Shot by both sides

The Nazis and the Soviets did their best to erase all evidence of the Warsaw Uprising. But the Poles have a way of enduring.

The Nazis and the Soviets did their best to erase all memory of the Warsaw Uprising. But 75 years on, evidence of the rebellion endures.

Warsaw is a city of memorials. Not grand, triumphalist monuments, but small, discreet ones that are often easy to miss. You come across them in unexpected places: in the foyer of a church, for example, or on a quiet street in the suburbs. They don’t celebrate great military victories. On the contrary, they silently commemorate a nation’s anguish. An inconspicuous plaque at 15 Wawelska St is typical. It recalls the events of August 5, 1944, when soldiers of the notorious Kaminski Brigade – Russian collaborators under the command of the German occupying army – forced their way into the Radium Institute founded by Marie Curie for the treatment of cancer patients.

After looting the hospital, raping the nurses and destroying much of the equipment, they set the building on fire. Some patients were burnt alive but dozens managed to shelter in hiding places. Discovered days later, they were dragged out and the building was set ablaze again. An estimated 50 critically ill patients were shot on the spot. Others were sent to the hastily improvised Zieleniak prison camp, where they were executed and their bodies burnt on a funeral pyre. It’s thought that 170

patients and staff lost their lives. They were civilians, not combatants, but the distinction was academic. In the savage German reprisals that followed the Warsaw Uprising 75 years ago this month, all Poles were the enemy.

The launching of the uprising by the Polish resistance movement, on August 1, was a cue for the Nazis to shed all restraint and adherence to the rules of war. By the time the rebellion was quelled two months later, between 150,000 and 200,000 Polish civilians – women and children as well as men – had died, mostly by execution, and more than half a million had been exiled to Germany to work in slave labour camps. My wife’s parents were among the latter group.

As an example to other occupied cities, the Germans then began the systematic destruction of the city. Hardly a building was left intact.

Stalin ordered his army to halt, then waited while the Germans did his dirty work for him.

STALIN’S BETRAYAL

The bitter irony was that the Polish resistance, officially known as the Home Army, was complicit in its own destruction. The leaders of the uprising made the fatal mistake of believing the Soviet Army, which was rapidly advancing on Warsaw from the east, would come to their assistance against the common enemy.

It was assumed the uprising would last only a few days – just as long as it took for Soviet