Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (90 page)

This last omission was enforced for nearly half a century, and had far-reaching consequences. There had been two risings in wartime Warsaw, one in 1943 and a much larger one in 1944, yet only one of the two could be publicly commemorated. Right from the beginning, therefore, the world was systematically schooled in the false belief that the Ghetto Rising and the Warsaw Rising were one and the same thing. Misinformation was officially promoted.

A similarly perfidious strategy was followed with regard to the numerous commemorative tablets which appeared on almost every street-corner in post-war Warsaw. The favoured formulas announced such things as ‘
HERE THE FASCIST OCCUPANTS SHOT 119 CITIZENS’ OR ‘ON THIS SPOT, 50 MEMBERS OF THE RESISTANCE MOVEMENT WERE KILLED BY BESTIAL HITLERITE FORCES
’. Nowhere was any information given about exactly what had occurred. One could name the enemy but not the patriots. Terms such as ‘Home Army’ or ‘Warsaw Rising’ were entirely absent.

One must also mention the National War Memorial which was erected in those same years in Byelorussia at a village called Khatyn. Byelorussia had probably suffered a greater percentage of civilian casualties during the war than any other country in Europe, so it definitely deserved a fine monument. But it did not deserve the disgraceful trick that was played by the Soviet propagandists. Khatyn, near Minsk, was one of hundreds of villages which had been razed to the ground during the Germans’ antipartisan campaigns. Indeed, its buildings were burned and its inhabitants slaughtered by none other than the Dirlewanger Brigade, which distinguished itself in a similar style in Warsaw. Yet its chief attribute as a memorial site lay in the fact that its name could be easily confused with that of Katyn, near Smolensk. Hence, exactly as the Risings of 1943 and
1944 were conflated into one mythical event, so Khatyn was deliberately conflated with Katyn. For decades, busloads of tourists and schoolchildren would be cynically driven to Khatyn, to pay homage to the victims ‘barbarously murdered by the fascist invaders’.

Contemporary history did not figure in the cultural schemes of the new regime. Indeed, the combination of increasingly rigid censorship and of plans to reconstruct the historical profession along Marxist lines meant that in the early post-war years very little history was published at all. When new school textbooks appeared in the late 1940s, they had nothing to say about controversial wartime issues. The Academy of Sciences did not launch its plan to prepare an official History of Poland until 1951, and the volume dealing with the Second World War and the formation of the PRL was destined never to appear in nearly fifty years of communism. In this situation, meaningful comment about the war years could only be found by reading between the lines of the official media, by risking punishment through importing foreign publications, or by scanning literary and artistic works for hidden allegories and oblique references.

Comments on the Warsaw Rising in post-war history textbooks were few and far between. Whenever the Rising was mentioned it was condemned in crude terms:

This unusually fulsome account dated from 1951. In Communist eyes, of course, the Home Army’s plan was to divert history from its predetermined direction.

The official media was unwavering in its mendacity. And all inconvenient facts were suppressed. Poland had been defeated in 1939 through the treachery of its fascist, militarist, and capitalist rulers and through their ridiculous alliance with the West. The War had been won by the Soviet Union. The Resistance movement had been run by Communists. The ‘People’s Power’ was entirely legitimate and fully supported by the people. The so-called Government in London was a lackey of the anti-Soviet Western powers and was trying to provoke the Third World War. None of which explained why so many wartime resisters were now being tried for alleged wartime crimes.

The Polish community abroad was subject to endless attacks, and ‘the émigré’ became a stock figure of ‘social realist’ literature. The attacks began promptly in 1945 when the party line was laid down by George B. and when suitable books, like Stefan L.’s
Twilight of London
, were written to order. The writer Stefan A. made that theme a speciality. One volume,
Targovitsa lies over the Atlantic
(1952), dealt with the period 1938–52, whilst
Passengers of the Dead Visa
(1954) dealt with émigré affairs in 1952–54:

[Targovitsa] signifies all the traitors, renegades, turncoats, and cheats, who, in pursuit of their own narrow class interests, have rejected their homeland and have entered the service of foreign imperialists in Britain, America, and West Germany. Driven by hatred against their homeland they have hatched the foulest plots, only to fall beneath the level of circus clowns . . .
⁸

In reality, ‘Targovitsa’ was the label given long ago in the late eighteenth century to a group of traitorous émigrés who had planned the Second Partition of Poland in St Petersburg. But now, as Orwell had noticed in 1944, Russia was the one place where Poles could not be émigrés.

No amount of propaganda, however, could cover up the human and
material traces of the Rising which were in evidence at every hand. ‘Children of the ruins’ who grew up in post-war Warsaw knew more than the Communist educators might have wished:

Fifty years later, Lech K. would be elected President of Warsaw.

Cinema was a mass medium close to Communist hearts. But its purely propagandist purposes were sometimes defeated. A budding film director, André W., for example, sought to screen the adaptation of a novel that had portrayed the dilemmas of post-war youth. The novel
Ashes and Diamonds
(1948), by George A., had pleased the authorities, because it implied that violence had been generated by the democratic side.
¹⁰
The film, which was not made until 1958, in contrast, was far more ambiguous, and considerably more sympathetic to the ex-Home Army characters. Another of his films,
Sewer
(1957), was the very first portrayal of the Rising on screen. It was passed by the censors probably because it depicted the searing tragedy of the insurgents, and by implication the futility of their sacrifice. Yet the film’s effect did not match the censors’ expectations. The scene which everyone remembered was the one where a group of desperate survivors, wading through the effluent, reach an exit grille on the bank of the Vistula, and gaze in dying frustration at the far side of the river. No one watching the film could fail to realize who had been
occupying the right bank of the Vistula in September 1944 or what they had done.

Nothing was more desirable, however, than the embodiment of the Warsaw Rising into a fully documented and carefully reasoned historical account. To this end, two separate teams of historians set to work shortly after the war. One of them was organized by Adam B., ‘Pepi’, a veteran of the Home Army who had served in the 1930s in the Army’s Historical Bureau, had edited an insurgent journal,
Barykady
, and had been commissioned by Gen. Bear Cub to collect materials. The other was directed by George K., a former Home Army officer who had co-authored the original plan a for a general Rising and who, being trapped outside Warsaw in August 1944, had joined the Berling Army. He was appointed director of the People’s Army Historical Section.
¹¹
Of the two teams, the former made the most progress. Eagerly supported by veterans, it founded an Institute of National Memory, assembled an impressive archive, and sent a large body of documents to the Nuremberg Tribunal. What is more, its organizers believed that they enjoyed official approval. They had only revealed themselves to the authorities during one of the post-war ‘amnesties’ on the express undertaking that they would be allowed to continue with work. Yet it was all to no avail. In 1948, George K., falsely charged with conspiracy in the ‘Generals’ Case’, was arrested, tortured, and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1949, the Institute of National Memory was cut down in similar fashion. Its entire archive was confiscated on the pretext that the papers were needed for the trial of Pepi’s wife, a war invalid from the Zoshka Battalion. She was sentenced to seven years in jail, having been charged with ‘collecting documents with a view to glorifying the Home Army and to smearing the People’s Guard’.

With history in a straitjacket, historical discussions on sensitive subjects had somehow to find another outlet, and they often found their way, in varying disguises, into literature. The Warsaw Rising was able to figure, for example, in several works of post-war fiction. Of course, the censors kept a tight rein on the content. But they did not pull the shutters down completely, so long as the overall impression of the Rising was negative. One novel,
Man Never Dies
(1951), was penned by an author, Casimir B., who had duly confessed his fault. ‘I loved the heroism of the soldiers’, he wrote, ‘and I closed my eyes to the stupidity of their leaders’.
¹²
Another novel of that year,
Generations
by Bogdan C., passed through the filter because its insurgent heroes disliked their ‘masters from London’ and were longing to join up with the Red Army. In this way, the novelist was able
to present other elements, such as the solid support for the Rising amongst Warsaw’s working class, which would otherwise have been suppressed. (Communists always put greater store on love for the Soviet Union than on love for the working class.)
¹³

Throughout those years, no insult was too nasty for it to be withheld if it was aimed at Generals Boor or Anders. One writer started a novel with the sentence ‘Count “Boor” was terrified by the consequences of his crime, frightened like a rat by the smoke of the burned city and by the sight of cunningly spilled blood.’ Another wrote that he longed for the day when ‘Boor’ would become a joke; ‘in the meantime, I hate him.’ A third, who called the Government-in-Exile ‘a litter of werewolves’, claimed that Anders had built concentration camps in Palestine and Italy to prevent his soldiers from returning home.
¹⁴

Most interesting, however, was the heated debate which took place soon after the war on the arcane subject of the ‘Conradian ethos’. To the uninitiated, Joseph Conrad may not seem to have much in common with the Warsaw Rising. Yet to those familiar with interwar intellectual trends, the connection was obvious. Conrad, the Polish seaman turned master of the English language, was one of the most popular and most translated authors of the day. The morality which he promoted of self-reliance, dignity, and integrity under pressure was highly attractive to the educated youth of independent Poland. His ideal of ‘being true to oneself’ was their ideal too. It was not for nothing that the ‘Class of 1920’, which formed the most typical cohort of the insurgents, has been called ‘Conrad’s children’. And it was no accident that the post-war Communist regime viciously attacked the legacy of a generation which revered an émigré.

The offensive was mounted by a young Marxist critic, Yan Ko., who later mended his ways and became a distinguished Shakespeare scholar. It was clever, arrogant, and totally unforgiving. ‘Conrad supports the sort of heroism which leads nowhere,’ wrote Yan Ko., ‘heroism which justifies nothing, heroism which has no higher purpose than itself.’ Conrad’s heroes, he claimed, were marked by ‘internal pride and spiritual self-destruction.’ Their actions ‘are always individual . . . devoid of social justification, of a moral code based on collective welfare, and of a desire to improve conditions.’ ‘Tragically,’ they maintain ‘blind obedience to the great
armatorom
of this world.’ Lest there be any doubt about the target, Yan Ko. referred directly to recent events. ‘We ourselves witnessed’, he wrote, ‘how, in the long years of German Occupation, people who fought for freedom were called traitors . . . how in the name of honour and
loyalty, it all ended up with the self-immolation of Warsaw.’ In the language of 1945 ‘people who fought for freedom’ referred exclusively to Communists and their friends.