The other warsaw uprising: why the world has forgotten.

World War II, it is often forgotten, did not end in the liberation of the whole of Europe. Among the major ironies of twentieth-century history is the fact that although it was the ruthless invasion of Poland that precipitated the war, after the Allied victory the Polish people were left in a state of subjugation much like that envisioned by their Nazi invaders in 1939. This irony has not been lost on Poles who recall the essential role of their mathematicians at the University of Poznan in breaking the German Enigma code, of their pilots in the Battle of Britain, of their ground troops in the Italian campaign and the Normandy invasion. They recall as well the promise by Churchill four years after the war started that Poland would be "a free, independent, sovereign and great state .... Britain and the United States will never desert you." That promise took all of five decades to be fulfilled, and when it was fulfilled it owed very little to the English or Americans. In light of that fact, it is but a minor irony that the sixtieth anniversary of the Warsaw Rising of August 1, 1944, received little attention from the American media--not even a paragraph in the New York Times (although New York contains more people of Polish descent than any other state), or the Chicago Tribune (although Chicago is second only to Warsaw in the number of Polish-speaking residents).

The Rising had been planned since September 1942 with a view to the Poles participating directly in the liberation of their capital and thus assuring a role in their country's future. Several factors determined the actual date: the attempted assassination of Hitler, which indicated Nazi weakness; broadcasts from Moscow calling for rebellion as the Soviet army advanced toward Warsaw; and the conviction that only active resistance would rouse London and Washington to send support. In the event, none of these factors favorably affected the outcome of the insurgency which ended brutally on October 2, sixty years ago. The bulk of the underground Home Army was destroyed, two hundred thousand Poles were killed, the remaining half-million were expelled, and the entire city of Warsaw was razed--a vengeful task that took the Wehrmacht and Polish slave laborers three months to carry out. The expulsion and the razing occurred by direct order of Hitler.

While Warsaw was leveled, the Soviet forces, by direct order of Stalin, dawdled on the eastern bank of the Vistula. There were mild protests from Churchill, and near silence from Roosevelt who had the leverage of being head of the nation whose industries were supplying the Russian war machine. Finally, on January 17, 1945, that machine lumbered into the city where it encountered negligible German opposition. Eleven percent of the original population--1.3 million at the time of the Nazi invasion--now remained in the wreckage of Warsaw. "So what was it all?" wrote the poet, Miron Bialoszewski, who was among the survivors. "A pile of ruins? Of bombed-out cellars? And a pile of corpses? All condemned together to a single history." And in the literal sense it was a single history, one detached from the greater story of the war--merely the history of some since-forgotten Poles.

"Crimes against human rights, never confessed and never publicly denounced, are a poison which destroys the possibility of friendship between nations," wrote the late Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, referring to the Rising in his 1980 Nobel lecture. One of the causes for the failure to honor the victims and heroes of the Rising is that it is often confused--by everyone from sovereigns (including the British queen) and journalists to the general public--with the Jewish ghetto insurgency of the previous year. The historian Norman Davies, whose recent book, Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (Viking), is the definitive analysis, has stated that the conflation of the two rebellions is now "an established piece of contemporary mythology." This has come about because all tragedies of the war are understandably considered in the shadow of the enduring mystery of the Holocaust. That "myth," however, is only a small part of the explanation of why the 1944 Rising has so often been misunderstood or ignored. The other part is cultural in the larger sense, since it relates to political and social conditions both in Poland and abroad.

In Poland, the Nazis set up concentration camps such as Auschwitz to eliminate the Polish ruling and educational elites--only in 1942 were Jews sent to Auschwitz. Thus the Rising was primarily the achievement of young people the Nazis had marked for death and who would have been the intellectual leaders of their emerging nation--but who died in the battle or were murdered. After the war, the Communists filled the universities, the media, and the government with hacks who followed the approved line about wartime events. The Black Book of Polish Censorship, made up of texts smuggled out of Poland, and preoccupied with Marxist minutiae, is a model of newspeak regarding the Rising, which it referred to as a "right wing" effort. The Black Book's references to "historical truth" and "the socialist character of the goals of patriotic education" clearly evoke Orwell, who was in fact the only significant voice in England to condemn his country's failure to help the Poles. Ironically, a week after the recent anniversary of the Rising, the British journalist Simon Heffer upbraided the Polish prime minister in the Spectator for "griping" about Britain's refusal to acknowledge that failure. Three days earlier, Gazeta Wyborcza reported that Russia had reacted similarly. Its foreign ministry declared that "the thesis" of Allied responsibility was "tendentious and subjective." Even today, the archaic jargon of Soviet orthodoxy prevails.

Lack of attention to the Rising in the United States can be attributed to several factors. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Polish immigrants were so preoccupied with the struggle for economic survival that only a fraction of their offspring entered such civic arenas as education, government, or the press, where they could make known to the general public the role of Poland during the Hitler years. The second, and more delicate, cause for the indifference to Polish suffering has to do with prejudices--some very old, and some of more recent origin. The more recent are now being called "anti-Polonism," and in this country during those same decades took the form of the conventional bias against newly arriving immigrant groups. This meant that events presumably of interest mainly to Poles--such as the 1944 Rising--would often be scanted by the media.

Whether present-day decisions and occurrences echo an anti-Polish bias will probably have to be left to the researchers at the National Opinion Research Center. One could certainly consider the instance of the two major newspapers mentioned earlier, and also the fact that this year's acclaimed documentary, Warsaw Rising: The Forgotten Soldiers of World War II, appeared not on any of the major networks but on CNN. It may be noted too that the documentary was initiated by a Pole who was born in Warsaw but educated at McGill and Harvard, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Similarly, the major adviser to the project was Norman Davies, mentioned earlier, whose two-volume history, God's Playground (Columbia University Press), is recognized as the most important effort at reorienting historical views on Poland. Lastly, and since the leitmotif of this discussion is irony, the documentary was first broadcast on D-Day when the world was honoring the "remembered soldiers" of Operation Overlord which resulted in the liberation of Europe--or at least the western part of it.

     Print/Woodcut

     What if the work doesn't save us
     and we must set down the stencils,
     brayer and the ink: return
     to a wood not carved, to faces

     featureless, where the eye relearns
     its opposite--yes--just as words
     must be written backwards so that
     they'll come out right, and the letters

     --we remember now--are only glyphs,
     stalks of wheat that once stood full
     in a field until a minstrel wind
     caught the tips and curved them down

     in a form like c,
     a bent of sound we'd heard
     and heard but had no picture of
     but that which hung in rain and sun

     could this be our remaking--
     one of one: the blade that is the word,
     the pine before it's cut?

     Anne Coray

It is in Europe that anti-Polonism implies something more sinister and hoary than any of the more or less genteel expressions of it considered above. It is a term employed in self-defense by those who have been accused of indulging in its mirror image, "anti-Semitism." The general form of the accusation is that "traditionally" Poles have discriminated against Jews. The specific form is that because of this tradition, many, though not most, Poles during the war were guilty of collaborating with the Nazis. Lost in such charges is the historical reality that there were more Jews in Poland--and thus occasion for more querulousness and more righteousness--than in all other Western European countries combined. This numerical difference occurred because Polish rulers over the centuries had provided a haven for Jews driven out of those other "cleansed" nations. Also, only in occupied Poland was any form of help for Jews punishable by death for the helpers, for their families, and their friends.

Nevertheless, the evidence strongly suggests that centuries of contempt for Jews, partially engendered and certainly reinforced by Roman Catholic Christianity, made the murderous goal of the Nazis more attainable. (Twenty years after the Holocaust, when a bishop made an intervention at Vatican II in favor of Jews, some prelates asked him, "How much did they pay you?") But as a matter of historic justice, it must also be affirmed that it was Catholicism as a structured society that also made possible the survival of the Poles as a Western national group. Unfortunately, that structure often smothered the teaching of "love one another"--as the idea of Christendom smothered the heart of Christianity. Nevertheless, this institutional strength in turn contributed to the survival of European civilization when in 1683 the elected king of Poland, John Sobieski, drove back the Ottomans from the gates of Vienna. One sequence of such events doesn't cancel out the other, but a score of such counterbalancing sequences--which could be readily adduced--illustrates the complexity of the histories involved and the perils of the univalent perspective that leads to anti-Semitism or anti-Polonism.

Accusations of culpable wartime prejudice are now, for the most part, of theoretical import. They certainly cannot result in sentences for the "convicted." To take events relating to the wartime period in the United States, few would question the guilt accruing to those who ordered the imprisonment of Japanese Americans in "concentration camps" (a term once used in a verbal slip by Roosevelt), or the destruction wrought by the terror-bombing of Nagasaki ("my ace in the hole," said Truman, anticipating the cold war). The chief agents of victory are rarely punished, and certainly it would be absurd to blame living Americans for those decisions. This raises the question why in Poland, wartime blame should be shared by the society today.

The answer is that many Poles themselves have insisted on "shared responsibility" for the Holocaust. "One can share the responsibility for the crime without taking part in it," said the Polish literary critic, Jan Blonski, in "The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto." That widely publicized 1987 statement effected a crise de conscience and challenged the nation to rethink its past. The title alludes to Czeslaw Milosz's "A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto," in Selected Poems which I published in 1973. The poem ends with its persona expressing fear that he too will be "counted among the helpers of death." According to Blonski, this fear which "warps and disfigures" Polish thinking, can be overcome--in a country which is 95 percent Catholic--by emulating Pope John Paul II at the synagogue of Rome, and by living in the spirit of the conciliar documents "written at the time of Pope John XXIII."

As Blonski points out, in the pope's synagogue speech as well as in those documents, one thing is clear:

  Christians of the past and the church itself were wrong. They had no
  reason to consider Jews as a "damned" nation, a nation responsible for
  the death of Jesus Christ .... The new church documents do not attempt
  to exonerate the past; they do not argue over extenuating
  circumstances. They speak clearly about the failure to fulfill the
  duties of brotherhood and compassion. The rest is left to history.

An encouraging aspect of that history has been the generally sympathetic responses to Blonski's statement by Polish intellectuals collected in My Brother's Keeper? (1990).

A less encouraging aspect of it is represented by Jedwabne, notorious as the town where hundreds of Jews were burned alive by Polish villagers in 1941. This disclosure in Jan T. Gross's Neighbors (Penguin), published in Polish in 2000, exposed the most widely bruited and controversial act of Polish wartime anti-Semitism. That the book has drawn such wide attention among Poland's intellectuals indicates that accusations of wartime crimes are still sharply divisive. Outside Poland, the reason for such keen interest is less readily discernible. There is the fact that, like the Roman razzia of 1943, when a thousand Jews were shipped to Auschwitz, the mass of recorded detail makes the event starkly emblematic and its monstrosity more recognizable--if not comprehensible. Still, the number of victims in either case is almost infinitesimal in light of the six million, or when contrasted with countless other massacres (Kiev and Odessa come immediately to mind). Certainly the obscene manner of death, evocative of an auto-da-fe, attracts the compassionate and the curious--who do not, though, seem to have been comparably moved by such "martyred villages" as Oradour-sur-Glane or Lidice. One might well wonder whether the anti-Polonism considered earlier is a factor in what seems an inordinate focus on Jedwabne.

Two non-Polish scholars have questioned the received reading of the massacre. In The Neighbors Respond (Princeton University Press), Istvan Deak of Columbia University has raised doubts about how a hundred enraged but unarmed villagers could herd fifteen hundred Jews into their crematorium. This led him to ask, "Why the Jews did not defend themselves," since there were other occasions when "Polish Jews dared to confront heavily armed SS soldiers"? Apart from rabid hysteria, the still-controversial answers are either that there was effective coercion by the Nazis--known to be in the area--or that the alleged number of victims and/or murderers has been seriously skewed. The second scholar is Norman Davies, whose Europe: A History, written before the Jedwabne disclosures, is recognized as a masterpiece of contextualization and evenhandedness--the latter in emulation of one of his admired exemplars, Cardinal John Lingard. In Rising '44, Davies adverts briefly to the massacre, since it is unrelated to the insurgency, and notes of "the shameful event" that it "cannot be used to fuel stereotypical misconceptions." Context explains why: "Occupied Poland contained between ten and twenty thousand towns and villages like Jedwabne. The number of reports about massacres with a similar scenario can be counted on the fingers of one hand."

Davies had been accused of skewing his interpretations by Lucy Dawidowicz--though she failed to make a convincing case. In any event, it makes more sense to heed the words of Ysrael Gutman, a ghetto survivor and director of Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem: "all accusations against the Poles that they were responsible for ... the 'Final Solution' are not even worth mentioning .... In Poland, the problem of complicity was a marginal phenomenon, important as a topic for research, but not a problem for a collective Polish culture today."

Perhaps now, Jews and Poles will find a symbolic meeting ground in the city where during the war the Nazi-created ghetto was divided from "the Aryan side." In that mutually consecrated place where death was swallowed up in victory, both parties may share their common triumph. Here are the final words of Davies about the events of 1943 and 1944: "The Warsaw Rising carries a deathless moral message. There are some things in life that are dearer than life itself. Like the heroes of the Ghetto uprising, who had fought the same enemy in the same doomed city only one year earlier, the most devoted insurgents of 1944 faced death willingly--not gladly, but by choice." A statement made by Jews and Poles alike recognizing the truth of Davies's words would make a small but helpful contribution to disentangling the network of congruent and conflicting viewpoints held by these two persecuted and traumatized peoples. Jews and Poles might also find they have more to share in the future by recalling together these two events of the past. There are some signs that this is already happening. A growing number of organizations in Poland, in Israel, and in the Anglophone world are now devoted to the furthering of mutual understanding and compassion between Jews and Poles. This may topple the menacing image, and give radically new and redemptive life to the term, "Warsaw Pact."

Justus George Lawler is author of Popes and Politics: Reform, Resentment, and the Holocaust (Continuum).