New Zealand Listener – August 24, 2019

30 LISTENER AUGUST 24 2019

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THE WARSAW UPRISING

crush Polish morale. The American his-

torian Timothy Snyder observed that the

Wola massacre “had nothing in common

with combat ... the ratio of civilian to

military dead was more than a thousand

to one”.

Warsaw was the scene of not one but

two doomed challenges to the Nazi war

machine. Only the year before, Jews incar-

cerated in the infamous Warsaw Ghetto had

staged their own heroic insurrection. It was

put down with the same pitiless force that

the Germans demonstrated in 1944.

Unlike the Polish patriots of the Home

Army, who were fighting for freedom, the

ghetto rebels were fighting for their very

survival. More than 250,000 of the 400,000

Jews crammed into the ghetto had already

been transported to the gas chambers of the

Treblinka concentration camp. Many others

had died from illness and starvation. The

ghetto uprising was a last desperate bid to

avoid extermination.

It’s estimated that 13,000 Jews died in

the month that the uprising lasted, half of

them burnt alive or suffocated by smoke

after the Germans set the ghetto alight using

flamethrowers.

The 1943 revolt is commemorated by the

sombre Monument to the Ghetto Heroes,

erected in 1948. Nearby stands the Museum

of the History of Polish Jews, opened in

2013 on the 70th anniversary of the ghetto

uprising. An outstanding museum and

deservedly a major tourist attraction, its

exhibits cover not just the Holocaust and

the ghetto but also the entire rich and col-

ourful history of Jewry in Poland, which was

home to Europe’s largest Jewish population

until the Nazis set in motion the Final Solu-

tion to what they perceived as the Jewish

problem.

The 1944 uprising has a museum devoted

to it, too, although it is poorly organised

compared with the Jewish museum.

ERASING HISTORY

Tragically, Poland’s agony didn’t end with

the Allied victory in 1945. The country

merely passed from the control of one ruth-

less totalitarian regime based in Berlin to

another based in Moscow.

Poland’s Soviet communist masters went

to extraordinary lengths to ensure that

all remaining embers of Polish national-

ism were extinguished. Just as Stalin had

ordered the extermination of more than

20,000 Polish army officers, intellectuals

and public officials in the infamous Katyn

massacre of 1940, when the Soviet Union

was an ally of the Nazis, so he now set about

erasing the uprising from history.

For decades, Polish monuments were for-

bidden from mentioning the Home Army.

Official accounts concentrated on depict-

ing Poland as having been liberated by the

Red Army. It wasn’t until after 1990, when

Poland had broken free from Soviet domi-

nation, that the full story of the uprising

could be openly told.

More shocking by far, however, were the

arrests of Polish resistance fighters by the

Soviet secret police, the NKVD, on trumped-

up charges of fascism. Many were executed,

tortured, exiled to Soviet gulags or simply

disappeared. In a notorious show trial, 16

leaders of the uprising were found guilty of

illegal activity against the Red Army.

My parents-in-law, liberated when French

soldiers arrived at their labour camp near

Stuttgart in 1945, considered returning to

Poland but wisely decided against it. They

knew of other Poles who had returned

home and never been heard from again –

casualties of state paranoia.

Perhaps the saddest victim of communist

malice was the Polish hero Witold Pilecki.

Remarkably, Pilecki had heard stories about

the extermination of Jews in Auschwitz and

deliberately got himself arrested and impris-

oned so he could check on their veracity.

He spent two years

in Auschwitz before

escaping and passing

detailed information

about the gas cham-

bers to the Allies, who

dismissed his reports

as mere rumours.

Pilecki joined the

Home Army in the

latter stages of the war

and took part in the

uprising, only to be

arrested, tried and executed by Poland’s

communist government in 1948 for treason,

presumably because, during the war, he had

made the mistake of declaring his loyalty

to the London-based government-in-exile.

CAPITALIST DECADENCE

Warsaw today is vibrant, prosperous and

sophisticated. The hideous Stalinist mon-

strosity known as the Palace of Culture and

Science still stands in the heart of the city,

but it seems symbolic of Poland’s trans-

formation that there’s a Club Mirage – a

symbol of capitalist decadence – on the

ground floor.

Once derisively labelled “the Russian

wedding cake”, the building no longer

monopolises the skyline as it did in the

communist era. It now competes for

attention with a cluster of architecturally

audacious high-rise office towers.

Wandering around Warsaw’s picturesque

heart, Stare Miasto (Old Town), no one

would guess the entire city was obliterated

75 years ago. It was painstakingly rebuilt

stone by stone between the 1950s and 70s

• arguably the one worthwhile achieve-
  ment of the communist era. Detailed
  18th-century paintings and old architec-
  tural drawings were used to help recreate
  buildings in their original form.
  Virtually no physical evidence remains of
  the damage done by the war, although the
  ugly pockmarks left by bullets and shrapnel
  are still plainly visible on buildings in the
  suburb of Praga, directly across the Vistula,
  which was held by the Red Army and thus
  spared demolition by the Germans.
  But in the unlikely event that anyone
  could forget what Warsaw endured 75 years
  ago, there are always the memorials. l

Small discreet plaques

in unlikely places

speak eloquently of

Warsaw’s tragedy.

Resistance leader Witold

Pilecki had himself

arrested so he could

investigate rumours

about the Auschwitz

death camp.