Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (105 page)

Particular difficulties arose with regard to honours and medals.
Although the Communists’ Order of Grunwald had been terminated in 1992, some circles in post-Communist Poland continued to regard it as the equivalent of the much older Order
Virtuti Militari
founded by the last king of Poland in 1792. Home Army veterans who had been awarded the VM were less than happy to find themselves in the same honourable category as former recipients of the Grunwald Cross who included, among others, Bierut, Berling, Bulganin, Rokossovsky, and L. Brezhnev.
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Anticipating the forthcoming Fiftieth Anniversary of the Rising, several documentary films were produced, and greatly benefited from the discussions and revelations of the early 1990s. A production from the state television service, presented several witnesses never seen before in Poland. One was a former German officer, who wept in front of the camera unashamedly. A second was the sole survivor of a British aircrew who had crashed in Praga. A third was none other than Ivan Kolos, alive and well in Moscow.
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Another film from the same era presented a biography of Gen. Boor. It did not emphasize the Rising. Instead it concentrated on sequences in his life which best illustrated his personality. It showed him in the old Habsburg army. It showed the happiest decade of his life when he was commander of a cavalry regiment in the idyllic setting of the eastern Borders, dreaming of retirement to the garden of his beautiful old manor house. It showed him with his equestrian team at the Berlin Olympics. And it showed him with his family at their modest suburban house in London. All in all, it was a sympathetic portrait of an attractive man. It was a revelation for Polish viewers who had only heard of Boor as a ‘criminal’, an ‘incompetent’, and an ‘émigré adventurer with blood on his hands’.
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The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Rising was celebrated on 1 August 1994. It was patronized by President Lech Wał
sa, and was supported by all branches of the newly liberated, democratic state, not least by the army. Invitations were sent to the presidents of Poland’s immediate neighbours, and to representatives of members of the wartime coalition. It was a great occasion for pomp, parades, speeches, and memories. But it did not pass off painlessly. The President of the Russian Federation did not attend; and the President of the German Federal Republic committed a most embarrassing gaffe. He graciously agreed to attend, but he did so in a letter which revealed that his advisers had imagined the occasion to be the
fiftieth anniversary of the Uprising in the Ghetto. ‘Fifty years ago’, President Wał
sa declared:

the insurgents of Warsaw took to arms . . . Freedom came out against slavery. The flame of the Rising remained in people’s hearts and souls. It was passed on by the baton of the generations . . . The spirit [of the Rising] proved indestructible and immortal. Soldiers of the Rising. You did not fight in vain.
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No one had voiced such a ringing affirmation of the Rising in half a century.

President Herzog struck a matching tone of homage and remorse:

In a separate ceremony four days later, a memorial tablet was unveiled to the liberation of the Goose Farm Camp by the Zoshka Battalion on 5 August 1944. After explaining that the Goose Farm had been a death camp, not just a concentration camp, the former commander of Zoshka’s Panzer Platoon, Capt. ‘Vatsek’ took the stand. Born of a Polish family in St Petersburg in 1915, Vatsek at twenty-nine had been older than many of his insurgent comrades. Now, at nearly eighty, he was a resident of Geneva, a retired executive of the United Nations and a veteran of countless Third World development projects:

On 27 July, the Germans decided to evacuate the Goose Farm Camp to Dachau. More than 400 inmates, incapable of marching, were shot . . . A column of about 4,000 Jews was marched off, but disappeared without trace.

And now the Zoshka Battalion was standing in front of this camp. They remembered the Scouting Statute, which says that a scout is a friend to every other human being and a brother to every other scout. We all wanted to attack immediately . . . And, since we had captured a couple of tanks, the situation was rather better than in the previous days. So four of us went back to Radoslav to ask for
permission. Radoslav was a cautious man and shared the view that the fortified positions should not be attacked frontally. But he agreed on condition that the attacking force be small in number and be composed entirely of volunteers . . .

We carried it off by surprise. Our tank was a great success, because the Germans [in the camp] had no antitank weapons. After the main gateway was destroyed Felek’s platoon moved in . . .

But, ladies and gentlemen, I wish to talk about something else, about the meaning of this ceremony. Because it is all about that scouting principle, about people being friends to others . . . I live in the wider world. I’ve been to Bosnia; I’ve seen the cruelties of the Tutsi and Hutu in Ruanda; and everyone asks me where this bestiality comes from. So I say that every man and woman is born with kernels of good and evil. If we wish to nourish the kernel of good, it is a long and hard road. But it leads to interest in others, to friendship, to trust and in the end, by Christ’s teaching, to love for one’s neighbour . . .

Let us remember that anti-Semitism is a sickness of half-intelligent people who are underdeveloped spiritually. It is the same with anti-Polonism on the Jewish side. We must struggle on all sides that people be brothers to other people. Such is the meaning of this tablet, and of this ceremony.
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President Herzog, of course, had not been alone in confusing the Warsaw Rising with the Ghetto. Much of the Western media made the same mistake. So, too, did the advisers of the British Prime Minister. The
Guardian
, NBC News, and Reuters all told the world a false story. The
Euronews
Channel reportedly announced the fiftieth anniversary of a rising in the Ghetto that had lasted for sixty-three days and had ended with the deaths of 200,000 Jews. At a later date, when Queen Elizabeth II visited Warsaw, her advisers requested a trip connected with the Warsaw Rising only to cancel it on realizing that they had something else in mind.

Perhaps one should not be too harsh, therefore, on those who persist in conveying the same misinformation. The conflation of the Warsaw Rising with the Uprising in the Ghetto had become an established piece of contemporary mythology. In 2001, a US television channel screened a four-hour miniseries called
Uprising
, which was completely devoted to perpetuating the myth.
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In 2002, Roman Polanski’s otherwise excellent and award-winning film
The Pianist
so telescoped the events of the two risings
that almost all reviewers assumed the story to be exclusively about the Ghetto and the Ghetto’s aftermath.
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A major task was also incomplete in persuading Poland’s neighbours that the story of the Warsaw Rising contained something valuable for them. By the end of the century, the Germans had largely forgotten such opinions about the Rising that the older generation might have had. But, judging by a long article in the respected Moscow journal
Nash Sovryemennik
, Russian opinions were still firmly stuck in their ancient mindset. As part of a tirade entitled ‘The Polish Nobility and Us’, its chief editor launched into a denunciation of the Poles and their alleged imperialism going back to the occupation of the Kremlin in 1612:

The anti-Russian spirit of the
Szlachta
[‘nobility’] was revived by the Risings, which were forced on Polish society ‘from the top’. The Warsaw Rising was its last echo. [In 1944], the curdled residue of the Polish nobility, having deserted to distant England, tried to return to power in Warsaw over the dead bodies of Russian soldiers. Fortunately, Stalin deciphered their intentions and blocked them.
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This opinion dates not from 1952 or 1652, but from 2002. One could only hope that it was not typical. The awareness of Stalin’s crimes in Russia was much lower than the awareness of Hitler’s crimes in Germany. Indeed, a German memorial to the Warsaw Rising was already in preparation. A model of the project, created by Fee Fleck, was unveiled in November 1999 in Mainz, in the foyer of the
Landtag
of Rheinland-Pfalz.
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Nonetheless, throughout the shifting evaluations of the Rising over half a century and more, one man’s opinions did not change. In 2000, the former Teofil – sometime inmate of Auschwitz, member of Zhegota, and soldier of the AK – was foreign minister of his country: and he was still expressing the same views that he had expressed all along: the Rising was ‘unavoidable’; ‘We had no choice’, and ‘I’d do the same again’:

I see the Warsaw Rising in the historical perspective as just one stage on the long, hard road which the Poles had followed since the eighteenth century. That road had led them from Ko
ciuszko’s Rising and the [Napoleonic] Legions . . . to the defence of the Vistula in 1920. I see it as one of the many occasions when the Poles said ‘No’ to successive occupiers, partitioners and usurpers who sought to limit or to abolish our nation’s sovereign existence.
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Or again

By the turn of the millennium, the great majority of surviving ex-insurgents were aged between seventy and eighty. The urge to see the Rising properly commemorated in their lifetime, therefore, was strong. The fiftieth anniversary had provided a crucial stimulus, but it was no less important to make further provision for permanent exhibitions and for memorials to local events and to particular units. Several separate monuments were raised in Mokotov, for example, to the memory of the Bashta Battalion. No less significant than the presence of such landmarks were the precise, genuinely informative tablets that accompanied them:

TO THE INSURGENTS OF [MOKOTOV]
SOLDIERS OF THE HOME ARMY
FROM THE BASHTA REGIMENT
AND OF OTHER UNITS
FROM THE FIFTH DISTRICT
AND TO THE TENTH DIVISION OF [MATTHEW RATAJ]
WHO FOUGHT IN THE DAYS / FROM 1 AUGUST TO 27 SEPTEMBER 1944.
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