsaw, praised it fulsomely only to conclude that ‘the author’s talent inexplicably deserted him when he reached the twentieth century’. The treatment of the Warsaw Rising in
God’s Playground
did not exploit any new sources and did not express any strong opinions. Whilst feeling uneasy about the reigning criticisms of the Rising,
the author at least felt confident enough to add some words of admiration.
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