Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (36 page)

Three factors in the General Government contributed to the extraordinary resilience of the Polish resisters. One derived from the Nazi policy of closing all centres of higher education, science, and research. At a stroke the Nazis created a ready-made pool of highly educated conspirators who could turn their energies full-time to undermining German rule.

A second factor lay in the iron principle of ‘no contact upward’. No one who joined the Underground knew, or expected to know, who was running the higher levels of the organization, and everyone used impenetrable pseudonyms. The resisters were content to serve without ever learning about the links in the unseen chain that bound them to their superiors in London. Hence, despite the constant resort to dragnets, torture, and shootings, the Gestapo was never able to gain the upper hand.

The third, and perhaps most vital, factor lay in the prevalence of instinctive, spontaneous social support. As one of the most famous anti-Nazi activists recalled, ‘the Underground was only able to function through the existence of the unwritten and unspoken assumption of almost universal collusion.’ ‘We’ simply did not cooperate with ‘them’. One day, he arrived in Warsaw from London after one of his hair-raising runs through Nazi-occupied Europe. As he left a secret meeting in a building in the centre of town, he was stopped by the hand of a Gestapo agent on his shoulder. ‘Where have you been?’ asked the agent. Looking round, he saw the brass plate of a lady dentist at the side of the doorway. ‘I’ve been to the dentist.’ So the agent immediately took him to a nearby cafe, and phoned the dentist. ‘Yes,’ the answer came without hesitation, ‘he’s just left an appointment here a few minutes ago.’ The courier owed his life to that dentist, whom he’d never met. And the dentist, for the sake of someone whom she’d never met, risked the lives of herself and of her entire family.
²³

‘Cultural warfare’ may sound like a contradiction in terms, but in an occupied country where the invaders were openly intent on transforming
the human substance of the nation, it was unavoidable. The Nazis were constructing their racial ‘New Order’. The Soviets had declared their ambition to forge ‘a new Soviet Man’. Everything that was most precious in the captive nation’s language, literature, history, folklore, customs, and identity was in mortal danger from both sides.

Free channels of information were vital to the Underground; and the tradition of secret printing presses in Warsaw was a very old one. The teams of clandestine writers, printers, and distributors had seen off the Tsarist
Ochrana
, and they were not going to be overawed by the Gestapo. Every single political orientation and every branch of the illegal Polish authorities had their dailies, their weeklies, and their news-sheets. Runners brought in communiqués from secret radio stations listening to the BBC or to WCBX relayed from New York. Hand-presses clunked in murky cellars. Shopkeepers wrapped purchases in a German paper on the outside and an illegal paper on the inside. And the Gestapo were vastly frustrated. Fresh print-shops sprang up for every one that was closed down. In July 1942, for example, the publishers of
Poland’s Voice
calmly reported the results of a raid, undeterred:

On July 4th a villa on a fashionable street in the residential section of [Cherniakov] was surrounded by the Gestapo and SS Black Guards . . . The house sheltered one of our printing shops . . . When knocking at the door brought no response, the police threw hand grenades through the windows, blasted the doors and fired inside with machine guns . . . A few days later, the owner of the villa, his wife and sons, and the tenants of neighbouring houses were arrested and subseqeuntly shot . . . This one case has cost 83 persons their lives.
²⁴

It was the general practice of these fearless editors to mail copies of their product direct to Gestapo HQ ‘to facilitate your research, [and] to let you know what we think of you . . .’
²⁵

Underground literary publishing had longer-term aims: they strove to provide an outlet for all the writers and poets affected by the occupation, and to save the population at large from the intellectual starvation to which it was condemned. The Underground even dispensed scholarships and research grants. One budding poet, for example, who didn’t much care for military resistance, spent his time ‘unlearning Western Civilization’. He put out his first volume of poetry ‘printed on a ditto machine’, edited a typewritten literary journal, collected a verse anthology called
Independent Song
, and translated both Maritain’s
A travers le désastre
and
Shakespeare’s
As You Like It
. ‘Rightly or wrongly’, he recalled, ‘I considered my poems a kind of higher politics.’
²⁶

Without doubt, one of the chief stars of underground publishing was the dazzling young poet Christopher K. B., widely known during the war by his pseudonyms of ‘Bugay’ and ‘Christophe’. The son of a Warsaw family where socialism mingled freely with literary criticism, he attended the Stefan Batory
Gymnazium
, and was writing verse before he left school. His first collected volume,
Closed with an echo
, was published in 1940 under a false name and a false date in seven copies. Awkward and asthmatic, he was already assuming the guise of a fatalistic, Romantic, tubercular soldier-poet before he joined the Home Army and its Parasol Battalion. His lifelong love-affair with Barbara D., whom he married in 1942, added an emotional intensity to the startling precision of his words and feelings. He loved language, nature, Poland, the good times, and his ‘Basia’ in equal parts; and he deplored the war and the pain of not loving enough. Above all, he felt a strange and powerful premonition of the apocalypse to come. It would give him the reputation of being a visionary, the prophet of his generation. Of ‘History’ he wrote:

Jeszcze słycha
piew i r
enie koni
(We still can hear the singing, and the neighing of horses.)
²⁷

As always in grim times, religion was the great comforter. The churches were full. The clergy, both secular and monastic, exercised their influence far beyond the altar, the pulpit, or the confessional. Parish halls and church crypts offered cover for meetings of all sorts. Monasteries and convents took in fugitives, who for various reasons could not circulate freely. Not for the first or the last time, the Church in Poland acted as the great unstinting protector of people in distress, including cultural activists.

Few Varsovians disagreed with the view that top priority should be given to education. A whole generation of teenagers and students looked set to remain half-educated. So the old practices of the ‘Flying University’ of Tsarist times were revived. German regulations were ignored. Professors and students, teachers and pupils, who had been thrown out of their colleges and schools, began to meet in private, often at night or under cover of some harmless pastime. Small, informal study circles grew into regular courses. And the participants passed exams and received diplomas. In the 1940s, students enrolled formally in the University of Warsaw, which was officially closed, were given degree certificates dated 1938 or ’39. Would-be entrants to the officially non-existent university were
accepted on the strength of school-leaving certificates issued by officially non-existent schools.

In this way, teenagers were brought up to regard illegal activity as a normal part of their birthright. Nazi laws were not considered morally valid. But there was a natural progression in the conduct of youngsters who thought instinctively in that way. When they finished courses and became qualified adults, they were eager to continue in the next stage of illegal activity. The students and pupils of the early war years became the recruits of the military Underground of 1944.

Underground drama circles proliferated. Many of them were closely connected to the Home Army – a cultural counterpart to military training. They observed a stern code of conduct, which forbade participation in Nazi-licensed premises. Their performances took place in private houses and monasteries, and their attitudes were forward-looking. One workshop run by a well-known director was preparing for post-war theatre reform, and was constructing a radical new repertoire.

Warsaw’s architectural legacy was desperately vulnerable after the bombing of September 1939; and all manner of schemes were hatched for its preservation and recovery. One group, for example, defied the guards surrounding the ruined Royal Castle and, through surreptitious nocturnal visits over many months, painstakingly collected fragments of the pulverized fabric and furnishings. Their efforts made possible the magnificent post-war reconstruction of the castle, which was finally completed in 1990. Another group successfully relieved the Nazi administration of the sequestrated plans of the City Planning and Development Office. Their daring escape, which involved driving two lorries in broad daylight out of a Nazirun compound, ensured that the city could be rebuilt decades later after the Nazis had done their worst.
²⁸

Historians, like everyone else, put their shoulders to the wheel. Many recognized the need for chronicling the occupation and for recording Nazi crimes. Thousands kept diaries. Others set out to locate, salvage, and relocate the National Archives, which had been badly damaged by fire, dispersed for safety, or plundered by the occupiers. One such devotee stayed at his desk until the end of the Rising, totally oblivious to the battles raging around him.

Musical concerts, great and small, raised morale. The droves of unemployed talent were legion. The most usual venues were cafes and cellars.

When a nation is suffering in extremis, the symbols of its identity gain
life-and-death significance. Men and women were ready to risk all to paint the anchor-sign of ‘Fighting Poland’ on walls and placards, tear down the new German street-names, or let a gramophone blare a recording of the banished Chopin onto the street. The simple act of wearing a white blouse over a red skirt constituted a dangerous act of defiance. Refusing to speak German, or still better speaking it very badly with an execrable accent, was a patriotic duty. The soul could sometimes smile even if the body was in chains.

In the early stages of their development, the political and military wings of Poland’s ‘Secret State’ faced daunting obstacles. Operating in absolutely the most hostile sector of Nazi-occupied Europe, they had to take elaborate precautions, and they had to steel themselves against the constant pain of the capture, torture, and death of valued comrades. But courage and ingenuity were not in themselves enough. The ‘Secret State’ could not have been set up and maintained so effectively without the unstinting support of Britain’s ‘special services’. The Polish Underground was an Allied enterprise.

The history of the
Delegatura
(‘Government Delegation’), for instance, was not an easy one. The first Delegate, a former mayor of Poznan, died in the hands of Gestapo torturers. His successor, an economist, suffered a similar fate. The third, known as ‘Sable’, escaped capture and established himself in Warsaw as a clandestine vice-premier.
²⁹
In 1943, eight Underground ministries were formed, to supervise health, justice, internal affairs, industry, agriculture, transport, the economy, and communications. In 1943, a separate Directorate of Underground Struggle (KWP) was formed; and on 26 July 1944 a Council of Home Ministers came into being. Such were the elements of the ‘Secret State’, which had no parallel in occupied Europe and which attracted so much admiration from those familiar with it. (See Appendix 11.) The effective functioning of the
Delegatura
relied in large measure on efficient communications. London’s messages were passed by the network of short-wave radio stations that were constantly on the move to avoid detection. Messages of more weighty import, requiring discussion, were brought back and forth by couriers, who crisscrossed Nazi Europe as if by supernatural means. One Home Army courier reputedly made fourteen successful runs to Paris, always travelling in first-class carriages and always dressed as a Wehrmacht general.
³⁰