Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (65 page)
News of the outside world was relayed by radio, and was rapidly redistributed. The bombing of Auschwitz by the RAF, for instance, was known within a day. So, too, were the capitulations of Finland and Belgium. Broadcasts from Radio Moscow were tested by comparison with broadcasts from the BBC. Exploits of the Home Army both in the Nazi and Soviet zones aroused special interest. The progress of the Anglo-Americans through the Low Countries and towards the Rhine were followed on a daily basis. The Allied Conference in Quebec was covered in detail. Indeed, it was harder to find out what was happening in Praga than in Canada. Expressions of support and sympathy from foreign statesmen were especially welcome.
The cultural life of insurgent Warsaw was enriched by radio, film, theatre, photography, graphics, art, and literature. Each deserves a volume in itself. Recitations, concerts, and plays were staged at the Palladium Cinema. Evening shows in the open air of an Indian summer were well suited to the needs of amateur troupes. A performance of the drama
Warszawianka
was being prepared in Mokotov until the leading actors were killed by a ‘bellowing cow’.
116
The outpouring of poetry was obviously connected to the heightened emotions of a community facing annihilation. Dozens of poets sprang up spontaneously. Their verses circulated in the underground press or just on handwritten scraps of paper. The favourite style was that of Tyrtulian martial songs. The leading names were Yashinski and Ubish, but none outdistanced the reputation of ‘Christophe’, who was killed on the fourth day:
FELDWEBEL
Wounded in three places, and paralysed, a soldier of the K-Div. awaits his fate
There was a tiny glimmer of hope. Hitherto, we had been liable to be shot on sight as armed civilians. But as from 1 September, as
combatants
, we were entitled to be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention . . .
After our soldiers’ departure we were alone and all was reasonably quiet for several hours. Suddenly, the peace was broken by ear-splitting shouts accompanied upstairs by the loud clatter of steel heel-caps, rifle shots, and screams of the wounded being murdered next door. ‘
Raus
, all those capable out . . . out . . .’
A German soldier appeared in the door of our cellar. He noticed Irka and the other nurse who – against orders – both stayed with us, and still blocking the door with his ample figure he motioned to the girls to stay put and his short ‘
Schon fertig
, all done,’ stopped the others from bursting in. It was only after the war that Irka told me she had discovered his surname: it was
Freitag
, Man Friday.
Time passed: one hour, perhaps two. Then another German rushed into our cellar, a big fellow, a
Feldwebel
. He stood there in the semi-darkness until he noticed me. He was slow on the uptake. He sized me up. Wounded, still breathing, eyes open. This must be a mistake! Then his eyes rested on my marching boots. He grabbed my leg. ‘
Deutsche Schuhe!
’ he screamed, drew his gun, and aimed it at my head. But before he pulled the trigger, he noticed another casualty hiding in the darkness. His attention was distracted: ‘
Zweite Bandit
, another bandit!’ he shouted.
Fortunately for me, he was not methodical enough to finish one job before starting another. The third occupant of our cellar, a much older man, spoke fluent German and said, ‘Rubbish, we are all civilians.’ This proved too much. A cow speaking with a human voice could not have impressed him more. ‘Are you German?’ he asked, with amazement written all over his bloated face.
‘No, but I speak German,’ said our man.
The
Feldwebel
recovered his composure. He stretched out his arm: ‘Your papers.’ Burhardt had documents. We had none.
‘You have a German name,’ said the Feldwebel with a simile of a smile. A polite discussion followed on the origins of the Burhardt family, the time of their arrival in Poland, etc.,
etc.
Moreover, Mr Burhardt’s civilian trousers, with a hole at the site of his wound, seemed to confirm his non-combatant status. (In fact he had just managed to get rid of his army trousers.) In short, we were saved.
We stayed in the cellar for three days. The
Feldwebel
and his men kept visiting us. Their unit was a
Strafkompanie
, or penal company . . . The
Feldwebel
himself, my
would-be assassin, was a Rhinelander, the son of a hotelier. Our only common language was French, which, being a frontiersman, he knew better than I. He didn’t dare to write to his parents that he was fighting in Warsaw. He had hit his lieutenant when he had found him in bed with his French fiancée, and was sent first to the Russian front and then to the penal unit in Warsaw. Among our German visitors was a Silesian, Romanovski, who spoke Polish. He was in the army’s bad books, I presume, because of his suspect origin.
Unwashed for days, I was not conscious of my own smell, but I could feel the stubble on my chin. The next German ‘visitor’ might shoot me just for my dirty face. And so I asked one of the soldiers to shave me. He applied himself to the task with gusto. I had to persuade him not to leave me a little goatee. And how full of sympathy he was! He was practically shedding tears, because his razor blade was blunt and he hated the thought of hurting me. This was the same man who the day before had been shooting the wounded, when ordered to do so by an officer.
Another German, somewhat embarrassed, returned to our cellar to collect a bunch of grenades he had left behind. Gentlemen that we were, we returned his lost property to him. Yet another, slightly tipsy, sat on my pallet and said,
‘Schade, schade ich bin nicht Pole, ich wäre auch Partisan
, pity, pity I am not a Pole, but I too would have been a partisan.’
Naturally, I protested vigorously: ‘I am a civilian . . .’ He patted me on the shoulder and left.
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Stanisław Likiernik
O lord of the Apocalypse! Lord of the World’s End!
Put a voice in our mouths, and punishment in our hand.
117
By the end of September, the
Bulletin
was starting to publish academic analyses of the course of the Rising. Various opinions were held about the timing of the outbreak, but ‘the military passivity of the [Eastern] Front as it approached the Vistula had been something totally unthinkable.’
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The German military had always believed that the Home Army was holding out in Warsaw in order to assist the Soviet advance. They now
assumed that Soviet strategists would exploit the continued existence of the Rising to link up with the insurgents. For Berlin, the problem was to divine the significance of Warsaw in the wider picture.
As the summer of ’44 wore on into the autumn, the contours of Germany’s deteriorating predicament became ever more apparent. The Grand Alliance was set on total conquest or unconditional surrender. The Reich was starting to be racked simultaneously from West and East. Yet the rack was far from symmetrical. The Western Allies, though dominant in the air war, had not matched the Soviet performance on the ground. The Soviet Army was more than holding its own against the 2 million men the Wehrmacht had pitted against it. The British and Americans were making relatively slow progress against the 1 million Germans deployed in north-west Europe and Italy. What is more, the Soviets were advancing along a much more extensive chain of fronts. They were closing on ‘the lair of the Fascist Beast’, as they called Berlin, from three directions at once – from the Baltic coast, from the Danube valley, and, if the roadblock at Warsaw were removed, from the Vistula. For the German High Command, headed by the
Führer
, the critical issue was to calculate where the final assault would be launched and hence where the dwindling defences should be positioned. Looking east from the windows of the Chancellery in Berlin, and knowing how close the Vistula was, it was not hard to conclude that Warsaw of all places should not be surrendered.
In the immediate future, therefore, it was essential for them to liquidate the Rising. So long as the city had been separated from the front, containing the insurgents was sufficient. But now they had to be finished off. Aerial reconnaissance on the 15th and 16th identified a large Soviet armoured column moving up towards Praga. This was taken to be the strike force which Rokossovsky would employ to exploit the junction which he had achieved.
119
From the German viewpoint, the time available looked terribly short. If every effort was not made to dislodge the two new bridgeheads within a couple of days or so, von Vormann could be in danger of losing control of the entire sector.
The Germans did not fail to notice that the Soviets as well as the British were now supplying the insurgents from the air. Like Boor, they could only have guessed what lay behind this change of tack. But the best guess would have suggested that the Allies had settled some political differences, and hence that a major Soviet attack was in the offing.
Initial attempts to dislodge the bridgeheads, however, did not produce
much effect. An attack on Jolibord by the 25th Panzer Division on the morning of the 17th was repulsed with over 300 casualties. The officer reported: ‘No result. Concrete buildings, high-rise houses infested with snipers, antitank fire from the flank and on the riverfront. Our forces exhausted after their heavy losses.’
120
In the south, Gen. Rohr called for reinforcements, and the Dirlewanger Brigade was joined by the 146th Panzer Grenadier Regiment.
Governor-General Frank took no part in these deliberations. Indeed, he had not set foot in Warsaw since September 1943. But a year later, in the middle of the Rising, he was still pondering ‘reforms’ that would make his fiefdom work more smoothly. Talking with his officials, he was adamant that the Underground as a whole should not be tarred with the same brush as the ‘adventurers in Warsaw’ and that some form of Polish autonomy was still a viable goal. Once the Rising was crushed, he said, he was going to submit proposals to Hitler for finding a rapprochement with Polish circles. If the proposals were refused, he would not be held responsible for the consequences.
121
Nonetheless, the Rising in Warsaw was a wretched nuisance for him. Sometime after his last visit to Warsaw, he had written in his diary: ‘In this country, we have one point from which every evil emanates. That point is Warsaw. If we didn’t have Warsaw in the General Government, we wouldn’t have four-fifths of the difficulties with which we must contend.’
122
Thanks to the Rising, those ‘difficulties’ had increased greatly. Looking through the windows of his grand office in the Royal Castle in Cracow, and surveying the peaceful scene below, he can only have felt doubly confirmed in his earlier bitter judgement.
The Polish Government could not have viewed the Berling Army’s arrival before Warsaw with much equanimity. Of course, like everyone devoted to the Polish cause, they rejoiced at the chance that the Rising might be rescued. Yet they could hardly have welcomed the political implications. If the rescue succeeded, the credit would be taken by Berling and by his Soviet-backed associates in the Lublin Committee. If the rescue failed, the Rising would probably go down to defeat; and the Government’s influence in Warsaw would come to an end. Either way, the Government’s stock was falling fast. [
GRAVES
, p. 368]
The Commanderin-Chief remained in daily radio contact with Gen. Boor and with several other Home Army stations, notably the Kampinos Group outside Warsaw. Orders, information, and advice were exchanged. Discussions took place on the attempts to contact Rokossovsky and on Soviet activity in the air. But little could now be done to improve either the stalled diplomatic situation or the battles on the ground. Between 15 and 18 September, a Polish official made three visits to the Soviet Embassy in London. He wished to hand over some letters. One was a copy of Boor’s telegram requesting radio communication with Rokossovsky. The next was the National Council’s latest appeal to Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin. The last was the transcript of Boor’s instructions about reactivating the telephone cable in Warsaw. On his first visit, the Secretary of the Embassy accepted the note without comment. But on the second visit, the porter absolutely refused to take receipt of anything. Attempts to get through by telephone resulted in answers stating that no responsible official was present. On the third visit, on the 18th, he managed to get inside the Embassy and to make his way into the Secretary’s office. When he pulled the letters from his pocket, he was cut short with the words: ‘The Polish Government are no doubt aware that between my Government and them no diplomatic relations exist.’
123
Three days had been wasted. In Warsaw’s terms, three days were equivalent to 6,000 deaths.
GRAVES
An insurgent soldier realizes that fighting is not necessarily the hardest part
At some point our unit passed a half-demolished house. An older man emerged from the gate and pointing his hand at the rubble said bitterly: ‘Look at what you have done!’ . . .
We passed him without a word. What was there to say? . . . He was not the only one who felt that way, and we had heard similar complaints more than once. We went on in confusion, as if we suddenly felt guilty . . . For us, it was a question of dearly held ‘ideals’, for him, it was his house. In general, the psychological situation was easier for the insurgent soldiers participating in battle than for the civilians who were sheltering in dark cellars and constantly expecting the next bomb to hit them . . .
The majority of the capital’s population was practically starving, especially those who had been driven from their houses in panic. The army showed more diligence supplying its own ranks, even though many soldiers went hungry. It never really resolved the problem of providing distribution points for the population at large.
This does not mean, however, that the mass of the population merely awaited their fate. No! Whoever was fit, cooperated actively with the fighters. They transported weapons, organized dressing points and hospitals, and dug passages, tunnels, and barricades. Some directed traffic, others rescued the buried, they extinguished fires, and, at the risk of their own lives, dragged out victims from burning houses.
Worst off were the little children. They were terrified, often extremely hungry, and unable to understand why such awful things were happening. I felt so bad for those little ones . . . But with the older children, it was different. Many teenagers joined the Rising. They often served as messengers, carrying weapons, reports, orders, and the press with enthusiasm. Many of them fell . . . They did not always realize the dangers, and had a greater tendency than us older ones to perform dashing deeds.
People died, individually, in crowds, sometimes in whole families, from machine-gun bullets, from artillery shells, from bombing, or from diseases for which there was no medicine. My school friend Olgierd S., a medical student, died in this last way. He had rescued a boy with diphtheria, and became infected himself. There was nothing to save him. His death was no less heroic than from a bullet on the barricade.
Burials took place wherever it was possible – in squares, in gardens, in parks, wherever in the ‘concrete jungle’ of a great city there were oases of green grass. The most frequent gravesites were, quite simply, in the ruins of destroyed buildings.
One day, in a small square, I saw six completely naked bodies, which someone
had mercifully covered with newspapers. Had some human hyenas stolen their clothing, or had they been humiliated and shot by the Germans? – I do not know. Among those murdered, I recognized the naked body of a younger friend from school, a mild and peaceful chap with a kind smile. I was already accustomed to the sight of dead bodies, but here was someone whom I used to bump into every day. Apart from being killed, he had been abused, the victim of human ignominy. I could not shake off the disgust for a long time.
My friend was laid to rest in a communal grave in the square. I searched around for a blanket, or something that could be used as a shroud . . . there was nothing. Over his grave a small cross of sticks was left and a piece of cardboard with his name: ‘Farewell, companion! May God clothe you in his merciful light!’
1
A. Janicki