The Polish Review, Vol. 69, No. 3, 2024, pp. 3-7.
Remembering by Donald E. Pienkos
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
The tragic saga of the heroic but too little known Warsaw Uprising of 1944 is summarized here on its eightieth anniversary. A personal remembrance follows. The essay ends with a selected bibliography of important publications on Poland’s fate in World War II, the Poles’ resistance to their occupiers, the Uprising itself, and its consequences for the nation. Seven of these works are starred. They were authored by persons who took part in the Uprising.
5 P.M. Tuesday. August 1, 1944. At that fateful hour the leaders of the Polish wartime resistance movement known in the West as the Home Army (Armja Krajowa, or AK) called on its 40,000 members to liberate Warsaw, Poland’s capital after five years of brutal Nazi German occupation. The city and its inhabitants had suffered grievously at the hands of the Germans from the time of their invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, the prologue to World War II. In the years after, its gentile population had endured ruthless German rule; incredibly worse was the fate of Warsaw’s huge Jewish community – doomed by Adolf Hitler to utter destruction in 1942.
The organizers of the Warsaw Uprising had high hopes for success. Aiming to drive the seemingly war weary Germans from the city in six or seven days, the AK’s zealous but poorly equipped soldiers, many of them teenagers, failed in their mission against the heavily armed enemy, whose own ranks were soon reinforced. And when a Soviet army, near Warsaw on the very eve of the Uprising, suddenly ended its advance on the city, the insurgents were ‘on their own’ in a mercilessly unequal fight.
Despite the absence of substantial support from Britain and the United States, the Soviet Union’s great power anti-Nazi allies of Poland’s wartime exile government based in London, the AK fighters carried on. The struggle would go on for 63 days.
When it at last ended on October 2, 1944, the two sides had inflicted devastating casualties on each other. Some 10,000 troops of the Third Reich had been killed, with 7,000 wounded and 9,000 missing. The AK counted 17,200 dead and 5,000 wounded.
Unimaginably, as many as 200,000 non combatants in Warsaw perished as well, victims of Hitler’s barbaric order that residents and combatants alike be killed. In the days after the insurrection, Warsaw’s surviving AK soldiers and civilians were marched out of the city, which Hitler ordered to be destroyed.
On Josef Stalin’s command, the Soviet Army near Warsaw at last entered the ruins in January 1945. There, where more than a million of the Capital’s 1.3 million citizens had lived in 1939, only 22,000 remained.
The suppression of the Uprising ended the AK as an organized fighting force and was a crushing defeat for its sponsor, Poland’s government in exile. The way was now open for Stalin’s creation, the Committee of National Liberation, to make good on its claim to rule a postwar Moscow-dominated puppet state.
Why did Poland’s allies behave as they did after August 1, 1944? In sum, Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s Britain was too weak militarily to do much for the freedom fighters. As for the United States, President Franklin Roosevelt had by then made it clear that his priority was to maintain America’s alliance with the Soviet Union in winning the War in Europe and then in Asia against Japan. A new global order would follow with Stalin’s support of his United Nations proposal. As a consequence, the plight of Poland, and of Warsaw, was of little import to him by 1944. Aside from his sympathetic but unhelpful words to the London Poles, Roosevelt’s main Polish concern was in holding on to the large “Polish vote” to help insure his re-election that November.
Only Stalin, given his overriding commitment to dominate a postwar Poland deprived of half of its prewar territory, was in the position to make a difference in August 1944. Already in military control of much of the country, his refusal to order his Army to join the AK against the Germans was decisive. As a result, Warsaw, its citizens, the AK, and the exile government in London, were doomed. Their loyalty to the Allied cause had gained them nothing.
A devastated, territorially reconfigured postwar Poland, having already lost perhaps seven million of its citizens, would be sentenced to forty-four years of Soviet domination. In contrast, for two generations of Americans, Poland’s World War II experience and the tragedy of the Warsaw Uprising became little more than footnotes in the history books.
But Poland and eighty percent of its inhabitants did survive World War II, the era of Stalinism that followed until 1956, and three more decades of post Stalin communist party rule. In 1980, a new generation of courageous men and women rose up again – inspired by a Pope from Poland and committed to non violence – in Poland’s shipyards, steel mills, coal mines, and countless other places. Their resolve and solidarity would forge a free and sovereign Poland in 1989 and lead to the end of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe. Even more astounding was the Soviet Union’s own collapse in 1991 and with its demise the end of the Cold War.
On the Uprising itself, we do have the publications by some of its participants along with hundreds of unpublished memoirs that merit continuing scholarly study. There are a few movies too, including Andrzej Wajda’s now classic Kanal (The Sewer, 1957) on the final tragic days of the Uprising. An important film entitled Warsaw ’44 appeared in 2014, the seventieth anniversary of the Uprising, but it was not widely shown in the United States.
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Here may I share a personal word. I was born in Chicago, not Warsaw, in January 1944. I grew up learning little of the Uprising, in high school, college, even as a graduate student. In the tumultuous 1967-1968 academic year that my wife Angela and I spent in Poland as PhD candidates, the Uprising was seldom discussed. I did often visit the resurrected Old Town and could scarcely miss the many plaques on the walls of buildings there and around the city, reminders of the men and women, AK soldiers and civilians, shot during the Nazi occupation. But my World War II-related visits were more often to sites like Auschwitz and the great monument memorializing the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943. There were also our get togethers with friends who lived in a Karmelicka Street apartment house built on the ruins of the Ghetto.
But did I fully appreciate that there were two uprisings – one in 1943, the other in 1944? I hope I did.
In the years after I benefited from reading works in Polish history that discussed the Uprising. I had conversations with individuals who had lived through the War – academic colleagues Barbara Borowiecka, Kamil Dziewanowski, and Waclaw Soroka, AK member Jerzy Zubrzycki, who as an 18 year old fighter somehow survived the severe wounds he suffered in the Uprising, and Janina Chmielinska, later an Ursuline Sister, and Zofia Kusmierska, young nurses during those horrific weeks. I spoke with members of the Polish veterans’ associations in America and Jan Krawiec, Maria Lorys, Kazimierz Lukomski, and Edmund Banasikowski of the Polish American Congress, who chose post war exile rather than life under Soviet domination. I met emigres who wrote eloquently about the Nazi occupation and the Uprising from their personal experience – Jan Karski, Jan Nowak, Stefan and Zofia Korbonski, Jozef Garlinski, Janusz Zawodny, Edward Rozek, and Zbigniew Antoni Kruszewski, whose biography appeared in 2021.
In 1984 I was privileged to attend a White House ceremony honoring the Fortieth Anniversary of the Uprising. There President Ronald Reagan spoke from the heart about Poland’s cause (unlike his predecessor decades before). Mr. Korbonski, the last head of the Polish underground state, then rose to thank the President for posthumously recognizing AK Generals Tadeusz Bor Komorowski, Leopold Okulicki, and Stefan Rowecki for their service.
And Angela and I were among the thousands in a sweltering Victory Square in Warsaw on August 1, 1994 where we took part in a Mass commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Uprising.
Yes, in the Warsaw of today, rebuilt, restored and impressive in so many ways, there are reminders of the Warsaw of pre Uprising times – its majestic Old Town, Royal Castle and Cathedral, all rebuilt from the ground up. There are those plaques on buildings around the city and in memorials in its churches and cemeteries. There are the monuments to the Uprising, most strikingly those dedicated in 1989 near the Old Town.
And there is the extraordinary Museum of the Warsaw Uprising on Grzybowska Street which has welcomed more than 8.5 million visitors since its opening in 2005. Its purpose is clear – “to pay homage to those who fought and died for independent Poland and its capital city.”
All help us remember what began at 5 p.m. on August 1, 1944.
REFERENCES
On Germany’s war against Poland in 1939, the Underground State and the AK:
Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1944).
Stefan Korbonski, Fighting Warsaw: The Story of the Polish Underground State 1939-1945 (New York: Minerva Press, 1956). *
Jack Fairweather, The Volunteer (New York: Custom House, 2019).
Roger Moorhouse, Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2020).
On Occupied Poland, its Exile Government and the Great Powers:
Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, The Rape of Poland: Pattern of Soviet Aggression (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948).*
Edward J. Rozek, Allied Wartime Diplomacy: A Pattern in Poland (New York: Wiley, 1958).*
George M. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967).
Richard C. Lukas, The Strange Allies: The United States and Poland, 1941-1945 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978).
Jan Nowak, Courier from Warsaw (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982).*
On the Warsaw Rising and its Aftermath:
Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski, The Secret Army (New York: MacMillan, 1951; 1984).*
Jan M. Ciechanowski, The Warsaw Rising of 1944 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1974).*
Janusz Zawodny, Nothing But Honor: The Story of the Warsaw Uprising (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1979).*
Jozef Garlinski, Poland in World War II (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1985).
Norman Davies, Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw (New York: Macmillan, 2003, 2004),
Wlodzimierz Borodziej, The Warsaw Uprising of 1944, trans. Barbara Harshav (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).
Jadwiga Biskupska, Survivors: Warsaw under Nazi Rule (London: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Other notable scholarly works:
Joanna K.M. Hanson, The Civilian Population and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
Erika L. Tucker, Remembering Occupied Warsaw: Polish Narratives of World War II (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2011).
Alexandra Ritchie, Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Warsaw Uprising (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).
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Thanks go to the Editor of The Polish Review for her assistance on this essay.