August 1 is the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, one of the biggest urban battles of World War II.
The Home Army Polish resistance was battling the German army, while the Soviet army was watching from the eastern side of the Vistula river as the Germans pummeled Warsaw into smithereens and killed 200,000 people.
President Donald Trump on his first visit here in 2017 gave a speech where he acknowledged that Poland was tried by its history. It was occupied and oppressed and wiped off the map. But it still survived, renewed itself and thrived.
Last and most traumatic was the Warsaw Uprising, which broke out as the Soviet army was approaching the city made into a fortress by the Germans for the upcoming titanic battle.
Home Army started the battle for freedom and independence of Poland, the biggest anti-Nazi resistance action in Europe. It did not know that Poland was already assigned to the Soviet sphere of influence at the Teheran conference by Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill in 1943.
As the iron German army beat back the lightly armed guerillas, Hitler gave an order to kill every man, woman and child and raze the city into the ground.
On August 5, 1944, German units with helper battalions made up of Soviet prisoners of war shot about 50,000 old men, women and children in the Wola district of the city. Those few who survived this bloodlust killing frenzy had an impression of witnessing pure evil. Streets were flowing with blood and the burden of what to do with bodies became too great.
The indiscriminate killing stopped the next day but Himmler decided to expel the entire population of Warsaw, about 1 million people. They were transported outside of the battle zone and distributed into various concentration and labor camps.
The Soviet Army watching on the other side of the river was not passive either. Some of the Home Army soldiers who managed to swim the river to save themselves from the burning hell were imprisoned by the NKVD internal security units as “reactionaries” and “helpers of Hitler,” even though they just came from fighting Hitler.
They were imprisoned and tortured in basements of a few surviving buildings. Officers were executed, while soldiers were sent to Siberia.
Once the city was empty, German soldiers came up to every building in the western side of Vistula and burned it down with flamethrowers after robbing them first. In January 1945, they burned down a medieval library as one of their last acts of barbarism and left town.
A few days later the Russian army walked in without a fight.
The fury of two totalitarian powers against Poland, which only wanted to be free and manage its own affairs, spelled the end of the traditional European civilization. The aristocratic and intellectual elite was exterminated or scattered in various camps. Hundreds of years of documents, books, paintings, and architecture were destroyed and could be recreated only to a limited extent.
The end of this old world is still being mourned today together with the death of so many promising young people who had so much to contribute but died to assert their humanity. Acute sense of defeat seized Poland and was further reinforced by the news of the Yalta conference.
None of the perpetrators of this mass murder were ever punished and some of them managed to have political careers in West Germany. The Uprising was only mentioned in communist public discourse in 1957 and its participants were always discriminated against.
Only faith gave meaning to the absolute evil witnessed not only by the wartime generation, but also its traumatized successors. This faith led to the revival of hope, especially when John Paul II was elected to the Papacy and was able to focus attention of the world on the oppression of the human spirit, perpetrated by communism, discrediting it worldwide.
In addition, Polish workers demonstrated that communists did not represent the working class, even though their whole ideology was built on it.
The Warsaw Uprising became the founding myth of free Poland and unities Poles across the country and the world. Today the Wola district is the most dynamically developing district of Warsaw because it was such a wasteland until now.
Only survivors of the wartime massacre ventured there to remember their dead relatives and neighbors. Now it is called Warsaw’s Manhattan with a wall of glass skyscrapers and a fashionable social life.
And for the first time ever, a German official will participate in the commemorations. Only two years ago, the German government was excusing its lack of aid to invaded Ukraine by its obligations to Russia, which was hurt by the Germans during World War II.
It refused to recognize that the damage perpetrated by the German army was much greater in Poland and Ukraine and this is where the German government should direct its guilt.
This year the President of Germany himself participated in commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the Uprising in Warsaw and the massacre of Wola in recognition of their significance.
In his speech, he asked for forgiveness for Germany’s racism, nationalism and imperialism. Again, the relevance of epoch-defining events of 80 years ago to today’s politics was evident.
Dr. Lucja Swiatkowski Cannon is a senior research fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. She was a strategist, policy adviser and project manager on democratic and economic reforms in Eastern Europe, the Baltics, and Central, South and Southeast Asia for Deloitte & Touche Emerging Markets, Coopers & Lybrand, and others. She has been an adjunct scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Dr. Cannon received a B.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Columbia University where she was an International Fellow and IREX Scholar at Warsaw University, and the London School of Economics. Read more of Swiatkowski Cannon's reports — Here.