“I felt free”: commemorating the Warsaw Uprising
Published: Friday, Jul 26th 2024, 10:30
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On a warm day in August 1944, Janusz Maksymowicz is standing on the top floor of a bombed-out house in Warsaw's Old Town. The 16-year-old is a soldier in the Polish underground army Armia Krajowa (Home Army). Together with two other young fighters, he was sent to this lookout post.
"Down on the street, the Germans approached with three tanks, with infantry marching in between," recalls Maksymowicz (96) today. The boys threw a grenade and a few Molotov cocktails at the first tank. "The explosion tore the left track, it spun loose. The tank spun in circles on the right track, then it caught fire. The crew got out, we shot at them." In the end, the Germans retreated. It was a small triumph for the Polish resistance against the overpowering German occupiers.
The Warsaw Uprising began 80 years ago, on August 1, 1944. It was the largest armed action of the Polish resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Poland. The capital was to be liberated under its own steam. But the uprising, which lasted 63 days, failed. Around 200,000 people lost their lives, around 90 percent of whom were civilians. Warsaw was largely destroyed by the Germans in a punitive action. The suppression of the resistance was one of the worst German crimes of the Second World War. On the 80th anniversary, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will come to Warsaw to commemorate the victims.
Secret shooting training with the father
The underground army was led by officers of the Polish army who had gone into hiding after the German invasion of Poland began in 1939. Many scouts between the ages of 14 and 16 joined them. "My father was in the resistance and gave young people shooting training in the forest. At some point, I asked him if I could join," says Maksymowicz.
Another insurgent, Jerzy Substyk, joins the resistance through a friend from the Boy Scouts. He was 16 years old when he received the mobilization order on 1 August. "When the uprising broke out, white and red flags were waving in the streets. I felt free. I was a soldier, with a weapon in my hand, equal to the enemy. I no longer had to run away," says the now 96-year-old. He was so convinced that the uprising would be a quick success that he packed his Sunday best when he mobilized. "I wanted to wear them at the victory parade."
"The insurgents were fully aware that they could not win a battle against the Germans, against the Wehrmacht, in the long term," says Berlin historian Stephan Lehnstaedt, author of a recently published book on the Warsaw Uprising. "The leadership circles of the Armia Krajowa assumed at the time that it would be possible to achieve success against the Germans for five days. After that, you just have to wait for them to crush the uprising."
However, the insurgents expected the Soviet Union, whose Red Army was advancing on Warsaw from the east, to come to their aid. "The plan was to stage our uprising and welcome the Red Army, which would then arrive, as the landlord," says Lehnstaedt. But the plan didn't work out. For one thing, the Red Army did not advance as quickly as expected. On August 3 and 4, it suffered a defeat in the tank battle of Radzymin outside Warsaw. Secondly, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin had no interest in helping the recalcitrant Poles. "The Warsaw Uprising failed because the Red Army did not come," concludes historian Lehnstaedt.
Dangerous escape through stinking sewage
In Warsaw, life becomes hell for underground fighters and civilians. The Wehrmacht air force bombed the city. Units such as the notorious Dirlewanger Regiment, made up of professional criminals, poachers and convicted SS men, murder civilians en masse. The Germans cut off the water supply. Food becomes scarce.
The insurgents are pushed back from the old town. They flee through the sewers. "It was terrible: the stench, the darkness and the water," recalls Maksymowicz. "We had a cord that you had to hold on to. Pull it once and you were quiet. Pull it twice: Stand still." If the occupiers noticed the movement, they threw grenades into the gullies.
The Germans destroy Poland's capital
On October 2, the leaders of the Armia Krajowa sign the surrender document. The fighters are treated as prisoners of war in accordance with the Geneva Convention. Maksymowicz, who was injured in a military hospital at the end of the uprising, remembers feeling "terrible bitterness". His home city of Warsaw was 30 percent destroyed. After the uprising was suppressed, the Germans systematically blew up most of the buildings still standing. The massacres of the civilian population continue.
"The Warsaw Uprising was not at all worthwhile for the Poles. The result was a destroyed Warsaw and 150,000 to 180,000 civilian victims," is historian Lehnstaedt's assessment. The question is rather why this uprising was necessary from the logic of the time. "It was based on the principle of hope. It was an attempt to determine one's own fate." This is why the commemoration of the Warsaw Uprising is both a commemoration of heroes and a commemoration of victims.
In Poland, the uprising and its consequences have been discussed time and again. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski (1922-2015), himself an AK fighter and a pioneer of European reconciliation in a long political life, once said that the uprising had become a "source of maintaining dignity" for the Poles. Memory gave Poles confidence during the four decades of communist rule. The insurgents' dream of independence was only fulfilled when Poland was released from Soviet rule in 1989.
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