Andrew Borowiec
Journalist who wrote a powerful account of his dramatic role as a youngster in the Warsaw Uprising
ANDREW BOROWIEC, who has died aged 89, learnt his first English in a German prisonerof-war camp when he was 16. It was October 1944 and his teachers were captured British medics who had strayed into enemy hands. They were treating the wounds he had received towards the end of the Warsaw Uprising, trying to keep the Germans away from the manhole cover that was the hatch to his next escape route through the city’s sewers.
Six years later, his English was good enough for him to talk his way into Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York. This, and the French and German he had learnt as a child, got him a job with Associated Press, where his byline was anglicised from Andrjez to Andrew Borowiec.
By 1956 he was part of the agency’s Paris bureau, from where he covered wars and revolutions in francophone former colonies such as Algeria, the Belgian Congo and Vietnam. He was last shot at in Croatia at the age of 63.
But other people’s wars, as he called them, never matched his memories of growing up in a wartime Poland that, before Hitler turned on Stalin and invaded the USSR, was jointly occupied by Russian and German troops. He saw his first killing aged 11, when a Soviet sentry shot a tottering figure heading for the German zone across a frozen river. Jews came the other way. Enemies of the Reich dangled from roadside gibbets; intermittent gunfire sounded night and day as, despite horrendous reprisals, Poles continued to resist.
A generation for whom the Nazis forbade education beyond 14 attended clandestine classrooms, and it was at one of these that an older boy recruited Borowiec to the Home Army, whose loyalty was to the government in exile in London.
Boys his age were used mainly as couriers, but when the time came Borowiec started the way he intended to continue. “Somebody shouted, ‘Throw the grenade!’ ” he wrote in Warsaw Boy, his memoir, eventually published in 2014, which was started with notes pencilled on Red Cross lavatory paper in Stalag X1-A. “I looked around, then realised this command was directed at me. I pulled the pin and hurled it through the nearest window. I remember thinking I’ll never be able to live back with my mother after this.”
Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Lewis Jones called his book “a timely, angry, terribly moving and drily amusing account”.
When he threw that grenade Borowiec was still two months short of his 16th birthday. Yet when the fighting began on a sunny August morning neither side expected it to last long. German forces included SS units composed almost entirely of desperate Red Army deserters with a gruesome reputation for massacre, rape and pillage. They estimated that it would take a couple of weeks at most to finish off a bunch of poorly armed teenagers.
The Poles were just as certain of a swift victory. For days they had thrilled to the sound of the Red Army’s artillery getting closer as it approached the city’s outer suburbs on the Vistula’s east bank. Recent German losses in Russia and eastern Poland had been so big they hoped that the Wehrmacht might be planning to abandon Warsaw and regroup in East Prussia.
In the event, both sides were wrong. Stalin saw the Warsaw Uprising as a chance to let Hitler dispose of the enemies of socialism most likely to resist Poland’s transformation into a Soviet satellite and paused his tanks.
At the same time, the insurgents turned out to be better armed, partly by RAF airdrops, and often better led than either Stalin or the SS envisaged. In the end they were reduced to paper bandages and short of everything except courage, but they astonished both friend and foe alike by holding out for 63 days.
Borowiec was among those who crawled through sewers, shot his way through close quarters gunfights, saw his friends killed – and avenged them. Once, he staggered firing out of the ruins of a house that, as the prelude for an infantry assault, had been blasted apart by an unmanned wire-guided miniature demolition vehicle on caterpillar tracks.
About the size of a large suitcase, the Germans called it Goliath. Borowiec narrowly escaped from the building after he had spotted from a ground level basement window the Goliath approaching in beetle-like stops and starts. The basement was packed with wounded, but when he tried to raise the alarm a doctor reprimanded him for disturbing his patients. By the time the Goliath exploded the teenage veteran had reached the top step.
His luck ran out on September 25 1944, the day after his 16th birthday. An agonising mortar shrapnel wound in his right leg came exactly a week before the depleted Home Army surrendered, by which time the Red Cross had secured an agreement that they would be granted the same prisoner-of-war status that the Poles had given their German prisoners and not executed as Polish banditen.
As Borowiec lay in a makeshift field hospital, nurses put him in the only civilian clothes they could find: a satin-lapelled dinner suit and two left shoes. He was still wearing them when he limped through the gates of Stalag XI-A and into the arms of British medics.
Andrjez Borowiec was born in Lodz on September 24 1928. His father, Stanislaw, was a career officer in the Austro-hungarian Army that found itself on the losing side of the First World War. In 1920 Colonel Borowiec fought the Russians again when a newly independent Poland routed Lenin’s Bolshevik invaders. Divorced, he celebrated this victory with an unlikely marriage to Zofia Arct, the daughter of a general and some 20 years his junior. But when their only child was five she left him for a younger officer. Zofia had little access to her son and in her absence the boy became close to his Francophile governess, who was also his father’s mistress.
Young Andrjez was living with his father in somewhat reduced circumstances in a German-occupied Carpathian mountain town, after they had been evicted from their family home to accommodate German civilians made homeless by the RAF. Then, in September 1942, Colonel Borowiec died of a stroke and Andrjez joined his mother in Warsaw. Two years later he threw his first grenade.
By 1947, having briefly served with a Polish formation in Allied occupied Italy, Borowiec was living in Britain as a beneficiary of the Polish Resettlement Act. Intensive English language courses were available. Borowiec, having just failed to get into the LSE, read social sciences at a college in Pennsylvania and went from there to Columbia. On November 11 1954 he was among 50,000 new US citizens swearing their Oath of Allegiance at the Yankee Stadium.
Once he became a journalist he rarely lived in America. Shortly after his second marriage he moved with his English wife Juliet, the younger sister of the novelist Shirley Conran, to Cyprus where – apart from a short interlude in Washington DC – they remained for more than 30 years.
During this time he published political histories of Yugoslavia and Cyprus and a historical account of the Warsaw Uprising for a US academic imprint, but he could never finish an account of his own part in the events and nearly lost a draft in the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus.
In failing health, in 2012, he consulted Colin Smith, an old friend who had published military histories. Smith brought it to the attention of Penguin and it has since appeared in English, Italian, Greek and Polish editions. In 2015, shortly after the Polish government awarded him a Bene Merito distinction for promoting his country abroad, the Borowieces moved to Ilford Park Polish Home, near Newton Abbot.
Andrew Borowiec is survived by Juliet and his two children by his first wife, Tamara.
Andrew Borowiec, born September 24 1928, died April 14 2018