Poland’s Three Uprisings

The week before Thanksgiving, my favorite American holiday, I visited Poland to help the publisher of my books there, Credo, celebrate their tenth anniversary. Warsaw is a lovely city, situated along a broad river. Its main street, now a cobblestone pedestrian mall, winds past baroque churches, a university, the royal palace, and an Old Town of narrow alleys and medieval-style buildings. The visitor quickly learns, however, that these “old” buildings are actually new, rebuilt after the destruction of World War II.

Thanks to movies like Roman Polanski’s The Pianist and books like Leon Uris’s Mila 18, many of us know about the 1943 uprising of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. German Nazis first corralled Warsaw’s Jewish population of more than 300,000 into a dense central area of the city surrounded by concrete walls and barbed wire. For three years the Jews suffered disease, overcrowding, and starvation. Then the Nazis began a program to transport them all to extermination camps.

After some 250,000 Ghetto residents had been rounded up and killed at Treblinka, the survivors rose up in the largest single revolt by Jews during the Holocaust. Poorly armed but fighting for their lives, the rebels held off the Germans for four months until finally the SS brutally crushed the uprising. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising stands as the strongest refutation of the common perception that all Jews went “like sheep to the slaughter” during the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the resistance was futile: in the end only 100,000 of Poland’s three million Jews survived the war and Hitler’s extermination policies.

The following year, in an event far less known, Warsaw’s Gentile population also rose up against the Nazi occupiers.  By the autumn of 1944, Germany’s defeat seemed inevitable. After the D-Day invasion, Allied forces had proceeded to reclaim much of Western Europe and Soviet forces had rolled back German advances to the East. Indeed, the Soviet Red Army had marched to the very suburbs of Warsaw, less than ten miles from the capital. The Polish Home Army, an underground network of 50,000 insurgents, chose August 1 as a day to begin the liberation of their city. Bands played, the red-and-white Polish flag suddenly appeared all over the city, and women gaily danced with Polish soldiers in the streets. Surely, they thought, the Russian army would support their revolt, or at the least the American and British allies would provide air support or airdrop needed weapons.

Neither happened. Instead, the Soviets halted their advance, dug in, and watched. The Home Army won a few skirmishes in the early days, infuriating SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who decided to destroy the city as a lesson to the rest of Europe. The German army rushed tanks, rocket launchers, and machine guns to the city, and the German air force filled the skies with bombers.

Why did no one come to the Poles’ defense? Josef Stalin harbored a personal hatred of the Poles because of bitter memories from the Soviet-Polish War, and he also had plans to incorporate Poland into the Soviet empire. Already the Russians had slaughtered 8,000 Polish army officers in the infamous Katyn incident. Poles who rebelled against Hitler’s occupying army may well rebel against the Soviets who would displace them, so why not let the Germans do the dirty work of destroying the rebels?  The Allies asked Stalin for permission to use nearby airbases or at least make airdrops; he refused. When Churchill proposed aid missions despite Stalin’s objections, Franklin Roosevelt responded, “I do not consider it advantageous to the long-range general war prospect for me to join you in the proposed message to Uncle Joe [Stalin].”

Free from outside interference, the Germans began a systematic program of slaughter and destruction.  On one bloody day known as the Wola massacre, they executed at least 30,000 civilians including women, children, and the elderly. For 63 days the Polish Home Army held out, starved of food and ammunition, often hiding in Warsaw’s sewers as a protection against the relentless bombing. In all, some 200,000 civilians died in the fighting. The SS chief Himmler decreed, “The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.” He got his wish. The entire population of Warsaw was sent to transit camps and German engineers moved from building to building, dynamiting each one. In all, 85 percent of the buildings in Warsaw were destroyed.

Here are three eyewitness reports from those 63 tragic days:

“Imagine the scene: executions here, houses ablaze there—and then they burnt the bodies. You don’t forget a smell like that.”

“Imagine a narrow tunnel the shape of an egg, and having to run bow-legged with one foot on each inner shell of that egg, over sediment of toxic chemicals and decomposing bodies of the many who died down there, from suffocation or carbide gases the Germans used.”

“We did not only grow up quickly during those days, we grew old. At first it was a big adventure.  But we hadn’t thought what it would be like to see your comrades lying on the ground, their entrails lying beside them, begging their friends to kill them, to put them out of their pain.”

I learned about the Warsaw Uprising by visiting a museum opened in 2004 on the 60^th anniversary of the revolt. According to my Polish guides, the aftermath of the war ushered in a new kind of atrocity, the execution of truth, as the Soviet conquerors nearly obliterated this tragic/heroic event from memory. In a bitter irony, once Stalin’s forces took over Poland they arrested leaders of the Polish Underground State, accused them of being fascists and Nazi sympathizers (!) and wrote history books portraying them as traitors to the Polish people. Until the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989, Polish schoolchildren learned this revisionist history, a view corrected only by the whispered contradictions of their parents.  The name of the Home Army never appeared in print and propaganda films reinforced the official Soviet line.

I visited the museum on a Sunday, and earlier that day I had slipped into a couple of churches in downtown Warsaw. Poland is 96 percent Catholic and both churches were packed with worshipers, a rare sight in modern Europe. I could not understand the language, but as I stood at the back I thought of the devout Poles who had prayed first for deliverance from the Germans and then from the Soviets.  Appropriately, my first book translated into Polish was Disappointment with God. Poland has the misfortune of being a relatively flat, fertile land positioned between two great empires, and its history records many invasions from both directions. 

Today the sun shines more brightly over Poland. Its economy is growing, a contrast to most European countries. Sipping coffee in Starbucks, I watched Polish young people in jeans and leather jackets laughing together as they strolled a mall populated with Western shops and fast-food restaurants. After nearly a half-century under Soviet rule the Poles rose up again, a revolt led this time by shipyard workers and coal miners and the very first Polish pope. Improbably, this gunless revolution set their nation free at last.

I returned to the U.S. just in time for Thanksgiving, with renewed reason to give thanks for a country that since independence has not lived under foreign occupation. Like most Americans, I am fed up with a dysfunctional Congress and a presidential campaign filled with pettiness and over-the-top rhetoric. Living in a democracy, we have no one to blame but ourselves. The citizens of Poland are still relishing that privilege.