Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
Even so, the months of free speech in 1980–81 had broken the official taboos about the Rising, and the Communist authorities were never able to return to their previous line, even when Solidarity was suppressed and martial law introduced. The years of Gen. Jaruzelski’s military–party dictatorship, therefore, were marked by two features relevant to the evolving Rising story. On the one hand, the uncontrollable
samizdat
operation of the Solidarity Underground made up the backlog on previously untranslated foreign publications. On the other, official historians and textbook writers were forced to make ever-greater concessions. Schoolchildren were allowed to learn more than ever before. A textbook from 1982, for example, gave an astonishingly frank account of the composition of the insurgents:
The units of the Warsaw District of the Home Army formed the core of the heroic insurgent ranks. Units of the People’s Army also subordinated themselves to the Rising’s leadership – and one of them from the League of Youthful Struggle . . . covered itself in glory during the defence of the Old Town. Two battalions from the ‘Grey Ranks’, Zoshka and Parasol, were particularly famed for their heroism . . .
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Inclusivity was on the march.
Yet there were limits beyond which the Communist establishment was still unwilling to go. In August 1984, they refused to patronize the fortieth anniversary of the Rising; though they did not interfere with the huge crowds that gathered spontaneously at the City’s military cemetery. And they again resisted demands for a proper Rising monument.
However, once Jaruzelski had taken the unprecedented step of ordering the prosecution of security officers who had murdered a pro-Solidarity Catholic priest,
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it was increasingly difficult for the military–party leadership to ignore public opinion on other issues. With Gorbachev’s Moscow moving itself into the era of
Glasnost
, determined citizens increasingly took unlicensed initiatives. An independent committee formed to design and construct a monument to the Rising, and to fund it by public subscription, refused to give up. This time, instead of arresting the organizers, the authorities tried to infiltrate the Committee and thereby to influence its decisions. But they failed. In 1989, a colossal, impressive monument was finally unveiled on the edge of Warsaw’s Old Town, next to the manhole
cover through which the district’s defenders had once escaped to safety. It had taken forty-five long years to achieve. There could have been no better signal to announce that the Communist regime was on its last legs and was losing the will to defend the fictions on which it had been built.
The monument to the Warsaw Rising was not to everyone’s taste. It was grandiose, sensationalist, almost exhibitionist. One of its two groups of extra-life-size figures is frozen in combat. The other, which represents a wounded man, a nurse, and a chaplain heading for the sewers, is more suitably reflective. Designed in tandem by a sculptor and an architect, it dominates a corner of the Old Town, long since rebuilt. And yet, in a very real sense, its gigantism is appropriate. For the Rising hung over the capital for forty years like a giant unseen ghost. Henceforth, and quite properly, the ghostly giants of 1944 are anything but invisible.
In the meantime, public events in honour of the Warsaw Rising could only be held abroad. The fortieth anniversary, which passed in near silence in official Warsaw, was marked in Washington by a meeting at the White House addressed by President Reagan:
This month, we commemorate a desperate battle of the Second World War, an heroic attempt by free Poles to liberate their country from the heel of Nazi occupation, and to protect it from post-war foreign domination . . .
Today we honor three individuals, heroes of the Polish Home Army, never given their due after the Allied victory. It’s my great honor to present the Legion of Merit to the families or representatives of these men: to Stefan ‘Arrow’, who was executed by the Gestapo; to the son of Gen. ‘Boor’, the leader of the Warsaw Uprising, who later died in near poverty in exile in London; and finally to Gen. ‘Bear Cub’, who was lured into a trap and died under suspicious circumstances in Moscow . . . These brave men and the courageous individuals who fought under their command represent the best of the human spirit . . .
If there’s a lesson to be learned from the history books, it is that Poland may be beaten down but it’s never defeated . . .
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Some would say that this speech shows ‘the great Communicator’ at his best. Political opponents would say that Ronald Reagan never missed an opportunity to bang an ‘anti-Soviet’ drum. But such politicking misses the
point. The Home Army was neither ‘right-wing’ nor ‘left-wing’. It contained representatives from all points on the democratic spectrum; it was both ‘anti-Nazi’ and ‘anti-Soviet’, as all true democrats were bound to be. As leader of the Free World, President Reagan had a simple duty to recognize wartime allies who cherished the values the USA so readily proclaims. The only thing wrong with the speech is that it was forty years overdue.
The collapse of the People’s Republic, which was completed by the democratic presidential election in December 1990, initiated freedoms previously unknown to the majority of citizens. Among many other changes, it led to the abolition of the censorship. For the surviving ex-insurgents, it had momentous consequences. For the very first time since the Rising, they were able to talk, to publish, to organize, and to commemorate exactly as they pleased.
As in 1955–56, the regime had begun to crack before it collapsed. One sign of its weakness could be observed in the tack of the censorship towards much greater leniency. Another sign was seen in the willingness of the judicial system to re-open the unsatisfactory reviews of Stalinist trials that had been undertaken in the late 1950s and early 60s. At the end of one such review, dated 7 March 1989, the Procurator-General of the People’s Republic entered a decision changing the formula which had been used in 1958 to justify the abandonment of the case against Gen. Nile. The new formula stated unequivocally that the said person ‘was not guilty of the acts of which he was accused’.
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It had far-reaching consequences. A memorial tablet to him was unveiled on 1 September 1989 at the spot where he had been arrested in Lodz in 1950. Another tablet was unveiled on 11 November 1989 by the Lord Mayor of Cracow on the house where Nile had been born. Full recognition of Poland’s war heroes was no longer confined to the churches and cemeteries.
A major change came with the emergence of unrestricted media. Prior to 1990, the state authorities had given up long ago on trying to control private conversations. But they had still kept a tight rein on radio, television, and the press. After 1990, most controls were cast aside, and for a time the Rising became one of the many passionate topics of popular debate. Any number of interviews, articles, and investigative programmes were produced in which, at last, the ex-insurgents could have their say. A variety of opinions were expressed. The Home Army voices did not have
it all their own way. They had to contend with entrenched opinions; and indeed, on several key issues, they did not present a united front. But bit by bit, the facts about 1944 surfaced; and the public at large found itself in a position to take an informed view.
The rush of publications about the Rising in the 1990s covered many categories. There were numerous memoirs by ex-insurgents who had now entered retirement age, detailed logs of the battle trail of particular units, and excellent studies of barricade design or insurgent security services. Simultaneously, a number of authors and editors moved into topics that had been out of bounds in People’s Poland. German policy in 1944, for example, was illuminated by collections of translated military documents and by serious document-based studies. Soviet policy, too, was opened up, though with more mediocre results. Most importantly, perhaps, initiatives were taken to collate existing information and to present it to the public in accessible forms. A day-by-day chronicle of the Rising, for example, which was first prepared as a series of radio programmes enjoyed wide acclaim. The trend was expanded with great energy by a series of historical compendia, chronicles, anthologies, biographical dictionaries, and encyclopedias. The process could not have been trouble free. Different researchers belonging to different traditions were using different sources. Great offence was caused, for instance, when the
Great Encyclopaedia of the Warsaw Rising
listed the Home Army’s Crag-Crusher Regiment and Oaza Battalion as units of the Polish People’s Army.
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At long last, however, Polish schoolchildren were completely free to learn about the deeds of their grandfathers without official interference. But freedom brought its own problems. For half a century, the textbooks had suffered from sterile conformity, ideological interpretations, and factual selectivity. They now suffered from a profusion of diverse emphases. Teachers who had been trained in an authoritative system that provided all the answers suffered from a lack of authoritative sources. Everyone was obliged to learn or relearn. Generally speaking, though, the nostrums of the former Communist regime collapsed before the tidal wave of information. And a new generation of open-minded authors replaced the closed state pedagogical industry of previous times. A sceptical approach to history was encouraged; and criticisms emerged not only of the Soviet Union but also of the Western Powers.
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Historical scholars in Western countries continued to disgorge enormous quantities of work on the Second World War, but they showed little interest in reviewing the Warsaw Rising. A much-praised American
synthesis of the war contained an extensive passage on the Rising, expounding a curious mixture of outdated and risky new judgements:
The Polish Government-in-exile was itself frequently divided internally, but practically none of its members was prepared to agree to the territorial demands of the Soviet Union. The other Soviet demand . . . was for a major change in the personnel of the Polish Cabinet . . . The issues were complicated in 1944 by two further factors. This was an election year in the United States, and President Roosevelt was hesitant to take steps which would alienate the Polish American voters . . .
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The other and more important element was the functioning of the Polish underground army . . . The advancing Soviet units utilized the assistance of the AK . . . until an area was firmly under Red Army control and then arrested and either shot or deported them.These issues all came to a head in late July 1944 as the Red Army approached Warsaw . . . even as [Premier Mick] flew to Moscow to confer with Stalin. Expecting to overrun the Polish capital quickly, Soviet radio on July 29 called on the public in the city to rise against the Germans. The British Government had made it clear to the Poles that they could [not] carry out extensive air operations . . . On July 31, the Polish commander in the city ordered an uprising for the next day.
General [Boor] [had], decided that it was better to take a chance than to stand aside, and it is clear that the bulk of his associates agreed. What is not so clear is why this reversal from previous AK strategy was made with very little preparation. When the rising took place as ordered on August 1, the insurgents were unable to seize many key locations, and the Germans rallied their forces. No one has explained why the Polish underground learned nothing from the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto the year before; for those who have studied the 1944 uprising, as for the civilians in the rest of Warsaw at the time, that event might as well have taken place on another planet . . .
For weeks, the Soviet Union refused either to send aid itself or to facilitate the sending of aid by the British and American air forces. The latter did send some supplies by air drops from Britain and Italy, but these operations were . . . more effective for morale than supply purposes . . .
In early October the remaining AK forces surrendered, and the Germans levelled to the ground most of what was left standing of Warsaw.
Now that the regimes of Poland and the former Soviet Union have publicly admitted Soviet responsibility for the Katyn massacre, the line on the events of 1944 may also change . . .
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On either side of the Fiftieth Anniversary, various academic symposia were organized. The time had come for conflicting interpretations to joust and to be subjected to cross-examination. The exercise was a healthy one. For too long, the followers of the rival condemnatory and justificatory camps had sulked in their separate tents, and had not been required to confront their critics. Finally, in August 1996, a pioneering Polish–German symposium on the Rising was held in the Masurian lakeland. The participants included staff and students from Polish and German universities, an array of international speakers, and a group of eyewitnesses who had been on one or other side of the barricades in 1944. A Russian speaker from the Military Academy in Moscow had been a Soviet intelligence officer in August 1944. The badly needed internationalization of the subject had begun in earnest.
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Some of the more practical obstacles to removing institutional equality, however, proved harder to overcome. An Act of Nullity, in 1991, removed all the politically based legislation of 1944–56 from the statute book. And in 1992, the Ex-Combatants Act gave equal rights to all veterans. But these measures proved insufficient. In the veterans’ case, for example, ‘ex-combatant’ was not satisfactorily defined. No less than eighteen registered associations now catered to the ex-insurgents’ interests. Yet the larger and older ex-combatants’ organizations, whilst obliged to accept Home Army personnel, were unwilling to offload some of their more unsavoury categories of membership. Under Communist management, all branches of the military in People’s Poland, including military prosecutors and former members of the organs of repression, had enjoyed an honourable place; and no opposition had been offered to the fiction that Communist Party officials were ipso facto ‘fighters for peace’ and hence eligible for ex-combatants’ benefits. Under their chosen strategy of ‘drawing a line’ against recriminations over the past, the democratic Governments of the 1990s failed to address many a running sore; and the problems continued to rankle.