Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (102 page)

In 1952, such a passage would have been unpublishable: and in 1972 it was still seriously subversive.

Miron B. (1922–83), though thirty years younger than Maria D., was another Varsovian resident who had taken virtually no part in the fighting. Throughout his career he was preoccupied with the inner life of ‘the private person’. He was only interested in the outside world in so far as it impinged on his thoughts and emotions. As a result, his
Memoir of the Warsaw Rising
(1967) bore no resemblance whatsoever to what other people were writing. The language imitated the everyday speech of ordinary citizens, full of repetitions, clichés, poor grammar, and awkward formulations. The content appeared to be utterly banal, recording all the minute details and casual observations which others judged insignificant:

How long did we sit there? A long time, but not till the morning. At the half-light, it began to quieten down. Quick. It has stopped. We fled. A handful of tools. Whatever – pick it up. Quick. What else, I don’t remember. Only that it was very quick. Cobblestones. That must be the sky. August. Something under my arm: a spade. Church St. A corner, next to a barricade . . . here . . . quiet – only a couple, him and her – insurgents, boy and girl – they’re sitting at the side of the barricade. On duty. They’re chatting. As if nothing else was happening, or was supposed to happen. Only it is warm. They’re
sitting. The barricade, the side of a piece of furniture. And a chat. I also remember that I was happy, that I was returning.

Morning – straightaway: sun, heat, smoke, aeroplanes, bombing, burning. I suddenly recall. If someone wants to imagine the three destructions of the Warsaw – in September 1939, in the Ghetto from 19 April to around 20 May, and in the Warsaw Rising – all of them took place in the same sunshine, the same heatwaves, the same burnings and bombings. The heat, the sun, and the blue sky, mingled with fires, smoke, crashes, and crumblings, hard to believe but they added something exotic, an extra tripling in the head.

Those were the days, when every hour, or every half-hour, something collapsed around us, nearer, further, higher, lower, but always crumbling. Every now and then, newcomers would enter our shelter. Still covered in plaster dust, with bundles, or without bundles, or with nothing or with children, with families, on their own. They walked in. They rushed in. All were accepted. . . .

Good morning! Can we. . . .

Yes, do come in. Of course. Where’ve you come from? There’s room here. Please . . .
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Historical monuments, and the manipulation thereof, were a Communist speciality. Every town and village in the Soviet Bloc had its memorial to the Soviet Army. Portraits of the Communist pantheon – Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin – were brought out on any pretext; and pictures of the current General Secretary of the ruling Party hung in all public places. At the same time, all inconvenient traces of the former times were scrupulously removed. Hence in People’s Poland, long-dead figures such as Copernicus or Chopin were widely honoured in order to bolster the Party’s patriotic credentials, but persons connected with either the pre-war
Sanacja
regime or the Government-in-Exile were routinely cast into oblivion. The main Censorship Office kept a register of names that could be praised, names that could be mentioned for the purposes of condemnation, and names that could not be mentioned even to be condemned.
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Thanks to its turbulent history, Poland has a highly developed funereal culture. Graveyards are constantly filled with flowers. Candles flicker beside the graves. On All Souls’ Day, families congregate to pay their respects. Yet Stalinism had even invaded the cemeteries. The very first memorial to the Rising was raised in late 1956 in Warsaw’s military
cemetery to members of the Grey Ranks. Others gradually followed. Plaques and tablets began to appear in churches, not least in the rebuilt St John’s Cathedral. The limits of official tolerance were strict. Henceforth, the memory of the Warsaw Rising was to be tolerated in silence on consecrated ground; but elsewhere, or in public, not at all.

Memorials relating to the Second World War therefore caused very complicated contortions. The Communists regarded ‘the anti-fascist struggle’ of 1939–45 as their principal raison d’être, yet they were unwilling to admit that the great mass of Polish anti-fascists were equally opposed to communism. So very little, apart from the Soviet Army, could be commemorated. The soldiers of 1939, who fought the Wehrmacht in defence of the pre-war Republic, were still not judged worthy of remembrance. The soldiers, sailors, and airmen who fought shoulder to shoulder with the British and Americans were treated as pariahs. And the men and women of the Home Army might as well have never existed. For more than forty years, the Communist regime consistently refused to erect a suitable monument to the Warsaw Rising. The only memorials permitted were raised either to abstractions, to obscure Communist activists, to unnamed civilian victims, or to the Heroes of the Ghetto.

The fact that the Ghetto Rising had been commemorated properly, whilst the Warsaw Rising was
not
, fostered deep confusion. The belated wave of interest in the Holocaust which arose from the 1960s on magnified the false impression that the one and only rising in wartime Warsaw had occurred in the Ghetto. For decades, foreign visitors went to see the fine monument to the Ghetto Fighters, designed by Rapaport and erected straight after the war. But they could not be shown the far more numerous sights connected with the events of 1944. Official guides were ordered to pass over the Warsaw Rising in silence, or if pressed, to bad-mouth its leaders as criminal ‘anti-Communist’ adventurers. There was no central point or symbolic object in Warsaw on which the memory of the Rising could focus. As a result, when the then German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, visited Warsaw in December 1970 to pay his nation’s penance, there was still only one suitable monument before which he could kneel.

The largest single project for a major war monument in the 1960s and 70s was that of the ‘Warsaw Nike’ – a female personification of ‘Victory’. Inspired by the Communist concept of the triumphant war against fascism, it was completely unrelated to the Capital’s own wartime experiences.

Chancellor Brandt travelled to Warsaw to sign a German–Polish Treaty, a central building block in the Federal Republic’s new
Ostpolitik
. He arrived on the morning of 7 December 1970. He went first to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, writing in the visitor’s book: ‘In memory of the dead of the Second World War, and the victims of violence and betrayal, in the hope of an enduring peace and of solidarity between the nations of Europe.’ He then moved on to the Ghetto Memorial, and, in a gesture as spontaneous as it was unforgettable, fell to his knees before the world’s cameras. ‘I did not plan it,’ he said afterwards, ‘and I’m not ashamed of it’:

My gesture was intelligible to those willing to understand it . . . The tears in the eyes of my delegation were a tribute to the dead. As one reporter put it – then he knelt, he who has no need to, on behalf of all who ought to kneel, but don’t, because they dare not, or cannot, or cannot venture to do so. That was what it was: an attempt through the expression of fellow-feeling, to build a bridge to the history of our nation and its victims.
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Willy Brandt’s
Warschauer Kniefall
provoked worldwide comment, both positive and negative. An opinion poll showed that 41 per cent of Germans judged the gesture ‘appropriate’, whilst 49 per cent though it ‘exaggerated’.
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The British Ambassador in Bonn noted: ‘The picture of a Chancellor with an irreproachable record of opposition to the Nazis kneeling at the Jewish Ghetto Memorial was widely publicised and made a profound impression, though it was not universally endorsed.’
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While the world’s press welcomed Brandt’s act, the majority of foreign commentators did not notice a distressing omission. In the enthusiasm of the moment, it was sufficient for most observers to realize that a German leader had finally admitted his nation’s guilt. Yet any serious examination of Chancellor Brandt’s
Ostpolitik
would confirm that his main aim in Warsaw had been to promote the cause of Polish–German reconciliation. To that end, it was desirable that he paid his respects to all the victims of all Germany’s wartime crimes. During his stay in Warsaw, one might have expected him to salute both of the city’s two great acts of resistance. But he signally failed to do so. No one breathed a word about the Warsaw Rising. The inscriptions on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier did not include a single line about the Home Army or about 1944. The ex-insurgent veterans were not represented. They had been killed in their thousands by the Nazis in far greater numbers than the Ghetto Fighters. They had fought and died for their capital. They had been persecuted,
tortured, and judicially murdered by the Stalinists. And now, in the moment of reconciliation, they were officially sidelined.

In the fresh political environment after 1956, the paths of the former insurgents began to diverge. A few, who were well hidden under false identities, continued to deny their past. Some were again able to emigrate. Others followed apolitical careers. A few chose to throw in their lot with the reformed regime.

The ex-insurgents who made their peace with the regime found various ways of doing so. Casimir Mo., ‘Badger’, for example, the man who had served time with Jürgen Stroop, joined the Democratic Movement (SD), a Communist client party, which enjoyed a small margin of autonomy.
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Most of the military officers with AK connections, like Gen. Tabor, now returned to their commissions and stayed there until retirement.

Many of the most scrupulous ex-insurgents, however, sought careers and occupations which involved the minimum of official approval. Ladislav B., ‘Teofil’ (b. 1922), for example, started work in 1957 in the Catholic weekly
Tygodnik Powszechny
, which, like him, had been put out of circulation in the preceding period.
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In 1963, he was awarded the title of ‘Righteous Among Nations’ by the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem, which thereby recognized his service with the Zhegota organization. He was one of the first of thousands of Poles who were similarly recognized and who would form the largest national contingent to receive the honour. In 1972, he was appointed General Secretary of the Polish section of PEN Club International, and in 1973 Lecturer in Modern History at the Catholic University of Lublin. In the history department he joined his comrade from 1944, Professor George Kl. (b.19), ‘Peterkin’ of the Bashta Battalion, who was well on the way to becoming a prominent medievalist.
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‘Paul’ (1890–1970) was a Home Army veteran, but not a Warsaw insurgent. He was a Polish writer from Lithuania, had worked with ‘Cat’ M. under the German occupation and had fought with ‘Lupashka’’s army. After the war, under the pen-name of ‘Jasienica’, he wrote a number of colourful and highly readable history books, which made him the best-loved historian in the country. In March 1968, Comrade Gomulka named him as a hostile conspirator. He knew that he was being watched. ‘My home is not my castle,’ he remarked, shortly before he died, ‘indeed, I am not even master of the drawers in my desk.’ The tale took a surprising twist when his security file was opened in the 1990s. The file was crammed
with hundreds of informers’ reports. By far the most assiduous and longest-serving informer was a woman who had been a long-standing confidante and who, in 1969, had become his wife. Still more shocking, she was an AK veteran who had fought in the Warsaw Rising. Her marriage had taken place with the Security Office’s approval. Her missives were usually penned in the toilet. Her last report on him was written during his funeral.
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In which regard, the extent of official controls over people’s lives, even during the ‘Thaw’, may be gauged from the fact that the State Censorship Office insisted on editing every single printed word, including funeral notices. (The same was true for birth announcements, wedding invitations, party invitations, and business cards.) In practice, therefore, all funeral notices, which were customarily posted outside the churches, were required to adhere to official norms. With luck, the dead person might be described as ‘soldier’, or ‘member of the Resistance movement’, or, at some risk, as ‘a patriot of 1944’. But in the 60s and 70s, ‘insurgent’ and ‘AK’ and the AK’s anchor symbol stayed firmly beyond the pale.

Alexander ‘Borodich’ G., yet another professional historian, had a relatively smooth ride.
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During the Rising, he had directed the Home Army’s Bureau of Information and Propaganda, but having worked during the war in the secret campaign to preserve samples of the fabric of destroyed monuments, he was indispensable to post-war reconstruction. A medievalist of special distinction, and a scholar with wide international contacts, he was able to promote an independent academic career with unusual success.

Of course, ex-insurgents with more practical professions – engineers, medics, scientists, or musicians – were less likely to fall foul of the authorities on ideological grounds. In the first post-war decade, as ‘enemies of the people’ they were largely barred from studying, and many were thrown back into menial jobs. But they were often able to catch up after 1956, and in due course to shine in their chosen field. The composer Vitold L. (b. 1913), for instance, who in 1944 had been an underground entertainer, was prevented before 1956 from publicizing the dense atonal counterpoint for which his style would become famous. Indeed, his First Symphony (1948) was performed only once before being banned. But, with his
Travermusik
(1958), he returned to experimentation. His
Jeux Vénitiens
(1961) adopted ‘controlled aleotoricism’ which gave the players a certain latitude in producing new sounds of their own. From then on, he was well established as one of Europe’s top talents.
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His success ran somewhat
ahead of André Pan. (1914–91), with whom he had played in Warsaw’s wartime cafes, but who succeeded in 1954 in emigrating to Britain.
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