Poland remembers uprising against Nazis

By Monika Scislowska
The Associated Press

PAP ARCHIVE / AP, 1944 Soldiers from the Polish Home Army carry a wounded comrade during the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis.

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Antoni Chrusciel was chief of the Home Army resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Warsaw and commanded the thousands of largely teenage insurgents who rose up against the Germans on Aug. 1, 1944.

He led 63 days of fighting, until the resistance gave way to the better-armed enemy. Some 165,000 Poles, including 15,000 insurgents, died in the uprising, and the city was turned to rubble.

The uprising began as the Soviet army was advancing toward the capital. Similar uprisings in Rome and Paris as Allied troops approached had been successful.

But the Soviet army stopped within sight across the Vistula River and never attempted to give assistance. In addition, the Soviets refused permission to the Americans and British to use their airfields to drop ammunition and relief supplies.

In September, when a German victory seemed certain, the Russians allowed a small amount of ammunition to be dropped in, but it was useless: It was made for Soviet armaments and did not fit the Poles' weapons.

Warsaw uprising Some key facts on the 1944 rebellion: The doomed uprising continued for 63 days as the approaching Soviet army refused to help 50,000 ill-equipped Polish troops pitted against 90,000 German soldiers who were quickly reinforced by 50,000 others. The resistance was brutally suppressed. Some 150,000 civilians were killed in the battles, 165,000 sent to labor camps and a further 350,000 displaced. Fifteen thousand Polish soldiers were killed or disappeared during the uprising, with 25,000 wounded. After the surrender, the Nazis razed the city, destroying 85 percent of its buildings, before fleeing to allow the Soviets to march in.

The Poles took control of the city on Aug. 4, but the Germans sent reinforcements: SS police units, a brigade of Russian ex-prisoners, and a brigade of ex-convicts, all of whom Hitler had previously ordered removed from the front because of their excessive brutality.

The Polish forces became fragmented and isolated. The Germans pursued the cut-off fighters into the city's refuges: burned-out buildings and sewers.

Chrusciel was captured and held in prison camps in Germany until being liberated by U.S. troops.

After the uprising, many Polish Home Army troops who took part in the failed battle were prosecuted by Moscow-trained Communists eager to impose their rule. For decades the uprising was played down by Communist leaders and often confused in the West with a similarly tragic Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.

Instead of returning to communist Poland after the war, Chrusciel chose to live in exile in Britain and moved to the United States in 1956, settling in Washington, D.C. He died there in 1960 at age 65.

"He was — and remains — one of our national heroes," Warsaw Mayor Lech Kaczynski said as Chrusciel's remains were interred yesterday at the city's Powazki military cemetery.

"World War II expelled him from his own country," Kaczynski told a crowd of more than 1,000 people, including family members and war veterans, gathered in the wooded cemetery.

Zbigniew Scibor-Rylski, head of the Warsaw Insurgents' Union, a veterans association, said the 1989 fall of communism and rebirth of democracy in Poland were Chrusciel's dream, one he never got to see.

"The ideals you struggled for have become reality," he said at the funeral. "Poland is free from foreign domination."

Secretary of State Colin Powell and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder plan to join Polish leaders in the main observance of the uprising tomorrow.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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