On 1 August 1944, one of the largest urban battles of World War II began.
The Warsaw Uprising was the attempt by the Home Army (the Polish Underground State’s fighting force) to liberate Poland’s capital before the advancing Soviet Red Army arrived.
Inadequate intel led the underground leaders to believe that the Germans were on the verge of abandoning the city and that the Red Army was near its eastern outskirts.
The Germans were in fact about to reinforce the city garrison while small Soviet reconnaissance forces had only made probing advances and the eastern bank of the Vistula in Warsaw would not be occupied until late August.
Despite the heroic efforts of the insurgents and the civilian population caught in the crossfire, the Home Army was forced to capitulate after 63 days of fighting.
The absolute advantage of the Germans in planes, artillery and tanks, the inadequate small arms of the insurgents, Stalin’s refusal for Allied planes to land after making supply drops to the city, the Red Army’s near total inactivity, and above all, the earlier decision of the Allies at the Teheran Conference to leave Poland in the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, sealed Warsaw’s fate.
The losses were staggering. More than 15,000 soldiers died, as many as 200,000 civilians perished, tens of thousands of them brutally murdered in the early days of the Uprising in the Wola District, in what is known as the Wola Massacre.
What was left of the city after the fighting was systematically burned down or blown up (depicted in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist).
The destruction of Warsaw had been so complete that the communist authorities considered moving the capital, but the decision was made to rebuild.
The tragedy had to be turned into a moral triumph by later generations of Poles, if only to cope with the trauma of World War II, which was prevented from healing through repressions and censorship that lasted until 1989.
Poles still pay tribute to the Warsaw Uprising every August 1 at 5pm (W-hour). Thousands gather in central Warsaw. Here is the video I made at last year’s anniversary.
When I was a volunteer at the Warsaw Uprising Museum (a must-visit in the capital), I had the privilege of meeting participants in those days.
During the 70th anniversary events, I met and interviewed British airmen who flew all the way from Italy and back to deliver supplies to the insurgents. Here is what I wrote about this experience then.
For the best documentary on the Warsaw Uprising in English, I recommend “Warsaw Rising: The Forgotten Soldiers of World War II” made by CNN in 2004, watch it on YouTube here.
Updates
It has been a tumultuous half-decade for me, but life’s storms have passed for now.
Despite it all:
I defended my PhD dissertation “Operations of the American Relief Administration in Poland: 1919-1922” at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw in March 2022.
I resumed my work as a Polish to English translator in 2020, and my translation of 485 Days at Majdanek by Jerzy Kwiatkowski (a project initiated by my father, Dr. Maciej Siekierski, before his retirement) was published by the Hoover Institution Press in 2021.
Buy 485 Days at Majdanek on Amazon
Among other things, I translated “…So That Every Scrap of Memory is Saved” for the Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance (forthcoming 2023) and I am currently translating the papers from a conference on Operation Reinhardt held by the State Museum at Majdanek (forthcoming 2024).
Besides translating, I am: proofreading history books, teaching English, beginning to edit my dissertation with plans to publish it, foraying into YouTube video-making (my videos on President Biden’s in Warsaw have a combined 120,000 views) and splitting my time between Warsaw and Northern California.
Future newsletters will focus on the World War I and II eras, particularly on Poland, and how Eastern European history is still highly relevant to current affairs.
The past is never truly just history in this region, as the events in Ukraine show. Old imperial legacies and inter-ethnic conflicts still drive the policies of political leaders.
Having spent much of my time in Warsaw since the beginning of the Russian invasion has given me a firsthand view of how fresh the wounds of history still are across the region.
I’d be glad to hear from you, feel free to email me (nick [at] researchteacher.com) or share this post with anyone you think would be interested.
Thank you for being here,
Nick Siekierski
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