I

It is Aug. 13, 1944, and the streets of Warsaw are clogged with barricades and mounds of rubble, burn-out vehicles and fallen streetlamps, bent iron pipes and tangled electrical cables, all interspersed with spent cartridges and dead bodies. An acrid stench of putrescence and gunpowder suffuses the heavy summer air in this martyred city, where hundreds, indeed thousands of buildings have collapsed under the weight of German shelling, leaving only their chimneys upright, gesturing toward the sky like atrophied fingers stiffened by rigor mortis. Some signs of devastation are more subtle. The poet Czesław Miłosz will later describe the curious sight of cobblestones “standing upright like the quills of a porcupine,” displaced and tilted upward by unrelenting machine-gun fire. “Such moments in the consciousness of a man,” Miłosz felt, “judge all poets and philosophers.” For 13 days the Polish Home Army has been engaged in street combat, in house-to-house combat, in hand-to-hand combat with the Nazi Wehrmacht, while civilians huddle in cellars and bomb shelters. For 13 days the city has been subjected to non-stop barrages, reducing the Paris of the North to a barren, cratered moonscape. And for 13 days the world has looked on, passively — with a few exceptions — as Warsaw proves itself, in the words of the historian Olgierd Górka, “the most heroic city of resistance to German bestiality.”

The Warsaw Uprising began at 17:00 hours on Aug. 1, 1944 — “W-Hour” — with the seizure of the city’s main post office, railway station, and power station, the towering Prudential Building, and a number of German arsenals and bunkers, with the Home Army attempting to secure the city’s freedom before the arrival of the advancing Soviet army. Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, the leader of the armed uprising, had figured that “a struggle undertaken inside the city at the moment of the Russian attack from outside would shorten the battle and spare Warsaw the fate of Stalingrad.” At the same time, the Polish government-in-exile hoped that taking control of Warsaw would strengthen the Free Polish bargaining position vis-à-vis its Kremlin counterparts. As the Home Army activist Aniela Dziewulska-Łosiowa put it, “We wanted to come forward as hosts of this land on which we lived, and on which we fought during the whole period of the German occupation,” while another member of the Polish Underground, Zivia Lubetkin, acknowledged that “from the very beginning we were given to understand the twofold significance of the Polish uprising. It was both an armed, military revolt against the Germans and a political revolt against the Soviets.” Surely few causes in history were ever so just. (READ MORE: Ukraine and Syria: Biden’s Leftover Wars)

Gen. Bór-Komorowski had estimated that his forces could hold out against the Nazi war machine for a few days, or perhaps a week; the Soviet vanguard was expected to arrive in Warsaw “on the second or third or, at the latest, by the seventh day of the fighting.” The high tide of the Warsaw Uprising was reached on Aug. 4, but no Soviet columns were in sight, and the pockets of Polish resistance slowly began to dry up like isolated tidal pools as casualties mounted, ammunition ran low, and the German advantage in manpower and air power was increasingly felt. Soviet airfields were located a mere five-minute flight away, but no supplies were forthcoming from the east. Heroic efforts to supply the Polish insurgents by the American and British air forces proved costly; at the height of the airlift, it was calculated that one Allied bomber was being lost for every ton of equipment successfully delivered — an unacceptable ratio, however worthy the mission. The Soviets, meanwhile, were content to dither on the other side of the Vistula while the Nazis, their ostensible enemies, systematically liquidated the Polish Home Army, their ostensible allies.

Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian-born author of Darkness at Noon, indignantly declared the Soviet Union’s cynical betrayal of the Polish resistance to be “one of the major infamies of this war which will rank for the future historian on the same ethical level with Lidice,” comparing Stalin’s sacrifice of Warsaw to the notorious Nazi massacre of all the men, women, and children in the Bohemian town Lidice in reprisal for the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich. Sir John Slessor of the Royal Air Force, who had led the unsuccessful Warsaw Airlift, praised the “utmost gallantry and self-sacrifice on the part of our air-crews” and the “deathless heroism on the part of the Polish Underground Army” while castigating the “blackest-hearted, coldest-blooded treachery on the part of the Russians,” adding that “I am not a naturally vindictive man; but I hope there may be some very special hell for the brutes in the Kremlin, who betrayed [Bór-Komorowski]’s men and led to the fruitless sacrifice of our flyers.” Yet it is hard to disagree with the historian Norman Davies’ conclusion that “western assessments of Soviet practices and intentions were grossly complacent.” Joseph Stalin had proven willing to take the lives of millions upon millions of Soviet citizens through mass murder, forced population transfers, terror famines, and the Gulag system. Standing pat while Varsovians fought and Warsaw burned was a comparatively simple way to eliminate his sworn political enemies. The free world might have looked on in horror and pity as yet another cruel joke was played on God’s Playground, yet another ordeal was inflicted on the repeatedly partitioned Martyr of Europe, yet another round of copious bloodletting was taking place in Europe’s Bloodlands — but who in their right mind could have expected the manifestly genocidal Red Butcher of the Kremlin to be moved by Poland’s plight?

Geopolitics was presumably far from the minds of the Home Army insurgents as they waged their desperate daily struggle for survival, armed only with a motley collection of light weapons and what little they could scrounge from dead German soldiers and scattered Allied airdrops. The sheer heroism of the Home Army soldiers was beyond description but can best be explained by the exhortation issued during the previous year’s Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by Mordechai Anielewicz, a leader of the Jewish Combat Organization:

The most difficult struggle of all is the one within ourselves. Let us not get accustomed and adjusted to these conditions. The one who adjusts ceases to discriminate between good and evil. He becomes a slave in body and soul. Whatever may happen to you, remember always: Don’t adjust! Revolt against the reality!

Warsaw has always been a city of resistance, as evidenced by the Warsaw Insurrection of 1794, the November Uprising of 1830, the January Uprising of 1863, the Miracle on the Vistula of 1920, and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. Unwilling to accept or adjust to the seemingly permanent reality of totalitarian domination, Varsovians had revolted once again, but, as usual, they were on their own. Still, they fought block by block, street by street, house by house, yard by yard, reluctantly ceding ground to the Germans in the central districts of the city. Rumors began to spread about the slaughter of civilians being carried out in the western boroughs of Wola and Ochota, where as many as 100,000 defenseless noncombatants were gunned down by sadistic SS, police, and Wehrmacht squads, but the campaign of terror was ineffective, and resistance only stiffened.

By Aug. 13, the frontline had shifted to the Home Army strongpoint located at the Archcathedral Basilica of St. John the Baptist in the Old Town. Unable to dislodge the determined Polish defenders from the brick gothic cathedral, the Germans deployed a Schwerer Ladungsträger Borgward B IV, a remote-controlled demolition vehicle filled with 450 kg of explosives, which was driven into the building and detonated. Most of the church was destroyed instantaneously, leaving behind only toppled masonry, broken bricks, smashed stained glass, and shards of plaster, marble, and human bones. After the Home Army had retreated, a German Vernichtungskommando (Destruction Detachment) unit would arrive to level little what remained of the structure. As the mother church of the Archdiocese of Warsaw and the burial place of the Dukes of Masovia, St. John’s was one of the city’s crown jewels, renowned for its Baroque main altar painting, the Venetian virtuoso Palma il Giovane’s Virgin and Child with St. John the Baptist and St. Stanisław, and for its vast array of sculptures, including Jean-Joseph Vinache’s marble bust of Franciszek Jan Bieliński, as well as innumerable other precious works of art lost forever during the uprising and its aftermath. The Archikatedra św. Jana w Warszawie had stood there on Świętojańska St. since 1390, surviving the wars and partitions and revolutions that occurred with such terrible regularity over the centuries, and then, all of a sudden, it was no more.

The cathedral was not alone in its fate; 10,455 buildings were destroyed in the fighting, including 25 churches. St. Alexander’s Church on Three Crosses Square would be hit by nine separate bombs dropped by Junkers Ju 87s, resulting in the collapse of its exquisite neoclassical dome, its main nave, and much of its southern facade. Before the German bombs struck, members of the Underground had managed to spirit away one of its finest adornments, a marvelous painting by Rembrandt’s disciple Carel Fabritius, The Raising of Lazarus. The work’s provenance was a gripping story in itself: Painted in 1642, it was sold in Amsterdam in 1739 as a genuine Rembrandt before making its way to St. Alexander’s in the mid-nineteenth century, where it was attributed for some reason to the 18th-century artist Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich until the art historian Juliusz Starzyński discovered Fabritius’ signature after a 1936 cleaning. A certain talismanic quality must have been imputed to the rescued painting. Just as Lazarus had risen from the dead and cast off his grave clothes, and just as Fabritius’ masterpiece had improbably navigated the centuries, emerged from obscurity, and managed to avoid destruction at the hands of the Nazis, so to would Warsaw one day rise from the dead, just as it had risen, in every sense of the word, so many times before.

II

George Orwell addressed the ongoing Warsaw Uprising in his pugnacious Sept. 1, 1944, contribution to the leftwing Tribune newspaper, entitled “As I Please.” His stated aim was “to protest against the mean and cowardly attitude adopted by the British press toward the recent rising in Warsaw,” having noticed that the “British intelligentsia, with few exceptions, have developed a nationalistic loyalty toward the U.S.S.R. and are dishonestly uncritical of its policies,” regardless of any considerations of basic morality:

Their attitude towards Russian foreign policy is not “Is this policy right or wrong?” but “This is Russian policy: how can we make it appear right?” And this attitude is defended, if at all, solely on grounds of power. The Russians are powerful in eastern Europe, we are not: therefore we must not oppose them. This involves the principle, of its nature alien to Socialism, that you must not protest against an evil which you cannot prevent.

Orwell had an unambiguous message for pro-Soviet sycophants, one that unfortunately retains its relevance almost 80 years later:

Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.

III

The Warsaw Uprising came to an end on Oct. 2, 1944, when what little was left of the Home Army laid down what little was left of its arms. Owing to the Blitzkrieg of 1939, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, and post-uprising Nazi reprisals, approximately nine-tenths of the city had been reduced to rubble. The Nazis had first intended to Germanize the city, which would have been called Neue deutsche Stadt Warschau, but in the aftermath of the uprising, Heinrich Himmler had ordered that “the city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.” There were even plans to flood Warsaw, concealing it beneath a vast artificial lake. The belated arrival of the Soviet Army prevented the Germans from realizing their goal of the total destruction of the Polish capital, but the devastation was nonetheless on a scale unknown in human history. Perhaps 200,000 civilians had been killed, and the 700,000 who survived were expelled from the city and processed at the Durchgangslager 121 transit camp in Pruszków. Many of those were sent on to the concentration camps and death camps at Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and Ravensbrück.

One of the survivors of the uprising, Czesław Miłosz, returned to Warsaw in the spring of 1945 alongside his fellow writer Jerzy Andrzejewski. Miłosz picked his way through the debris and arrived at his old home on Aleja Niepodlegiosci, only to find it unrecognizable after fierce fighting had raged there between the Nazis and the heroic Baszt Battalion from Aug. 1 all the way through Sept. 27. Looking back on his visit, Miłosz described how his “house was damaged by artillery shells. A page from André Gide flapped ironically in the wind. There were other book covers that feet had stamped on … Rimbaud, French surrealists, Kafka, Proust. It looked a little stupid in the background of the ruins … What was the point in looking for the rest of my books? I felt revulsion at the sight.” A volume of his own early poetry collection, the 1936 Three Winters, lay half-concealed in the ruins, symbolically pierced by a stray bullet. Priceless collections like the National Library, the Krasiński Library, the Przeździecki Library, and the Zamoyski Library had all been reduced to ashes, but the loss of so many smaller book collections, however comparatively modest, was just as heart-rending. (READ MORE: NATO Needs Ukraine, and So Do We)

Passing by the ruins of the Archcathedral Basilica of St. John the Baptist on Świętojańska St., pulverized back on Aug. 13 by the bomb-laden Borgward IV, the poet was flooded with contradictory emotions, which he endeavored to record in his immortal poem “In Warsaw”:

What are you doing here, poet, on the ruins 
Of St. John’s Cathedral this sunny 
Day in spring?

What are you thinking here, where the wind 
Blowing from the Vistula scatters
The red dust of the rubble?

You swore never to be a ritual mourner.
You swore never to touch
The deep wounds of your nation
So you would not make them holy
With the accursed holiness that pursues
Descendants for many centuries.

Surrounded by the “unburied bones of kin,” Miłosz ultimately resolved to seize his pen and “write the story of their lives and death,” before concluding:

It’s madness to live without joy
And to repeat to the dead
Whose part was to be gladness
Of action in thought and in the flesh, singing, feasts,
Only the two salvaged words:
Truth and justice.

The artist Tadeusz Cieślewski — whose son, also an artist named Tadeusz, had perished during the uprising — likewise returned to Warsaw. Wandering among the ruins of his city, he depicted the omnipresent desolation with charcoal on paper. One of his drawings, Ruins of the Church of St. Alexander in Warsaw, looks like a Piranesi sketch of the ruins of the ancient Roman forum, the collapsed rotunda seeming like it belonged not to a modern city but a lost civilization.

Visit Warsaw today and walk down Świętojańska St., and you will find St. John’s not as Miłosz saw it on that melancholy day in 1945 but meticulously reconstructed and returned to its 14th-century grandeur, just as it appeared in 17th-century illustrations by Abraham Boot and Frans Hogenberg. And then proceed south down the ulica Nowy Świat and Krakowskie Przedmieście, and you will arrive at Three Crosses Square, graced by St. Alexander’s, which appears not as Cieślewski saw it in the dismal aftermath of the uprising but as it would have appeared in all its neoclassical glory back in 1825, when it rivaled the Pantheon in Rome with its serene, austere beauty. The Old Town was also brought back to life, with reference to Bernardo Bellotto’s vibrant 18th-century depictions of Warsaw. It was a herculean labor just to remove all the rubble and broken bricks; the staunch anti-communist novelist Leopold Tyrmand observed how “one of the philosophers calculated that Varsovians inhaled four bricks each year at that time. One must love one’s city in order to rebuild it at the cost of one’s own breathing. It is perhaps for this reason that, from the battlefield of rubble and ruins, Warsaw became once more the old Warsaw, eternal Warsaw … Varsovians brought it to life, filling its brick body with their own, hot breath.” It is little wonder that Warsaw is known as the Phoenix City, its motto Semper Invicta. After all the partitions and revolutions of the 19th century, the genocidal violence of World War II, and then 44 years of Soviet domination, the city would again be reborn as the capital of a free Poland. One almost forgets what a miracle it is that Warsaw exists at all. 

Reminders of the uprising are everywhere in the city. The bronze Warsaw Uprising Monument dominates the southern side of Krasiński Square. Off of Czerniakowska St. looms a hilly park once known as the Góra Śmieci, the “Mountain of Trash” formed by piles of brick and concrete hauled away from the shattered city streets, but which was subsequently turned into the Mound of the Warsaw Uprising, with a cross-lined path leading to a memorial erected in honor of the Home Army, featuring its iconic anchor insignia. At the intersection of Nowy Przejazd and Aleja Solidarnośc is the Monument to the Heroes of Warsaw, with its formidable, sword-wielding Warsaw Nike statue. The thought-provoking interactive Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego, the Warsaw Uprising Museum, located in the Wola district, opened in 2004 and still receives some 3,000 visitors per day.

Other reminders of the uprising are more understated, though no less affecting. When the Krasiński Library at 9 Okólnik St. was destroyed by the Nazis, some 50,000 books, manuscripts, and irreplaceable incunabula were reduced to ashes. After the insurgency was suppressed, the library employee Bohdan Korzeniewski cautiously entered the building’s basement and was relieved to find that the books hidden there had improbably survived, piled up in “thick, even layers.” As Korzeniewski approached the stacks, he found that “the volumes were no longer stuffed together tightly and touching the ceiling, as when we stored them. A closer approach revealed the secret behind these changes. It was disgusting. When one touched the layer of those stored units, they did not even disintegrate. They vanished. The collection smoldered completely in a fire that must have been digesting it slowly for many days.” The ashes of the incunabula and manuscripts were swept up and placed in an urn, which is now displayed in the reconstituted National Library, a haunting reminder of the deep wounds inflicted upon the Polish people and the reverence with which they instinctively treat the relics of the past. 

IV

A photograph of Warsaw taken in 1950 provides a northwest view of the Krasiński Gardens and Świętojerska St. There is nothing to see but a vast expanse of rubble, with rows of brick chimneys emerging in regular rows like gravestones, a vista of wholesale destruction commensurate with that of Ground Zero in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Looking at this unforgettable image, it is hard not to be reminded of images of the equally devastated cities of present-day Ukraine — Volnovakha, Severodonetsk, Lysychansk, Marinka, Avdiyivka, Popasna, Rubizhne, Mariupol, Bakhmut, and others — all reduced to post-apocalyptic hell-scapes during Ukraine’s stalwart resistance to Russian bestiality. And when a Russian missile hit the Transfiguration Cathedral in Odesa on the morning of July 23, 2023, blowing a hole in the roof, destroying the altar, and penetrating down into the building’s basement, it was hard not to be reminded of the destruction visited upon churches like St. John’s and St. Alexander’s by the Nazis during the Warsaw Uprising. (READ MORE: Edward Luttwak: The U.S. Must End the Russia–Ukraine War)

The Russian invaders have no more regard for Ukrainian cultural heritage than the Germans had for Polish cultural heritage. Around 500 churches were destroyed during the first year of Russia’s shameful invasion of Ukraine, and the number continues to rise. Such crimes are designed to break a people’s collective spirit, though historically, they rarely succeed in doing so. In the notorious Baedeker Blitz, the Nazis bombed strategically irrelevant targets like Exeter, Canterbury, and Bath, only to find British resistance stiffened by those enormities. Poland’s aspirations for political freedom were not snuffed out by the orgy of genocidal violence that followed in the wake of the Warsaw Uprising. And Russia’s barbaric campaign against innocent Ukrainian cities, typified by the attack on the Transfiguration Cathedral, is similarly destined to fail. As Odesa’s Mayor Gennadiy Trukhanov eloquently articulated it in his address to the Russian people, made in the aftermath of the attack:

If you only knew how much Odesa hates you, not just hates you but despises you. You are fighting against little children and Orthodox cathedrals. You are creatures without kith or kin, without morals and with no values … You know us Odesans very poorly. You will not break us, you will just make us more angry.

There are those who will look upon the devastation wrought in Odesa and urge Ukraine to come to an accommodation with its violent, increasingly unhinged neighbor. Yet it was Mordechai Anielewicz, during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, who warned against failing to distinguish between good and evil, and it was George Orwell, during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, who warned against the tendency to grovel before tyrants. In Poland, Aug. 1 is Warsaw Uprising National Remembrance Day, and at 5 p.m., sirens sound, and Warsaw comes to a halt in remembrance of the insurgents who fought against impossible odds za naszą i waszą wolność, “for our freedom and yours.” It is an occasion to remember that “dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for,” that truth and justice can be salvaged from the dusty rubble of a martyred city, that churches and libraries and homes and even entire cities can be rebuilt, and that a freedom-seeking nation will survive the worst that can be thrown at it. And it is an occasion to remember the eternal truth of G.K. Chesterton’s dictum, that “in the end it will not matter to us whether we wrote well or ill; whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will matter to us greatly on what side we fought.” 

Cześć i Chwała Bohaterom!