Friday, Jul 30, 2004
Healing of a great wound
By Peter Avis
The first day of August marks the 60th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis. Nearly 200,000 Poles died in the fighting that lasted until October 2.
IT WAS at 5 p.m. on August 1, 1944 that the Warsaw Uprising began. The Polish Home Army leaders who launched it against the occupying Nazi army thought the insurrection might hold out for two or three days, until the Soviet army that was massed along the opposite banks of the Vistula crossed the river and completed the expulsion of the Germans. But the Russians never arrived and the insurrection went on for 63 days until the inevitable surrender on October 2. The Poles then and now felt betrayed by the Russians and betrayed too by the Western allies of that time who did little to bring about their salvation.
One of the most tragic episodes of the Second World War, in which some 180,000 civilians and 18,000 combatants were killed and one of Europe's great cities was subsequently razed by the Nazis, is being commemorated this weekend (July 31 and August 1) at ceremonies in Warsaw that will gather survivors from around the world. Poland's President Aleksander Kwasniewski will be present, accompanied by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany, symbolising the healing of a great wound dividing the two nations at the heart of Europe. Among foreign guests will be the U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and the U.K. Deputy Premier, John Prescott.
The survivors have waited 60 years for a national museum honouring the combatants to be built. The museum, instigated by the city's new mayor, Lech Kaczynski, will be opened this weekend with pomp of Church and State. For decades, Communist governments resisted the building of such a museum; in the Soviet lexicon of 1944, the Home Army soldiers were bandits led by right-wing landlords and fascists who did not deserve to be rescued by the Red Army.
It was a fiction cultivated by Stalin to damn a movement, which he saw as a threat to his future hegemony over Poland but it denied the truth of a national movement that represented the great swathe of the population. Even members of the Communist-led People's Army, a minority segment of the Polish resistance, fought and died with the Home Army soldiers in 1944.
The flower of Polish youth was cut down in the Battle of Warsaw. Some survivors died in Nazi camps and others were prosecuted and imprisoned, and sometimes killed, by the successor Communist regime, following the defeat of Hitler's Germany. Many of those who emerged from captivity in 1956 went on to adorn Polish national achievement, particularly in the fields of medicine, architecture and literature. A few of them live on today.
On the eve of the commemoration, a new young generation is involved in the preparation of events that will fill television screens and newspaper columns. Young volunteers were still busy last week decorating the renovated tram power station that will house a museum incorporating a 156-metre long wall recording the names of thousands of combatants who perished during the insurrection.
Karolina Mroz, who is to start her studies at the famous Film School in Lodz after the summer, declared: "It's marvellous. The veterans have been waiting 60 years for the opening of this museum and they are glad we are interested in them."
Poland's young people of 2004 have other challenges to face than those of their predecessors whose incredible courage is celebrated in a moving exhibition presented by writer Barbara Wachowicz, paradoxically at the Palace of Culture (the ugly wedding cake building 'presented' by Stalin to Warsaw after the war).
In a population that is generally sceptical about politicians of every kind, the young appear to be the most enthusiastic about Poland's new membership of the European Union.
Most people register, painfully, that accession to the Brussels club has been accompanied by a rise in prices of many basic foodstuffs of more than 20 per cent. But the younger generation celebrates above all that by being recognised as full-fledged citizens of Europe in which they have the prospect of living their lives unrestricted by the old frontiers.
The still young lime trees flower in a city that rose from the ashes after the war, so that today you can wander along streets that have been long since been restored out of rubble to the recreated facades of the nation's illustrious and artistic past. Now, with the opening of the Warsaw Uprising Museum, another brick from the past is added to the house of the present in a city that never seeks to escape its history.
- © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
Copyright © 2004, The Hindu.