Warsaw Uprising Recollections - 79th Anniversary of the Conflagration of Warsaw 2023, 17.00 August 1st.1944
Today (5.00 pm August 1st 2023) I watched the
extraordinarily moving and symbolic commemoration of the Warsaw Uprising on television simultaneously in the many ceremonial venues (including boats on the Vistula) of the Warszawa Pamieta.
Someone once asked me to express the nature of Poland in one word. I replied 'Resistance' . Such was the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.
What a huge commemorative event this has developed into …. but I have rather mixed feelings concerning leadership after studying this ill-fated heroism in detail for my
book. The aircraft display flew directly over my home in Mlociny which was in Command Structure Area II - the northern districts Zoliborz and Bielany …. amazing
really…..to hear and see these aircraft so close at low altitude vibrating the atmosphere on this poignant day of memories ….
Rain was singularly appropriate for the melancholy of the recollection - a very few valiant survivors still struggle on with diminishing life.
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The conflagration of Warsaw 17.00 August 1st.1944 |
The abandoned....
The valiant men...
This uprising must never be forgotten and will not be despite the indelible controversy surrounding it
This is also a nation of truly remarkable Polish women
Independent, powerful, determined, loyal, intelligent, courageous,
and
beautiful...
and
beautiful...
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And their children.....   |
From:
Chapter 4 'Warsaw the Phoenix' from A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland by Michael Moran (Granta, London 2009)
Your scarlet victorious army
Has stopped beneath Warsaw's fiery clouds
And like a vulture with a carcass sates itself
On a handful of madmen, who are dying in the ruins
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Warsaw-1944-Hitler-Himmler-Crushing/dp/0007180438/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=warsaw+1944+alexandra+richie&qid=1596277767&s=books&sr=1-1
and
The Warsaw Uprising of 1st August 1944
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Extract from Chapter 4 Warsaw the Phoenix from:
A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland by Michael Moran (Granta, London 2008)
A visit to the Jewish Cemetery adjacent to Powązki in Okopowa Street is a powerful and melancholic reminder of the tremendous historical presence of Jews in Warsaw and the central contribution they made to the life of the city. From 1527 to 1795 Jews were not permitted to live in Warsaw. The cemetery was founded in 1806, at that time outside the walls, and covered a massive eighty acres.
Up to 1939 it contained the bodies of some 200,000 Jews in marked graves. Much of it is a sad and neglected place, finely carved grave-stones overgrown and awry, decorative wrought iron rusting in piles, doors to mausoleums gaping as if the soul has fled. Despite this, clearance and dedication by volunteers has improved sections immeasurably over the years. Most moving are the common mass graves to the Ghetto Insurgents (overgrown grassy depressions surrounded by a circle of white marble standing stones with a simple black band) and memorial graves erected by Jewish families living abroad to honour family members murdered but never met. An inscription reads ‘In memory of one million Jewish children murdered by Nazi German barbarians 1939–1945.’
A statue of the renowned Janusz Korczak ‘The King of Children’ gently accompanies a few of his charges from his orphanage to their joint annihilation. Of the numberless descriptions I have read of the horrors of the Holocaust, this passage, describing the final journey of 200 children to the Treblinka extermination camp, is the most heart-rending of all. It comes from Władysław Szpilman’s The Pianist.
One day, around 5th August, when I had to take a brief rest from work and was walking down Gęsia Street, I happened to see Janusz Korczak and his orphans leaving the ghetto.
The evacuation of the Jewish orphanage run by Janusz Korczak had been ordered for that morning. The children were to have been taken away alone. He had the chance to save himself, and it was only with difficulty that he persuaded the Germans to take him too. He had spent long years of his life with children, and now, on this last journey, he could not leave them alone. He wanted to ease things for them. He told the orphans they were going out into the country, so they ought to be cheerful. At last they would be able to exchange the horrible, suffocating city walls for meadows of flowers, streams where they could bathe, woods full of berries and mushrooms. He told them to wear their best clothes, and so they came out into the yard, two by two, nicely dressed and in a happy mood.
The little column was lead by an SS man who loved children, as Germans do, even those he was about to see on their way into the next world. He took a special liking to a boy of twelve, a violinist who had his instrument under his arm. The SS man told him to go to the head of the procession of children and play – and so they set off.
When I met them in Gęsia Street the smiling children were singing in chorus, the little violinist was playing for them and Korczak was carrying two of the smallest infants, who were beaming too, and telling them some amusing story.
I am sure that even in the gas chamber, as the Zyklon B gas was stifling childish throats and striking terror instead of hope into the orphans’ hearts, the Old Doctor must have whispered with one last effort, ‘It’s all right, children, it will be all right,’ so that at least he could spare his little charges the fear of passing from life to death.
Janusz Korczak (1878–1942) was the pseudonym of Henryk Goldszmit, the heroic Polish-Jewish paediatrician, children’s author and educational theorist. Andrzej Wajda made a film of his life in 1990 called Dr Korczak.
One might also like to be reminded of the wonderful Martha Argerich and Friends Commemorative Concert at the POLIN Jewish Museum Warsaw on 17th February 2018:
http://www.michael-moran.com/2018/02/martha-argerich-and-friends-polin.ht
English version (Version in Polish below printed in green)
Abandoned by the Allies in thrall Stalin, the effort was valiant but hopeless.
Essentially the Warsaw Rising of August 1944 was fought against the SS and the Wehrmacht by the Army in blazing buildings, cataracts of rubble and stinking sewers by adult, youth and child. For two months a kilometer-high pall of smoke and fire lay over the city.
Essentially the Warsaw Rising of August 1944 was fought against the SS and the Wehrmacht by the Army in blazing buildings, cataracts of rubble and stinking sewers by adult, youth and child. For two months a kilometer-high pall of smoke and fire lay over the city.
John Ward, a British airman and Times correspondent during the Uprising wrote in August 1944:
'Today the battle is going on in Warsaw That is very difficult for the British nation understand it. It is a battle that is being carried on as much by the civilian population as by the AK ... It is total warfare. '
Five years of cruel occupation had united Poles in an outburst of hatred and revenge, even joy in taking positive action against the oppressor, a magnificent gesture of defiance. All classes felt as one. 'Liberated Warsaw throbbed with a kind of freedom ...' wrote Joan Hanson in her riveting account: The Civilian Population and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.
However, the political and military motivations for the uprising were conflicted. Some Varsovians did not want a rising and felt it an ill-conceived idea. Many were psychologically and materially ill-prepared for the type of fighting that did occur. Children delivered food, guns and bombs for the army while scouts fearlessly delivered newspapers and replies to letters limited twenty-five words. Collective prayer and the Catholic faith held the fabric of society together as always in a Poland laboring under the heel of an invader.
The various districts of Warsaw experienced violence in distinct ways and degrees of horror. The Old Town suffered grotesquely, its fall and the premonition of doom and the ultimate capitulation of the entire city. Some of the inhabitants were reduced to '... eating noodles cooked in water had flowed over dead bodies'. Communication over the timing of the beginning of the uprising and later communications between areas cut off by the fighting proved problematical. As the battle raged on far beyond its intended duration, mood swings by the population were inevitable. Water shortages posed insurmountable problems; filthy living conditions and chronic hunger weakened everyone. Allied promises of assistance proved hollow, mendacious in the case of Soviet Russia. Disillusionment with the Allies, the Polish Government in Exile and conflicts within the AK weakened the spirit of resistance.
Incandescent with rage at an upstart capital that dared resist his paranoia, Hitler ordered the systematic annihilation of the city and its inhabitants. Those not slaughtered in the burning tenements or immolated by flame-throwers were drowned in sewage beneath the streets or shot upon emerging from manholes, their bodies are covered in excrement.
The Russians applied their infamous 'hyena principle' of waiting for the twitching corpse to die. The carnage of the uprising was witnessed from the district of Prague on the opposite bank of the Vistula by a cynical, complicit and anesthetized Russian army before their eventual 'liberation' from the smoking ruins. For them the battle was simply a tactical element in their drive on Berlin and part of their longer-term strategy to deny independence to Poland. The aim of the insurgents, urged on by a cynical Government-in-Exile in London, was to create a functioning Polish government before the arrival of the Russians. 'This was the revolt of a fly against two giants. One giant waited beyond the river for the other giant to kill the fly.' Scarcely a shot needed to be fired over the lifeless rubble. Neither cat nor dog nor human moved there, only rats scurried among the dead.
Has stopped beneath Warsaw's fiery clouds
And like a vulture with a carcass sates itself
On a handful of madmen, who are dying in the ruins
Mention of the August 1944 uprising inevitably unleashes a fiery response from Poles to this day. It was an action of profound controversy in which detail battles with detail. The resistance is celebrated in memorial services and symbolic re-enactments every year.
Warsaw stops dead at 5.00 pm on 1 August, the time of the uprising began. Sirens wail, traffic ceases to move and people are frozen in time on the pavements. At night the war cemetery flickers with oceans of candles. It is impossible for a generation unaccustomed to war or occupation to imagine the horror of those days. Recorded history sanitizes the most grotesque in human experience: even the magnificent, sometimes harrowing new museum devoted to the rising provides the visitor with an immaculate dry sewer of new bricks devoid of stench.
Warsaw stops dead at 5.00 pm on 1 August, the time of the uprising began. Sirens wail, traffic ceases to move and people are frozen in time on the pavements. At night the war cemetery flickers with oceans of candles. It is impossible for a generation unaccustomed to war or occupation to imagine the horror of those days. Recorded history sanitizes the most grotesque in human experience: even the magnificent, sometimes harrowing new museum devoted to the rising provides the visitor with an immaculate dry sewer of new bricks devoid of stench.
My friend Wojciech Potocki, and Warsaw architect and painter, was just a baby during the rising, but his father was an active member of the AK or Home Army. Like many elderly Poles his parents were unwilling to discuss the war with him but he remembers a few family stories. Before the outbreak of violence his mother used to wheel him around the streets sleeping peacefully on smuggled guns hidden in the bottom of his pram. He told me many stories, any one of which would be sufficient for life.
The Army had captured a German tank and were jubilantly about to board it when Wojciech suddenly began to cry in his parents' nearby apartment. His father came onto the balcony and called to his mother to come as the baby seemed particularly distressed. His mother reluctantly left her friends, irritated by this 'domestic' summons. Shortly after entering the building the booby-trapped tank exploded in a ball of fire as a member of the Army lifted the hatch, killing and wounding many nearby. The cries of her baby had saved her life.
On another occasion after an Aktion (an operation which involved the assembly, deportation and murder of Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust) a German soldier was about to shoot Wojciech's father in the street. His mother begged for his life on her knees. The soldier kept raising his rifle and lowering it indecisively as the pitiful pleading continued. The soldier suddenly noticed a pet red squirrel in a cage on a balcony. In frustration, and unable to overcome his need to kill something, he shot the squirrel dead and stormed off shouting imprecations.
Finally, his father was stalking a German sniper holed up in the rubble of the city. He had crept up behind him when the German suddenly swung around and fired. A 'click' indicated his pistol was empty. Wojciech's father then fired his own pistol but he too was out of ammunition. Both laughed and made their respective escapes.
Wojciech believes to the Warsaw Uprising was a complete waste of the finest in Polish youth and an act of profound irrationality and cynical manipulation. Yet his parents never regretted their actions during those terrible weeks.
Many of the most admirable characteristics of the Polish temperament were graphically illustrated during the rising. The persistent belief that the impossible can be accomplished with sufficient sacrifice has become almost a truism in this country as it ultimately realized the seemingly unachievable dream of becoming an independent nation within the European Union. Did the patriotic spirit of the Uprising inspire the Solidarity Movement post-war Poland, the courage to rebel against their Soviet oppressors? Certainly it must have encouraged this, but this time it would be a 'bloodless' coup' despite the desire for revenge. Belief in the unattainable was, as ever in Poland, driven by that passionate, almost obsessional desire for freedom that peppers so many historical events. 'For your freedom and ours' was the Polish catch cry for hundreds of years. As a foreigner (a colonial Australian) am I actually in a position to judge this Uprising in any meaningful way? Yet the sheer humanity of it moves me desperately...
Such laudable emotions were often unbalanced by an almost cavalier disregard for the consequences of action. The result of the uprising was that some 720,000 civilian Varsovians (including 400,000 Jews - 98% of the Warsaw Jewish population) were slaughtered and the city 85% destroyed. The boundless faith in their Allies had been shattered. The importance of Poland in their eyes had clearly been overestimated. The most promising young people, the flower of the nation, had been offered up in a desperate iconographic gesture of 'freedom'.
After what many Poles consider to be the treacherous sell-out of the country at the Tehran Conference and the long drawn out Yalta accords, Warsaw experienced another half century of Soviet slavery as a reward for her Allied war effort. The paranoid NKVD ( Narodna Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del or People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs) proceeded to shoot or imprison any surviving member of the Home Army they could track down who had been 'Collaborating with' (i.e fighting) the German enemy. Close to ninety- eight per cent of the Jewish population of Warsaw died during the Second World War and around twenty-five per cent of the Polish population. The war and the uprising cost the city some 720,000 lives, half its prewar adult population, 'undoubtedly the greatest slaughter perpetrated within a single city in human history'.
After being almost completely destroyed by barbarian lust, the city miraculously revived in a wave of historicist nostalgia and selfless labor on an unprecedented scale. Poles began clearing the monumental mound of rubble that was Warsaw by hand. Over eighty per cent of the city had been destroyed. In the eighteenth century the Venetian painter Bernardo Bellotto had meticulously painted many views of the city and the surrounding riverscape of the Vistula which were used in a careful regeneration of the original appearance of the Old Town. (Many who knew both towns considered the new version superior.)
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| Bernado Bellotto, called Canaletto - View of Warsaw from the Praga district, 1770 |
In addition it replicating the historical appearance of the city, Varsovians constructed a breathtaking and architecturally faithful reconstruction of the sixteenth-century Royal Castle. The destiny of the Royal Castle is that of the city itself. The statue of King Sigismund III, the king who made Warsaw the capital of Poland, was blasted from the top of the nearby Column of Sigismund III (Sigismund Column) by a tank in 1944. His image lying amidst the rubble and ashes of the city and then restored to its plinth became a potent symbol of death and renewal. The ruination of the castle was shockingly effective as demolition squads were allegedly advised where best to place the charges by prominent Polish art historians. Fortunately, thousands of original sculptural and architectural fragments as well as the furnishings were secretly and courageously saved before the final annihilation. Many surviving fragments were incorporated into the new walls. Due to communist ideological barriers against this national symbol, reconstruction work did not begin until 1971.
On this link you will find a huge number of the most astounding photographs of the Warsaw Rising I have ever encountered. Give yourself time...
Arguably the finest book on the Warsaw Uprising which you really should read if you want more of the extraordinary detail
Warsaw 1944
Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City
Alexandra Richie
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In order to avoid the common confusion by 'foreigners' over the two major wartime Risings in Warsaw:
The Warsaw Ghetto Rising of 19th April 1943
I also post below my account of Ghetto Uprising, hoping to avoid invidious comparisons in terms of their differences of scale and motivation
Both Risings required immense courage in the face of inconceivable barbarism
Both Risings required immense courage in the face of inconceivable barbarism
Do scroll down
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Last night in a quiet moment before I went to sleep I could not help reflecting on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, living as I do where these tragic events occurred only a generation ago. I decided to get out of my warm and cosy bed and read what I had written in my Polish book about this particularly valiant and frantic moment in the tumultuous history of this miracle of a city, Warsaw.
The Ghetto Uprising is too often confused by travellers to this country, understandably unfamiliar with Polish history, with the equally tragic Warsaw Uprising that began on 1 August 1944. As an Australian author with no Jewish or Polish roots, I too initially suffered from a lamentable ignorance of matters almost beyond comprehension for one raised in 'The Lucky Country' - until I began to read. In this I consider myself privileged to have a rather more objective, what one might even term an outsider's view of such historical events. I count myself lucky not to have absorbed the cruel prejudices against Jews, Poles and Poland that are still inherited by those born into the collective unconscious of Europe.
Doubt hovers over a thought-provoking remark Stalin is reported to have once made. At the Teheran Conference “Churchill had been arguing that a premature opening of a second front in France would result in an unjustified loss of tens of thousands of Allied soldiers. Stalin responded that 'when one man dies it is a tragedy, when thousands die it's statistics'". Quoted in David McCullough Truman (New York 1992)
Accurately sourced quotation or not, the remark points up the danger of becoming all too familiar with historic events and the relative magnitude of deaths. This particular uprising illustrates at once the most bestial in human nature and its most noble qualities of resistance, courage even poetry of the darkest hue. We are in danger not of forgetting the event itself, but of forgetting the detail of it which when once recalled or first encountered profoundly moves the soul to pity.
We are lost in the welter of information concerning the perpetration of our own current appalling atrocities, horrors which are slowly obliterating or leaching away the intensity of past memory.
The metaphor changes but the bestiality remains. We must remember such past events but not to avoid them happening again. They will not be repeated in the same way by man the chameleon. He is too clever for that. Rather we need to remember and constantly remind ourselves that in human nature a brutish creature of terrifying proportions lies perilously close beneath the surface veneer of charm, moral goodness and virtuous intentions.
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| Detail within the Childrens' Memorial in the Jewish Cemetery, Warsaw |
Click on photographs to enlarge for superior image
Extract from Chapter 4 Warsaw the Phoenix from:
A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland by Michael Moran (Granta, London 2008)
In a history increasingly bleached by time, the city [Warsaw] suffered gross physical destruction by the Nazis, murderous repressions without parallel in revenge for both the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 19 April – 16 May 1943 and the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest and most infamous of the Nazi ghettos where almost 480,000 Jews died from either disease, malnutrition, execution or were murdered at Treblinka.
[Originally a footnote: This statistic is from Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940–1945, Gunnar S. Paulsson (New Haven 2002). The book is an extraordinary account of Jews in hiding with carefully researched statistics and many astounding individual stories of courageous Jewish resistance and protection of Jews by Poles. See also Words Outlive Us: Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. Michał Grynberg trans. Philip Boehm (New York 2002) p. 1. This is a heartbreaking collection of first-hand testimonies of life in the ghetto. These eyewitness accounts were written by a remarkable range of people from all walks of life either in the ghetto or clandestinely outside, discovered in the rubble of Warsaw or passed through the hands of survivors. The grimmest of truths lies in the details that speak from pages that ‘challenge us to imagine the unimaginable’. This is individual suffering by real people and not the sanitized, meaningless generalized statistics trotted out as contemporary ‘history’. Indispensable if you have the courage not to turn aside.]
In the Ghetto it was said that everyone had ‘death in his eyes’ or ‘a skull instead of a face’. The creation of it necessitated the displacement of over 200,000 Poles and Jews from their homes and businesses. A popular saying among Germans at the time was ‘The Poles we hate instinctively; the Jews we hate in accordance with orders.’ The displaced lost everything. The Nazis established the Warsaw Ghetto by decree on 12 October 1940 – on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
It was divided into three main sections. In the ‘Little Ghetto’ wealthy Jews and the intelligentsia lived well. The pianist Władysław Szpilman (whose memoir of the Ghetto, The Pianist, was an international bestseller) wrote of the Café Nowoczesna: ‘This was the meeting place of the rich; dripping with gold and glittering with diamonds; this was where painted harlots, at tables bedecked with delicacies, seduced the wartime noveaux riches, to the accompaniment of popping champagne corks.’ He went on to describe the hunger and illness of the poor in the ‘Big Ghetto’, dead children lying uncollected in the streets. The third section was the industrial ghetto where the Jewish workers and their families were worked to death as slave labour.
[Footnote: Śmierć miasta (Death of a City), Władysław Szpilman, compiled by Jerzy Waldorff (Warsaw 1946). This is the original unedited text of The Pianist, trans. Anthea Bell (London 1999)]
The Ghetto witnessed the departure of the packed cattle trucks from the Umschlagplatz (Shipment Square), the transport hub for the extermination camp of Treblinka and the Lublin labour camps.The Jewish police ‘delivered’ up to twelve thousand souls per day to the Nazis in the Umschlagplatz to die or work as slaves. Desperate parents drugged their infants and concealed them in knapsacks and suitcases which were often lost on the carts. Babies woke in the terrifying dark, buried alive, never to be seen again. Jews were driven to the overcrowded holding areas of the ‘Hospital for Infectious Diseases’, a building swimming in faeces, urine and blood ‘as if designed by a satanic architect’. Cattle cars were packed with a hundred and twenty people in a space designed for twenty horses. And then the gas.
After a tiring day at the ‘Umschlag’ one sadistic SS officer habitually drove around the Ghetto streets in a Mercedes sports car picking off strays with his revolver. Another asked a woman carrying a baby on her shoulder if she had had a difficult day’s work. She responded positively to his gesture of concern. He then asked her if she would like a loaf of bread. She thanked him profusely for his generosity. As she walked away with optimism in her heart he took careful aim and shot her baby through the head.
[Originally a footnote: A rarely performed and largely forgotten but unparalleled expression in Western music of this suffering forms the seven agonizing minutes of Ein Überlebender aus Warschau Op. 46 (A Survivor from Warsaw) (1947) for orchestra and narrator by Arnold Schoenberg. In a text written by Schoenberg himself in English (a narrator living in the sewers of Warsaw), German (a violent Nazi sergeant barking orders to the gas chambers) and Hebrew (the prayer Shem’a Yisroel) he expresses how consolation in extreme adversity can come from song and prayer.]
The Ghetto uprising in April 1943, led by Mordechai Anielewicz, was an act of inconceivable courage that has achieved formidable symbolic and moral stature. Yet after ninety per cent of the Jews had been murdered and the Ghetto destroyed and replaced by the concentration camp KL Warschau (where tens of thousands of Gentile Poles died) there remained in Warsaw ‘the largest clandestine community of Jews anywhere in Europe, in fact probably the largest community of people that has lived in hiding in any city, ever.’ (Paulsson)
Some ten per cent of Poles in Warsaw helped Jews to hide, and many more provided food, clothes and money for their Jewish friends. Few were betrayed to the common enemy. Some 28,000 Jews hid on the Aryan side while so-called ‘wild’ Jews returned to the burned-out ruins of the ‘wild’ Ghetto and lived like rats.
An iconic moment of German–Polish reconciliation occurred in December 1970 when the then Federal Chancellor of Germany, Willy Brandt, spontaneously fell to his knees in a silent apology at the memorial to Jews murdered by the SS in the Ghetto. ‘On the abyss of German history and carrying the burden of the millions who were murdered, I did what people do when words fail them,’ he commented later. This kneeling figure became a symbolic image of the way forward for a mercilessly divided Europe.
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Detail from the Childrens' Memorial in the Jewish Cemetery, Warsaw |
A visit to the Jewish Cemetery adjacent to Powązki in Okopowa Street is a powerful and melancholic reminder of the tremendous historical presence of Jews in Warsaw and the central contribution they made to the life of the city. From 1527 to 1795 Jews were not permitted to live in Warsaw. The cemetery was founded in 1806, at that time outside the walls, and covered a massive eighty acres.
Up to 1939 it contained the bodies of some 200,000 Jews in marked graves. Much of it is a sad and neglected place, finely carved grave-stones overgrown and awry, decorative wrought iron rusting in piles, doors to mausoleums gaping as if the soul has fled. Despite this, clearance and dedication by volunteers has improved sections immeasurably over the years. Most moving are the common mass graves to the Ghetto Insurgents (overgrown grassy depressions surrounded by a circle of white marble standing stones with a simple black band) and memorial graves erected by Jewish families living abroad to honour family members murdered but never met. An inscription reads ‘In memory of one million Jewish children murdered by Nazi German barbarians 1939–1945.’
A statue of the renowned Janusz Korczak ‘The King of Children’ gently accompanies a few of his charges from his orphanage to their joint annihilation. Of the numberless descriptions I have read of the horrors of the Holocaust, this passage, describing the final journey of 200 children to the Treblinka extermination camp, is the most heart-rending of all. It comes from Władysław Szpilman’s The Pianist.
One day, around 5th August, when I had to take a brief rest from work and was walking down Gęsia Street, I happened to see Janusz Korczak and his orphans leaving the ghetto.
The evacuation of the Jewish orphanage run by Janusz Korczak had been ordered for that morning. The children were to have been taken away alone. He had the chance to save himself, and it was only with difficulty that he persuaded the Germans to take him too. He had spent long years of his life with children, and now, on this last journey, he could not leave them alone. He wanted to ease things for them. He told the orphans they were going out into the country, so they ought to be cheerful. At last they would be able to exchange the horrible, suffocating city walls for meadows of flowers, streams where they could bathe, woods full of berries and mushrooms. He told them to wear their best clothes, and so they came out into the yard, two by two, nicely dressed and in a happy mood.
The little column was lead by an SS man who loved children, as Germans do, even those he was about to see on their way into the next world. He took a special liking to a boy of twelve, a violinist who had his instrument under his arm. The SS man told him to go to the head of the procession of children and play – and so they set off.
When I met them in Gęsia Street the smiling children were singing in chorus, the little violinist was playing for them and Korczak was carrying two of the smallest infants, who were beaming too, and telling them some amusing story.
I am sure that even in the gas chamber, as the Zyklon B gas was stifling childish throats and striking terror instead of hope into the orphans’ hearts, the Old Doctor must have whispered with one last effort, ‘It’s all right, children, it will be all right,’ so that at least he could spare his little charges the fear of passing from life to death.
Janusz Korczak (1878–1942) was the pseudonym of Henryk Goldszmit, the heroic Polish-Jewish paediatrician, children’s author and educational theorist. Andrzej Wajda made a film of his life in 1990 called Dr Korczak.
All extracts from A Country in the Moon : Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland by Michael Moran
(Granta, London 2008
in Polish
Wydawnictwo Czarne, Warsaw 2011)
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Polish version
Michael Moran: Kraj z Ksiezyca : Podroze do serca polski (Wydawnicwo Czarne, Warszawa 2011)
Kra z Ksiezyca : Podroze do serca Polski (Wydawnicwo Czarne, Warszawa 2011)
Michael Moran: Kraj z Ksiezyca : Podroze do serca polski (Wydawnicwo Czarne, Warszawa 2011)
Pozostawieni przez aliantów na pastwę Stalina, Polacy stanęli do mężnego lecz beznadziejnego boju, wzniecając w sierpniu 1944 powstanie w Warszawie. Żołnierze AK[1], dorośli, młodzież i dzieci, walczyli z SS i Wermachtem pośród hałd gruzu, w płonących budynkach, piwnicach i kanałach. Przez dwa miesiące nad miastem unosił się wysoki na kilometr obłok dymu i ognia. John Ward, brytyjski lotnik i korespondent „Timesa” w czasie powstania, pisał w 1944 roku: „Dziś toczy się w Warszawie bitwa, którą narodowi brytyjskiemu bardzo trudno zrozumieć. To wojna, w której uczestniczą w równym stopniu cywile, jak i żołnierze AK… To wojna totalna”.
Pięć lat okrutnej okupacji zjednoczyło Polaków w wybuchu nienawiści i żądzy zemsty, a nawet radości, jaką dawało podjęcie konkretnych działań przeciwko oprawcy, wspaniały gest sprzeciwu. Wszystkie klasy społeczne łączyły się we wspólnym działaniu. „Oswobodzona Warszawa pulsowała wolnością…” pisała Joanna Hanson w swej zajmującej książce „The Civilian Population and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944” (tytuł polski „Nieludzkiej poddani próbie”).
Jednak polityczne i wojskowe przyczyny powstania nie były jednoznaczne. Niektórzy warszawiacy nie chcieli zbrojnego konfliktu i uważali, że to nieprzemyślany pomysł. Wielu nie było psychologicznie i materialnie przygotowanych do tego rodzaju walki. Dzieci dostarczały jedzenie, broń i amunicję dla żołnierzy, podczas gdy nieustraszeni harcerze przenosili gazety i pocztę (listy ograniczone do dwudziestu pięciu słów). Zbiorowe modlitwy i wiara katolicka podtrzymywały społeczeństwo na duchu i dodawały mu sił, jak zawsze w Polsce znajdującej się pod obcą okupacją.
Różne dzielnice Warszawy doświadczyły przemocy wroga w różnym stopniu i na różne sposoby. Straszliwie ucierpiało Stare Miasto, a jego upadek miał być zapowiedzią ostatecznej kapitulacji i zagłady całej stolicy. Niektórzy mieszkańcy byli tak zdesperowani, że „jedli kluski gotowane w wodzie, która spływała po trupach”.[2] Utrzymanie stałej łączności między poszczególnymi oddziałami (to właśnie z powodu tych trudności nie wszystkie oddziały rozpoczęły walkę w tym samym czasie), a później pomiędzy poszczególnymi dzielnicami miasta, okazało się zadaniem bardzo trudnym. Nieuniknioną konsekwencją przeciągania się walk dalece poza założony wcześniej okres były zmiany nastroju ludności cywilnej. Ogromnym problemem stał się brak wody; fatalne warunki życiowe i wieczny głód pozbawiały wszystkich sił. Obietnice pomocy, składane przez sprzymierzeńców, okazały się niewiele warte, a w przypadku sowietów kłamliwe. Rozczarowanie postawą aliantów, działaniami rządu Rządu RP na Uchodźstwie i konflikty z AK osłabiały duch oporu.
Hitler, wściekły na harde miasto, które odważyło się sprzeciwić jego paranoi, kazał unicestwić Warszawę i jej mieszkańców. Ci, którzy nie zginęli w zrujnowanych kamienicach lub nie spłonęli w ogniu miotaczy, umierali pod ulicami, w kanałach ściekowych. Niemieckie kule dosięgały także i tych, którym udało się przejść kanałami, gdy wychodzili już ze studzienek włazowych, okryci ekskrementami.
Sowieci zastosowali swoją niesławną „zasadę hieny” i czekali, aż wstrząsane przedśmiertnymi drgawkami ciało całkiem znieruchomieje. Zmasakrowana Warszawa dogorywała, a z drugiej strony Wisły, z dzielnicy Praga, przyglądała się temu cyniczna, obojętna i współwinna tej klęski armia sowiecka, która kilka miesięcy później „wyzwoliła” dymiące ruiny. Dla nich ta bitwa była tylko taktycznym elementem pochodu na Berlin i częścią długoterminowej strategii, która miała na celu zniewolenie Polski. Celem powstańców był mężny opór, wyraz politycznej i moralnej jedności – kolejny akt tak dobrze znanej Polakom walki o wolność i godność. „Było to powstanie muchy przeciwko dwóm olbrzymom. Jeden olbrzym stał za rzeką i czekał, aż drugi olbrzym zdusi muchę”.[3] Wchodząc do wypalonego morza ruin, Rosjanie nie musieli oddać ani jednego strzału. Nie było tu ludzi, kotów ani psów, tylko szczury przemykały między trupami.
Legła twa armia zwycięska, czerwona
U stóp łun jasnych płonącej Warszawy
I ścierwią duszę syci bólem krwawym
Garstki szaleńców, co na gruzach kona…[4]
Powstanie warszawskie do dziś wywołuje żywe reakcje Polaków, będąc przedmiotem wielu sporów i kontrowersji, pojedynków na drobne szczegóły i opinie. Rocznica powstania co roku obchodzona jest na wiele sposób, między innymi podczas nabożeństw żałobnych i rekonstrukcji poszczególnych bitew lub potyczek odgrywanych na ulicach miasta. Warszawa nieruchomieje na moment pierwszego sierpnia o piątej po południu, w rocznicę wybuchu powstania. Wyją syreny, samochody zatrzymują się na ulicach, ludzie stoją w pełnym powagi milczeniu. Pokolenie, które nie miało do czynienia z wojną i okupacją, nie jest w stanie wyobrazić sobie grozy tamtych czasów. Oficjalna historia „ugrzecznia” te straszliwe doświadczenia: nawet wspaniałe, a czasem przerażające, nowe muzeum poświęcone powstaniu pokazuje zwiedzającym nienagannie czysty kanał ściekowy pozbawiony duszącego smrodu[5].
Mój przyjaciel Wojciech Potocki, warszawski malarz i architekt, podczas powstania był jeszcze małym dzieckiem, ale jego ojciec był aktywnym członkiem Armii Krajowej. Podobnie jak wielu starszych Polaków, rodzice Wojciecha nie chcieli rozmawiać z nim o wojnie, udało mu się jednak zapamiętać kilka rodzinnych opowieści. Przed wybuchem powstania zdarzało się nieraz, że matka woziła go po ulicach Warszawy w wózku wyładowanym na dnie bronią, podczas gdy on smacznie sobie spał na tym niezwykłym posłaniu. Usłyszałem od niego jeszcze wiele innych historii, z których każda mogłaby stać się najważniejszym punktem życia innego człowieka.
Powstańcy zdobyli niemiecki czołg i uradowani chcieli już do niego wsiadać, kiedy nagle Wojciech zaczął głośno płakać w pobliskim mieszkaniu swoich rodziców. Jego ojciec wyszedł na balkon i zawołał jego matkę, dziecko wydawało się bowiem wyjątkowo niespokojne. Matka Wojciecha z ociąganiem zostawiła swoich przyjaciół, zirytowana rodzinnymi problemami. Ledwie weszła do budynku, jeden z żołnierzy podniósł klapę włazu, a czołg-pułapka eksplodował, zamieniając się w kulę ognia. Zginęło wówczas kilkaset osób zgromadzonych wokół czołgu, wiele innych zostało rannych. Płacz Wojciecha uratował jego matce życie.
Innym razem, tuż po Aktion (w czasach holocaustu była to operacja, podczas której naziści gromadzili, deportowali i mordowali Żydów), jakiś niemiecki żołnierz chciał zastrzelić ojca Wojciecha na ulicy. Jego matka błagała na kolanach, by darował mu życie. Żołnierz podnosił i opuszczał karabin, niezdecydowany. Wreszcie zauważył na balkonie klatkę z oswojoną wiewiórką. Sfrustrowany i wiedziony potrzebą zabicia czegokolwiek, zastrzelił wiewiórkę i odszedł, wykrzykując obelgi.
Kiedy indziej jeszcze ojciec Wojciecha tropił niemieckiego snajpera ukrytego w ruinach miasta. Podkradł się tuż za niego, gdy nagle Niemiec obrócił się w miejscu i nacisnął spust. Rozległ się głuchy trzask, świadczący o tym, że karabin jest pusty. Wtedy ojciec Wojciecha sam pociągnął za spust, ale okazało się, że i jemu zabrakło amunicji. Obaj roześmieli się i uciekli w różne strony. Wojciech uważa, że powstanie warszawskie było aktem zupełnie irracjonalnym, wynikiem cynicznej manipulacji, która doprowadziła do śmierci kwiatu warszawskiej młodzieży. Jego rodzice nigdy jednak nie żałowali czynów, których dokonali podczas tych straszliwych tygodni.
Podczas powstania uwidoczniło się wiele spośród najbardziej godnych podziwu cech polskiego charakteru. Głęboka wiara w to, że dzięki wystarczająco dużemu poświęceniu można osiągnąć niemożliwe, stała się w kraju niemal truizmem, a teraz znajduje w końcu swoje potwierdzenie, Polska bowiem odzyskała nareszcie pełną niepodległość i jako wolne państwo została członkiem Unii Europejskiej. Wiarę w nieosiągalne zawsze wspierało przemożne, obsesyjne niemal pragnienie wolności, będące przyczyną tak wielu wydarzeń w historii tego narodu.
Jednakże porwani tymi chwalebnymi emocjami Polacy często nie liczyli się w ogóle konsekwencjami swych działań. W wyniku powstania zginęło około 200 000 mieszkańców Warszawy, a 85% zabudowy miasta zostało zrównane z ziemią. W gruzach legła również niezachwiana do tej pory wiara w aliantów; okazało się, że Polska wcale nie była dla nich tak ważna, jak chcieliby w to wierzyć sami Polacy. Tysiące wspaniałych młodych ludzi, kwiat narodu, zostało poświęconych w tym desperackim geście „walki o wolność”.
Po konferencji w Teheranie, podczas której zdaniem wielu Polaków ich kraj został haniebnie zdradzony i sprzedany, oraz po ustaleniach konferencji jałtańskiej, Warszawa w nagrodę za swój wkład w działania wojenne aliantów doświadczyła kolejnych pięćdziesięciu lat niewoli, tym razem sowieckiej. Paranoiczna policja polityczna NKWD (Narodnyj Komissariat Wnutriennich Dieł) zabijała lub zamykała w więzieniach wszystkich członków Armii Krajowej, których udało jej się wytropić, oskarżając ich o kolaborację (czyli walkę) z niemieckim wrogiem. Podczas drugiej wojny światowej zginęło niemal dziewięćdziesiąt osiem procent Żydów mieszkających w Warszawie i około dwadzieścia pięć procent całej ludności Polski. W czasie wojny i powstania życie straciło 720 000 mieszkańców stolicy, połowa jej przedwojennej populacji, co było „bez wątpienia największą zbrodnią dokonaną w obrębie jednego miasta w całej historii ludzkości.”[6]
Choć niemal całkowicie zniszczone przez barbarzyńską żądzę władzy, miasto w cudowny sposób podniosło się z ruin dzięki fali historycznej nostalgii oraz ogromnemu, bezinteresownemu wysiłkowi o niespotykanej dotąd skali. Polacy gołymi rękami zaczęli porządkować monumentalną stertę gruzów, w którą zamieniała się Warszawa. Zniszczeniu uległo ponad osiemdziesiąt procent miasta. W osiemnastym wieku wenecki malarz Bernardo Bellotto[7] namalował wiele szczegółowych pejzaży przedstawiających samo miasto oraz okoliczne krajobrazy nadwiślańskie, które to pejzaże wykorzystane zostały później do odtworzenia oryginalnego wyglądu Starego Miasta. (Wielu spośród tych, którzy widzieli obie starówki, uważa nową wersję za lepszą.)
Warszawianie nie tylko odbudowali starówkę, ale stworzyli też zapierającą dech w piersiach i architektonicznie wierną pierwowzorowi rekonstrukcję Zamku Królewskiego. Losy Zamku stanowią doskonałą ilustrację losów samego miasta. Posąg króla Zygmunta III, który uczynił Warszawę stolicą Polski, w 1944 roku został strącony pociskiem czołgowym z pobliskiej kolumny. Podobizna króla, leżąca pośród ruin i popiołów miasta, a potem ponownie ustawiona na postumencie, stała się sugestywnym symbolem śmierci i odrodzenia. Samo wyburzanie zamku było szokująco skuteczne, gdyż oddziały saperskie korzystały podobno z pomocy wybitnych polskich historyków sztuki, którzy podpowiadali im, gdzie umieścić ładunki. Na szczęście dzięki odwadze innych Polaków tysiące oryginalnych elementów wystroju wnętrz oraz rzeźbień i fragmentów architektonicznych zostało ocalonych przed ostateczną zagładą budynku zamkowego. Później fragmenty te zostały włączone w nowe mury zamku.
Ze względu na ideologiczne bariery stawiane przez komunistów, odbudowa tego symbolu narodowego rozpoczęła się dopiero w 1971 roku.
[1] AK czyli Armia Krajowa powstała w 1942 (wcześniej, od 1939 roku, działała jako Związek Walki Zbrojnej) roku i była największym ruchem oporu w okupowanej Europie. Oficjalnie była częścią polskich sił zbrojnych i jako taka posiadała silne struktury polityczne i prawne. Zbrojne powstanie przeciwko okupantowi uważane było za jej naturalny obowiązek.
[2] Cytowane w „The Civilian Population and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944” (Cambridge 1982) str. 110
[3] „Zniewolony umysł”, Czesław Miłosz
[4] Z wiersza „Czerwona zaraza” Józefa Szczepańskiego z „Parasola” (kryptonim batalionu AK). Poeta Józef Szczepański znany był w AK pod pseudonimem „Ziutek”. Wiersz zamieszczony w książce Normana Daviesa „Powstanie ’44. Bitwa o Warszawę”. (Kraków 2006) str. 909
[5] Wstrząsający film Andrzeja Wajdy „Kanał” doskonale oddaje grozę tych dantejskich scen rozgrywających się pod ulicami Warszawy. Film ukazuje tragiczną zdradę, kłamstwa i rozczarowanie, a także heroizm ludzkiej egzystencji w czasie wojny.
[6] Op. cit. Paulsson s. 1
[7] Bernardo Bellotto urodził się w Wenecji, w 1721 roku, i zmarł w Warszawie, w roku 1780. Był bratankiem słynnego Giovanniego Antonio Canala (znanego jako Caneletto), a ponieważ sygnował swoje obrazy „Il Canaletto”, często bywał mylony ze swym słynniejszym krewniakiem (czemu wcale nie próbował przeciwdziałać). Jego wspaniałe panoramy łączyły w sobie drobiazgowość realizmu architektonicznego z nastrojowym światłem. Król Stanisław August zlecił mu namalowanie dwudziestu sześciu obrazów do „Pokoju Canaletta” w Zamku Królewskim. Projekty odbudowanej po wojnie starówki oraz Zamku Królewskiego bazowały w dużej mierze na jego cudem ocalałych, szczegółowych verdutas.
http://www.michael-moran.net/poland.htm (English edition)
http://czarne.com.pl/katalog/ksiazki/kraj-z-ksiezyca (Polish edition)
One might also like to be reminded of the wonderful Martha Argerich and Friends Commemorative Concert at the POLIN Jewish Museum Warsaw on 17th February 2018:
http://www.michael-moran.com/2018/02/martha-argerich-and-friends-polin.ht
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