Poles recall revolt doomed to fail

Richard Bernstein

New York Times
Saturday, July 31, 2004

WARSAW The stories Norman Davies tells about the 1944 Warsaw uprising, whose 60th anniversary will be celebrated here Sunday, are not memories, of course, since he wasn't here to remember anything, but they have a vividness and a moral urgency that make it seem almost as if he witnessed the events himself.

Here he is, for example, on a walk through Warsaw, looking from a vantage point near the Old City over a curve of the Vistula River and describing the condition that doomed the uprising from the beginning: the refusal of Soviet forces to come to its aid.

The Soviet soldiers were there, Davies said, pointing to a tree-lined bank on the far side of the river, and the Germans were here, he continued, indicating the near bank where bicyclists meandered peacefully through the oak groves of what is now a public park.

"They didn't fire at each other," he said, a touch of retrospective amazement creeping into his voice. "But if any Soviet soldier tried to cross the river to help the Poles, both sides fired at him."

There is a chilling mournfulness to the image the story conjures up: Russian soldiers literally sunbathing on one side of the Vistula while the Germans literally obliterated Warsaw street by street on the other.

Certainly it is an image that moves Davies, who is by general consent, the most distinguished historian of Poland in the world today, as well as one of the most widely read and widely translated historians of Europe.

Davies, who is 65 and retired from teaching at the University of London, was in Warsaw this week for the publication of the Polish translation of his latest book, "Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw."

The English version, published a few weeks ago in the United States, weighs in at 752 pages and has been described by the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore as a magisterial work on one of the totemic events of the war.

The uprising began on the afternoon of Aug. 1, 1944.

Then, Poland's government in exile in London, eager to capture Warsaw ahead of the Soviet advance, ordered the underground Home Army to attack German forces throughout the city.

Stalin's refusal to come to Poland's aid made the uprising a sort of official nonevent in the decades of Soviet domination, but it is to be celebrated in a major way on this anniversary, beginning Sunday at a ceremony to be attended by President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany and Secretary of State Colin Powell.

But perhaps the aspect of the celebration that will have the most lasting effect will be Davies's book on the uprising, which has never been the subject of a broad-shouldered and sophisticated account by a major historian.

In many ways, Davies is the ideal person to tell the story. A Welshman educated at Oxford, he first visited Poland more than 40 years ago, when he remembers his guide bringing him to a point in the middle of a Warsaw street that was a sort of icon of the Polish tragedy. It was a manhole cover.

At the end of the insurrection, several thousand soldiers of the Polish Home Army, who had survived the eight weeks of Nazi bombardment, escaped from the Old City by going from that point in the middle of a street into the city's vast network of sewers.

"Coming to Poland at that time, seeing the ruins of the war, having a first encounter with the Holocaust, and then with the story of the Warsaw uprising, which I'd never heard of before, that's what attracted me," Davies said, recounting his decision to specialize in Polish history.

In fact, Davies is probably best known internationally for his 1,363-page book "Europe: a History," published by Oxford University Press in 1996 and, at last count, translated into 24 languages.

But there have been several other books on Poland along the way, including "White Eagle, Red Star," a history of the 1920-21 Polish-Soviet war and "God's Playground," widely viewed as the best single-volume general history of Poland in existence.

So, as Montefiore puts it, Davies has tackled large subjects before, though perhaps none more morally and politically fraught as the 1944 uprising.

The heroes of the story are clearly the men and women who fought and died in Warsaw's smoking rubble, but the big question always asked about the event has to do with Stalin's refusal to intervene. The official Soviet explanation was that Soviet troops were exhausted from their long advance West, and they needed time for rest and resupply.

In Davies's complex account, the big three World War II leaders - Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin - were locked in an embrace of necessity that essentially served Stalin's deep interest in squeezing the life out of Poland's aspirations for independence.

"If Roosevelt and Churchill had made a proposal to Stalin, saying 'these Poles are our allies,' I don't know what Stalin would have done, but my point is that they never made such a proposal, and that could only have increased Stalin's sense of uncertainty," Davies said.

"If the insurrection had succeeded, Stalin would have had a Polish ally far stronger and more independent than the docile puppet regime he was planning for Poland," Davies continued, "and it would have been awkward for him to march into Warsaw and put the Home Army under arrest. So, in the absence of pressure from Roosevelt and Churchill, he did nothing." In his view, Davies said, it was reasonable caution.

Meanwhile, eight weeks of the most remarkable and destructive conflicts of the war ensued, redolent of the stories that Davies knows so well.

In his Warsaw stroll the other day, he stopped for a few minutes at a place he calls the Goose Farm in his book, after the street it was on, Goose Street. It is the site of a work camp where the few hundred Jews not already liquidated were forced to salvage anything of value that might be found in the wrecked former Ghetto.

The first thing the Home Army did, Davies said, was storm the SS camp, where it seized two Panzer tanks, then blasted its way into the Goose Farm, liberating the Jewish prisoners.

The Jewish prisoners lined up in their striped pajamas, and somebody, probably a Jewish veteran called out, "Jewish battalion ready for service, sir!"

And then there was the Convent of Perpetual Adoration of the Holy Sacrament, a church near the Old City wall, where Home Army soldiers received treatment and food from the nuns.

"This was literally the front line," Davies said. "The Germans were systematically bombing, street by street. The prioress at the convent got orders to evacuate the church. She went to see the Home Army commander, who told her that the lads would be very sad to see the sisters go. And so, the prioress ordered all the sisters to go into the chapel and pray. A half hour later, a Stuka bomber dropped a bomb right through the dome and killed a thousand people."

The New York Times