Eighty Years after the Warsaw Uprising, History is Repeating Itself

Crowds swelled outside the Warsaw Uprising Museum in the Polish capital city as August marked 80 years since the heroic 63-day battle against the Nazis.

The museum takes guests on an incredible journey back to the gallant fight put up by the resistance in the ruins of Warsaw as they sought to expel the German army, which had invaded the city in 1939 and turned much of it to rubble as they sought to extinguish Polish identity through extermination, imprisonment and torture, much of it directed against the city’s 400,000 Jews.

The exhibition includes harrowing footage of the resistance fighters, many of them teenagers, as they took on the might of Hitler’s army with whatever weapons they could lay their hands on.

In the end, they were defeated by a merciless bombing campaign which flattened much of the city. By the start of 1945, as much as 90% of the city had been destroyed. The city of ruins, which had housed more than two million before the war, was reduced to less than 10% of this figure, two-thirds of them women.

When Nazi rule ended, Poland awoke to a new nightmare, 55 years of repressive Soviet rule which prohibited political expression and crushed civil society.

Not far from the uprising museum is the second-highest building in Warsaw, Joseph Stalin’s Palace of Culture and Science, a cynical “gift” from the Soviet dictator to the people of Poland.

Now stripped of Stalin’s name, it stands as a memorial to the 5½ decades of Soviet occupation after the Second World War.

Uprising abandoned

History could have told a different story had the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazi occupation in August 1944 succeeded.

As the Nazi hold on Europe waned in the face of Russian, British and US battlefield advances, the people of Warsaw formed a rudimentary civilian army and attacked the Germans in street battles.

Stalin’s Soviet forces had advanced to the outskirts of the city, but instead of coming to the aid of the uprising, they were ordered to halt on the other side of the Vistula River to allow the Germans time to destroy the Polish resistance, just the sort of politically assertive movement that Stalin despised.

The British and Americans, advancing from the West, could also have come to the aid of the uprising but they too held back, honouring an agreement with Stalin that he would take Warsaw. It was a shameful abdication of responsibility to support the forces fighting for freedom.

Instead, the Allies mounted a resupply airlift. South African and Royal Air Force crews lost one aircraft for every ton of supplies dropped on a long route flying from Italy, as they were denied overflight rights in Soviet-controlled areas.

About 16,000 members of the Polish resistance were killed in the uprising and as many as 20,000 Polish civilians died, mostly in mass executions.

The failure of the uprising enabled Stalin to impose his will on Poland, which became a Soviet satellite state where repression ruled for almost six decades until Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement successfully challenged the system, ushering in democracy in 1990.

Today, Poland is free and its streets are thronged with young people enjoying the summer evenings at bars and restaurants.

There is, however, a new tension in the air.

Tragic repetition

Poland and other former Soviet states in eastern Europe, face a new threat. Stalin may be long gone, but Russia’s new imperial aggression has brought war to their doorstep once more as Ukraine battles invading Russian forces.

In a tragic repetition of the destruction of Warsaw 80 years ago, towns and villages in Ukraine have been levelled by massive artillery bombardments, missiles and bombing as Vladimir Putin seeks to restore Soviet imperial glory, albeit grafted on to oligarchic state capitalism this time around.

Ukraine has fought valiantly, most recently mounting a daring incursion into Russia’s Kursk province. However, it faces an enemy that seeks nothing less than its annihilation and the imposition of a Russian Reich that will erase its freedoms and turn it once more into a satellite state.

Ukraine needs the world to stand by it and give it the ability to fully confront the Russians, and many have generously come it its assistance. However, the many caveats governing its use of military hardware limit its ability to respond to the mounting Russian threat.

Will the world once more stand by while a nation is robbed of its birthright, some 80 years after Poland’s darkest hour? A choice of appeasement, of turning the other cheek to naked aggression because it is a long way away is, as any Pole will remind, never going to be a winning bet. 

This article originally appeared in the Daily Maverick 

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