The heroes of Warsaw at last get their due

BY TOM HUNDLEY

Chicago Tribune,
August 1, 2004

WARSAW, Poland - (KRT) - Two months after the successful Allied D-Day landings at Normandy, the tide of the war had turned. Adolf Hitler's armies were reeling. Rome had been liberated; the Americans were about to march into Paris.

In Warsaw, the mighty Soviet army had reached the east bank of the Vistula, the river that divides the Polish capital in half, and Moscow Radio was calling on Warsaw's residents to rise up against the German occupiers.

The AK - Armia Krajowa or Home Army - was Poland's underground resistance. It had been planning for this moment since the start of the war in 1939. So with the encouragement of President Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin, combatants took weapons out of their hiding places, put on their red and white armbands, and the Warsaw Rising began at precisely 5 p.m. on Aug. 1.

The idea was that it would last four or five days, secure a few key objectives from the retreating Germans and pave the way for the Soviet army to march in and "liberate" Warsaw. Within hours, the Poles had succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. They were in control of most of the city.

"The first days of the rising were wonderful. Polish flags everywhere. Polish soldiers in the streets. Polish newspapers. Freedom," recalled Jerzy Turzewski, 73, an AK veteran.

But this "victory" would soon turn to ashes, Warsaw would be reduced to rubble, and 60 years later, one of the most heroic but calamitous battles of World War II would be all but forgotten.

This week, it will be remembered with modest ceremonies in the rebuilt Polish capital. A new museum will be dedicated and, for the first time, the United States will be represented by a high-level delegation headed by Secretary of State Colin Powell that includes Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and Secretary of Veterans Affairs Edward Derwinski. The recognition is a belated acknowledgment that Poland, too, has its "Greatest Generation."

Polish soldiers fought alongside the Allies at Tobruk in Africa and Monte Cassino in Italy, Polish pilots flew thousands of sorties in the Battle of Britain, and Polish citizen-patriots rose up against the Nazi occupation in Warsaw. But for them World War II was not a bright, shining enterprise that ended with evil vanquished.

While American GIs came home heroes to a grateful nation, young men like Turzewski - if they came home at all - were treated as criminals by a malignant communist regime installed by Stalin with the silent acquiescence of Roosevelt and Churchill. Many historians now recognize the Warsaw Rising as the first superpower confrontation of the Cold War. Few people outside Poland know anything about it. Most people confuse it or conflate it with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a similarly heroic but much smaller and entirely separate event that took place a year before.

In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto revolted against their Nazi tormentors. Although doomed from the outset, the ghetto fighters battled for 27 days. About 20,000 were killed, and the ghetto was razed. The Warsaw Rising, which lasted 63 days, resulted in 200,000 deaths. At the end, an entire city, population 1.3 million, was emptied and razed.

Turzewski was a month past his 13th birthday on the day it began.

"On that morning, I told my mother she will either agree that I join the AK and give her blessing, or she won't see me again because I will just run away and join," he said.

Turzewski's mother, who had already lost one son to the Germans, gave her blessing, and the boy soldier reported for duty as a stretcher-bearer and courier in Warsaw's Old Town.

That same morning in another part of the city, 14-year-old Stanislaw Schoen-Wolski told his mother that he was reporting to his unit. While he went to the cellar to retrieve some ammunition he had been hoarding, his mother, without speaking a word, mended the pocket of his jacket so none of the precious bullets would slip through.

Schoen-Wolski had joined the AK a year earlier. "I was trained as an artilleryman. But of course, this was in theory only. We had no cannons. Our commander was hoping that we would capture one," he recalled.

In the first days of the fighting, the lightly armed Polish resistance fighters, about 45,000 strong, captured a crucial German supply depot and barracks. They also controlled the post office, all of Old Town and the tallest building in the city center. More importantly, they captured two German tanks, one of which they hastily repaired and used to liberate Goose Farm, an SS death camp in the city whose Jewish inmates joined the rising.

Schoen-Wolski would get a commendation for bravery when he took out a German machine-gun nest by sneaking through sewers to get behind it and then hitting it with a grenade.

But the Soviet army declined to take advantage of the opportunity presented to it by the Poles. Instead, on orders from Stalin, it watched passively from less than a mile away while the Germans gradually regained the initiative.

Hitler ordered Heinrich Himmler, his SS chief, to crush the rising. Himmler's orders to his men were blunt: "Every inhabitant to be killed ... no prisoners to be taken ... every single house to be blown up and destroyed."

In the first week alone, the Germans retaliated against the Warsaw insurgency with an orgy of murder that left an estimated 50,000 civilians dead.

To prevent similar rebellions in other Polish cities, German authorities ordered a roundup of all young men. In Krakow, they broke into the house where a 24-year-old seminarian and former underground actor named Karol Wojtyla was hiding in the cellar. With his heart pounding, the future Pope John Paul II stretched out on the floor, his arms extended in the shape of a cross, and prayed that the Germans wouldn't discover the door to the cellar. The prayers were answered.

The insurgents in Warsaw would hold on for nine weeks while their exiled leaders in London pleaded with the Russians to come to the insurgents' aid, pleaded with Roosevelt and Churchill to put pressure on Stalin.

What was unknown to the world at the time - and certainly unknown to the Poles - was that Roosevelt and Churchill had already "given" Poland to Stalin at the Tehran Conference the year before.

The Red Army stayed put. If the Germans destroyed the Polish resistance, so much the better for Stalin's plan to install a puppet regime in postwar Poland.

"This was a gauntlet thrown down, in a spirit of malicious glee, before the Western powers," George Kennan, the charge d'affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and later pre-eminent Cold War historian, recalled in his memoirs.

The Americans and British offered to airlift supplies to the beleaguered Poles, but their nearest base was in Brindisi, Italy, more than 800 miles away, and Stalin refused permission for planes to land and refuel in Soviet-controlled territory. When the British began an airlift anyway, their planes were shot at by German and Soviet anti-aircraft guns.

The Americans tried once, on Sept. 18, 1944.

"That was a day of great joy for us. A huge squadron of American airplanes filled the sky. They flew high, and their drop was not very precise. But the sight was incredible. Imagine the whole sky filled with parachutes and airplanes," said Zbigniew Scibor-Rylski, then a 22-year-old AK commander.

More than a hundred B-17 bombers escorted by 60 fighters took part in the supply drop. It would turn out to be the only one authorized by Stalin, and the first and last effort by the Americans to aid the Poles. The U.S. planes flew at maximum altitude to avoid German anti-aircraft fire. As a result, 80 percent of the supplies they dropped fell into German hands.

Danuta Galkowa, now in her 80s, was one of thousands of women who were members of the AK. Usually the women were nurses or couriers. Galkowa was a sharpshooter. She wore trousers and tucked her blond hair inside her helmet.

During the final days of the rising, Galkowa watched as the Germans began attacking a military hospital on Dluga Street near Old Town. As the patients tried to flee, German machine guns cut them down. Then the Germans set fire to the building.

Galkowa repeatedly entered the burning hospital and rescued 22 wounded soldiers who were unable to move. "I carried them on my back. I dragged them by their hands and feet. Roof tiles were flying through the air from the heat. I had to clear a path through the bodies and the rubble," she said.

"There were things so horrible that I cannot speak of them. I would need a dark room and to sit there quietly to recall these terrible events," she said.

She hid with the wounded men in a nearby cellar. From mid-September until Oct. 8 - six days after the surrender - they remained in their hiding place, slowly succumbing to their wounds and to hunger.

"My sorrow is that only three people came out of that cellar," she said. One was a young commander who had lost a leg in the fighting. He and Galkowa would marry.

"To this day, there is a feeling of heat around my ankles, and I hear the voices of men begging, `Sister, sister, save us.' I cannot get rid of these voices," she said.

The catastrophe that befell Warsaw in those weeks is hard to overstate. In terms of death and destruction, it was the equivalent of a Sept. 11 attack every day for 63 days in a row.

When the AK capitulated, the Germans expelled what was left of the civilian population and then systematically leveled the city. By the time the Russian army entered the empty city, on Jan. 17, 1945, it foretold what Hiroshima would soon look like.

Stalin quickly set up his puppet regime and began rewriting history. Surviving members of the AK were labeled "Hitlerite fascist collaborators." They were hunted down and jailed by the thousands. Many were executed or shipped off to the gulag.

After his unit surrendered to the Germans, Schoen-Wolski found himself in a POW camp near the Dutch border. He escaped and joined a Polish brigade fighting alongside the Allies in northern Germany. He was 17 when he returned to Poland in 1947. He was arrested and sent to a work camp for three years.

Eventually he found work as a journalist and much later rose to prominence as a news anchor on state-run television.

Scibor-Rylski, the commander, slipped out of Warsaw after the rising collapsed and continued fighting in the underground. "After the war, I moved to Poznan (in western Poland), and since nobody knew me there, I denied all the accusations and said I was never in the AK," he said.

He worked in state industries and at age 82 still carries himself with the bearing of a military officer.

Galkowa and her husband also moved to avoid the police roundups. They never spoke to their children about their role in the rising. Her husband's missing leg was attributed to a "transportation accident."

Turzewski was still so young after the war that no one suspected his AK involvement. He entered high school and later became a manufacturing representative for Siemens in Poland.

There was a slight easing of the repression when Wladyslaw Gomulka, a communist not appointed by Moscow, came to power in 1956.

"That was the first time you could speak about it," Galkowa said. "But it didn't last for long - a short thaw, and then silence for another 25 years, until the 1980s."

The first monument to the Warsaw Rising, a kitschy statue of a boy wearing an oversize helmet and carrying a large gun, was erected in Old Town in 1981.

"Before that, there was no official recognition of the uprising insurgents," said Schoen-Wolski. "But if you went to the cemeteries on Aug. 1, you would see many people. And many police spies."

For nearly half a century, the official version was that the rising of 1944 was a foolhardy undertaking, a military disaster that left Warsaw in ruins, a catastrophe for which the Nazis and the AK shared blame.

"The Soviets pressed this version of the rising, and it fell on fertile soil in the West. You either kept silent about it or you came up with some awkward explanations," said Wojciech Roszkowski, a historian at the Collegium Civitas in Warsaw.

It was, however, a fearless Polish pope, returning to his homeland in June 1979 for the first time since ascending to the throne of St. Peter, who drew a direct line between the resistance fighters of the AK and what was soon to become the Solidarity Movement, an unarmed army that would finally liberate Poland from the Soviet bloc.

But even after the collapse of communism in 1989, recognition has come slowly for the aging survivors of the AK. A large, somewhat garish monument was unveiled in 1989, and AK veterans now get a government pension - about $50 a month.

"I have no bitterness, no grudge," Galkowa said. "Who would I blame? God? Stalin? I was just one little person on a large stage. What I did was normal for the times. I don't ask for any special recognition."

The Warsaw Rising Museum, which officially opens Sunday although it is still several months from completion, will attempt to tell the story to future generations.

"Nowadays, historians tell us we had no chance," Schoen-Wolski said. "You may call me a fool, but I believe our struggle gave everything to the Poles. It uplifted the spirit. It showed that for the sake of freedom we can endure anything. Maybe it took 45 years, but it finally brought about an independent Poland."