16. The Full Catastrophe

At precisely five o'clock on Thursday, a network of sirens wailed across Warsaw, their sad, mournful sounds echoing through the city's streets and squares. This annual commemoration marked the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, a day that had never held particular significance in my life—until now.

Months after my father's death, as I delved deeper into Poland's wartime history, a profound realization struck me. The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 must have been the crucible that forged him. In those sixty-three days of desperate courage, the man I would come to know was tested as he had never been before.

As I pieced together my father's story, I realized it was inextricably woven into a larger saga of bravery and tragedy—a history that had been deliberately obscured for decades.

The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 is one of the Second World War's most tragic and heroic chapters, yet it remains relatively unknown. After the war, the Germans had no interest in highlighting the carnage and genocide they perpetrated in suppressing the uprising.

Similarly, the Soviet regime under Stalin and the government it backed in Poland suppressed any official mention of the Home Army and the Warsaw Uprising viewing both as a threat to the ideological narrative they imposed on post-war Poland. Only after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 did the sirens across the city start, and the full story began to emerge.

This suppression of information obscured the long-standing efforts of the Polish resistance, particularly the Home Army, which had meticulously plotted to liberate their country from German occupation almost since the start of the war, patiently waiting for the moment they thought the Germans were most vulnerable.

By early spring 1944, several factors converged to create what the Poles believed was their opportunity. They assessed that Hitler had insufficient Wehrmacht troops in Poland to suppress a revolt. Another crucial factor was the Red Army, advancing from the east towards German-occupied Poland.

In this context, and ignoring instructions to the contrary from the Polish government-in-exile in London, General Komorowski, the head of the Home Army, thought the moment had finally arrived to defeat the Germans and stand up to the treacherous Soviets, who he knew had designs on Poland. With this decision, Operation Tempest, the long-planned armed revolt, was unleashed.

Operation Tempest began in Kowel, 137 kilometres north of Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine, but then in eastern Poland). The Polish forces faced a swift and crushing counteroffensive by the Wehrmacht. A month later, joint actions by the Home Army and the Red Army saw initial success in Lwów and Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania).

However, the Home Army's hopes were quickly dashed. Immediately following the fighting, Soviet secret security units—the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs)—disarmed the Polish forces. Some Polish soldiers were forcibly merged into the Red Army, while the NKVD arrested many of the commanders in both cities. Many of these leaders were subsequently executed or deported to the Gulag.

These actions signalled the failure of Operation Tempest and led to the effective dissolution of the Home Army in eastern Poland. Stalin established a Soviet-backed provisional government, the Polish Committee of National Liberation, in the newly "liberated" eastern regions.

Despite these setbacks, Komorowski made one last desperate decision to proceed with the urban uprising in Warsaw. Several factors influenced this choice. In July 1944, there had been an assassination attempt on Hitler's life by Wehrmacht officers, which had shaken the Nazi leadership. Hitler was becoming increasingly paranoid and unhinged, potentially weakening his control and decision-making capabilities.

Komorowski reasoned that if the uprising succeeded, the Soviets would have to recognize the Poles' critical role in Warsaw's liberation. Moreover, he believed the Allies would be compelled to acknowledge their contribution to the overall defeat of the Germans and the end of the war.

On July 31, Komorowski received information that Soviet tanks had entered Praga, the suburb of Warsaw on the right bank of the Wisła River. Believing the primary enemy, the Wehrmacht, was weak and unlikely to launch a counteroffensive and the Soviets would support him against their mutual enemy, Komorowski ordered the uprising to commence the next day, August 1 at 5 pm. It was now or never. This was the Home Army’s last chance, and success meant Poland would be recognized as a free and democratic country.

Secrecy and surprise were essential. Edward did not tell his parents or his girlfriend Krystyna that he had received the signal for the resistance operation to begin. He and his comrades—many still teenagers and only about 10 percent of them armed—optimistically thought it would be over within days, a week at most. Victory was close.

The first days of the uprising caught the Germans by surprise, and much of central Warsaw came under Home Army control. On the second day, Edward's squad, the “Barry” group, captured a German detention centre on Danilowiczowska Street, seizing desperately needed rifles and some ammunition.

The city's jubilant residents, including Jewish inhabitants who had been in hiding for months, took to the streets in droves, assisting the insurgents in building barricades, removing cobblestones and piling up furniture and anything else they could find in the hopes of obstructing the German tanks and forces. As the people streamed into the streets, Polish flags flew from windows and rooftops for the first time since the start of the war.

In these early days, Edward spent much of his time building and guarding barricades, as well as overseeing captured German soldiers at various locations. One of the key sites Edward defended was the central post office, an important building that the Barry group had reclaimed from the enemy. At night, the men in the Barry group took turns sleeping on the stone floors of the basements of the bombed-out buildings in Stare Miasto—the Old Town.

The Home Army's initial success proved short-lived. Hitler, without enough Wehrmacht forces to crush the Polish resistance, ordered the notorious SS under Heinrich Himmler's command to support whatever troops he had. Meanwhile, the Red Army tanks sat like stones on the other side of the Wisła River, ignoring the Poles' urgent pleas for assistance. The Soviet Air Force disappeared from the skies, and Stalin refused to allow the Allies to use Soviet air bases to airlift supplies to the Poles.

The Home Army fought throughout September, continually requesting urgent help from the Allies and Soviets. In what may be one of the greatest infamies of the war, Stalin had ordered his troops to wait until the Germans defeated the Home Army. A successful uprising by the Home Army, a resistance movement that supported a free Polish state, would have thwarted Stalin’s ambitions to create a Communist satellite state in post-war Poland.

The SS engaged in orgies of killing, looting, and raping, particularly in the Wola and Ochota neighbourhoods. They rounded up tens of thousands on the streets and pulled people from basements where they had sheltered. They murdered children in orphanages by smashing their heads with the butts of their rifles. It was a horrific bloodbath. In modern times, except for Leningrad, no other European city has undergone such carnage.

With little help from the Allies, save for a handful of airdrops of supplies and the devastating betrayal by Stalin, the Home Army fighters were cornered by the Germans. Komorowski had miscalculated. In the centre of Warsaw, Edward’s group was among the last of the insurgents fighting. Even on the last day of fighting, the Barry group led a desperate attempt to evacuate the citizens from the Old Town through the city sewers to another part of the city to escape the Nazis.

On October 2, the Home Army surrendered at Plac Bankowy, which happened to be just around the corner from Edward’s childhood home on Mirowski Square. Edward recalls the insurgents had cleaned up, even without water and facilities, to face the enemy with as much dignity as possible on the day of surrender. The brave resistance insurgents had withstood the Germans for a gruelling sixty-three days.

To prevent a complete massacre of the Home Army, Britain and the United States formally recognized the insurgents as a constituent part of the Allied forces, thereby compelling Nazi Germany to treat the Polish insurgents as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. The casualties of the Home Army were staggering: 18,000 dead, 7,000 wounded, 16,000 taken to prisoner-of-war camps, including all the high-ranking officers and General Komorowski.

Following the defeat in Warsaw, in addition to Home Army casualties, 200,000 civilians lay dead—this was also in addition to almost all of the city’s Jewish population that had previously been murdered. Half a million civilians found themselves trudging in long columns to Durchgangslager 121, a squalid transit camp surrounded by barbed wire and located at Pruszków about ten kilometres southwest of Warsaw at a former rail yard. Those suspected of being Jewish or members of the Home Army resistance were shown no mercy and instantly shot on sight while marching in the long lines.

Once at Pruszków, the citizens of Warsaw were segregated into different groups based on their perceived health and ability to work. Of the total, 165,000 were deemed strong enough to be exploited further for forced labour, while 50,000 were sent to various concentration camps. The remaining tens of thousands, mostly elderly or people with small children, were crammed into rail boxcars and transported southward. Once the harrowing journey reached the middle of nowhere, the people were ordered to jump off the boxcars and left to fend for themselves without any provisions or shelter. Stranded, they relied on the meagre offerings of local villagers who could offer little aid or comfort.

This was the experience of my friend Ela's parents, Jan (Krystyna's brother) and his wife Barbara, a young couple with their newborn first child—Ela's older sister. Born in the basement where they were hiding, the infant was carried by her parents as they joined the throngs walking to Pruszków. They had no food or water, and Barbara couldn't nurse her newborn daughter as she hadn't eaten for several days. With only the clothes on their backs, they were then loaded onto a rail boxcar, sent to a remote location in the countryside, and left with nothing. Meanwhile, Krystyna, who was living on the right bank of the Wisła River where the Red Army waited, managed to escape to a small village where she found work in a dairy.

In an act of extraordinary courage and desperation, approximately 5,000 individuals defied the Nazis' evacuation orders and chose to hide amid the ruins of Warsaw. Many of these people were Jewish and felt they had no other option. Among them was Władysław Szpilman, a Jewish pianist whose remarkable story of survival would later be immortalized in the film "The Pianist."

The story of Poland during the Second World War is one of massive violence and destruction perpetrated by the Nazi leadership and complicated by Soviet plans for post-war Communist expansion. It's a narrative both tragic and heroic.

Now, as the sirens wail across Warsaw each August 1st, they do more than mark the anniversary of the Uprising. They also mark the stories of countless individuals like my father—ordinary people whose lives changed in an instant.

The day before the uprising started, Edward met with Krystyna and promised her that the war would soon be over and they would be together.

It would be twenty-five years until they met again.