What Warsaw Remembers

MATTHEW KAMINSKI

Wall Street Journal Europe

WARSAW -- Each August, Warsaw remembers the hot month in 1944 when the Polish underground army rose up against the Germans.

Mounds of flowers and candles adorn thousands of graves at Powazki cemetery of the young men and women of the Polish Home Army (AK) who at "W" hour -- 17:00 on Tuesday Aug. 1 -- launched the largest insurgency in German-occupied Europe.

The Home Army, answering to the government in exile in London, launched the uprising, in part, to liberate Warsaw before or concurrently with the Red Army so as to not leave Poland's postwar fate to Stalin's mercies. Its tragic failure, after 63 days of fighting the Germans while the Red Army looked on impassively just across the River Vistula, did just that.

I was in Powazki on Aug. 1, 1989, amazed by waves of people streaming in, singing war songs and chanting Solidarity slogans. Polish patriotism was, at that time, an intense national longing. Few people had any inkling that the goal of the original uprising would be realized just a few weeks later with the fall of communism.

Then, the anniversary was a solemn anti-government protest. Fourteen years on, the atmosphere isn't as politically charged. The reminiscences of the remaining survivors are splashed in the papers, the country's former Communists now in power lay wreaths at memorials and buses fly the Polish flags. It's less immediate -- at last, just history. But it's history people aren't letting go of.

A Polish friend, late for dinner, had just taken his two young daughters, both born well after the end of communism, to Powazki -- so they'd know. My uncle notes the dates on the tombstones: These young people would've built a different Poland after the war. "This was the future," he says.

Stalin encouraged the uprising ("Poles, to arms: Freedom awaits," a Moscow-backed radio implored in late July) and then refused to let his troops or the Western Allies give any aid. The Allies, wanting to keep Uncle Joe happy, obliged him.

Polish soldiers in Western Europe had fought valiantly in the air battles over London as well as to liberate Paris and Italy, Home Army commander-in-chief, Gen. Kazimierz Sosnokowski, bitterly reminded the allies on Sept. 1, 1944, looking on helplessly from London while far better armed German reinforcements went into Warsaw. "Warsaw abandoned to wage the common fight against the Germans alone -- this is the tragic and vile mystery that we Poles cannot comprehend," he wrote. "We cannot do this, since we have not yet lost faith that a moral law rules the world."

Neither morality nor the Allies saved the Poles that year. By the end of the uprising in early October, as survivor Barbara Siedler wrote in Rzeczpospolita last week, "there was no city. There was no more strength, there was no ammunition, no water, medicine, food. There was nothing." Hitler personally ordered Warsaw razed, leaving Stalin to rebuild it. The Home Army was annihilated.

The Poles could be bitter, but they've drawn a different lesson from the war -- a war that, in reality, didn't end until 1989. Freedom can't be taken for granted; it must be defended. Hence Poland's unfashionable, in much of today's Europe, belief in a close alliance with America. Hence, its equally unfashionable commitment to NATO, not least since its neighborhood isn't yet stable. And hence its decision to take the lead this month of a large peacekeeping contingent in Iraq.

In Germany and France, the sudden high profile of Poland alongside the Yanks brings snickers and insults. "Mercenaries," a German ambassador told this page in spring. "Trojan Donkeys," added a German magazine.

"The French Army would feel humiliated to go to Iraq and be put in the same category as the Poles or the Uruguayans as part of the cleanup team," a senior French official, anonymously and pompously, told the New York Times last month. Excuse me, the French army would feel "humiliated"?

The French and Germans should know better. But memories of last century's horrors in Europe are fading or, rather, morphing strangely.

This year in Germany, Jorg Friedrich's "The Fire: Germany and the Bombardment 1940-1945," has topped the best-seller lists and forced a re-evaluation of the war. It is a study of the Allied bombing of German cities that conveniently paints over most other aspects of the war and the German depredations that brought it about. Under the rain of Allied bombs, German civilians died as in "crematoriums," subject to "mass extermination": Mr. Friedrich's book repeatedly employs phrases previously reserved for the Holocaust. At the same time, a nationalist group wants to build a center to commemorate the millions of people displaced by the war -- only this center would be in Berlin, and only to memorialize the German expellees.

Germany went through several phases after the war's end, denial, then guilt, and now, remarkably, "we were victims, too!" Germany's Nazi past seemingly never taught all Germans to view liberty as worth fighting for.

France's own wartime past (Vichy, American GIs in Paris) remains a sore subject. When French friends scoff at Polish loyalties to America -- as at many things American -- I merely respond, "You're lucky you weren't liberated by the Red Army." Lucky too, in a perverse way, that Paris never had the courage to rise up against the Nazis, only to be forsaken and destroyed.

The hot and cold wars of the 20th century may seem remote in Paris and Berlin. Not so in Warsaw.

Mr. Kaminski is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe