On August 1, 1944, some 40,000 Polish underground fighters, badly equipped if nobly led, launched full-scale operations in the Polish capital city of Warsaw against their German occupiers. It would be a ferocious fight. The home army, as the forces were known, took sections of the central city, fashioning barricades from wrecked trams and other detritus. What the Poles lacked in arms they made up in for in suicidal acts of courage – some units attacked German positions armed only with revolvers. The home army held sections of the city for two months until the revolt collapsed from the ferocious German response. SS units, operating in the Warsaw suburbs, killed indiscriminately, in one week alone killing 35,000 civilians. They sacked hospitals, raping nurses and machine-gunning helpless patients in their beds.
In a war that has no shortage of grim episodes, the Warsaw Uprising was one of the grimmest. Scholars still debate the decision of the Polish resistance to take on a heavily armed, superior foe. “Polish behaviour was characterised from beginning to end throughout by a heroic spirit of self-immolation,” the historian Max Hastings has written.
But it is the actions of the Allies – Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union – that remain controversial. RAF planes dropped weapons, as did a few US air force missions; but far too little to make a difference. Most notoriously of all, the Soviet Army, pushing to Berlin and poised on the outskirts of Warsaw, did nothing to help the Poles. Stalin allowed for airdrops and some artillery support, but it was symbolic cover for his motives. The Nazis helped the Soviet Union, some argue, by crushing an uprising that was largely non-communist.
In his remarkable memoir Warsaw Boy [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk], the journalist Andrew Borowiec recounts this time not as a historian but as a participant. The author was only a teenager when he joined the clandestine ranks of the Home Amy, participated in the fighting and was captured and sent to a German prisoner-of-war camp. It was there, at the age of 16, that he started jotting down notes in pencil on Red Cross toilet paper given to him by British medics. After the war, he emigrated to the US, enrolled in the Columbia School of Journalism and travelled the world as a correspondent.
He has assembled a fascinating portrait of Poland through a boy’s eyes as war clouds gather over Europe in the late 1930s. His parents were divorced, so the young Borowiec lived with his father, an officer in the Polish army.
He picked up worrying signs that, despite the pomp and circumstance of its officer class, the Polish army was hardly a fearsome fighting force. The suspicion was dreadfully confirmed with the German invasion in 1939 and the subsequent partitioning of the country by Hitler and Stalin, as set out by the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
For a time, Borowiec and his father lived in the Soviet zone, but with the NKVD (a Soviet security organ) hunting down Polish professors, intellectuals and officers, the father decided to go to the German side (he was fluent in German). The boy hops from place to place in search of safety and security; after his father dies of a heart attack, he goes to live with his mother in Warsaw.
Borowiec’s chapters on the early years are written with verve and pungent detail. There is humour; but also the stark realisation about Germany’s intentions. He watches as Jews are rounded up and sent to the death camps that were built in German-occupied Poland. In Warsaw, he takes clandestine classes in lieu of proper schooling. It was here that he joined the Szare Szeregi – The Grey Ranks, one of the many groupings that would take part in the Conspiracy, as Borowiec refers in the book to the planned uprising. He takes combat training in the countryside. He darts around Warsaw, painting defiant graffiti on walls. The home army waged assassination campaigns against German functionaries, SS figures and the Gestapo. But these were but pinpricks compared with what erupted on August 1, 1944.
Initially, the Polish forces did well in combat, taking key parts of the city centre, the Old Town and the working-class suburb of Wola. (“This was mainly because there were fewer Germans in these places than anywhere else,” the author concedes.) Weapons were ill-distributed, but the resistance captured the 18-storey art deco Prudential Tower, Warsaw’s tallest building, and an important power station that allowed them to power hospitals and arms factories.
But it would not hold. Hitler unleashed some of the nastiest, most brutish SS units, who inflicted untold savagery on civilians in the suburbs. Yet, as Borowiec writes: “For much of the uprising it was perfectly possible to live a comparatively peaceful existence in one part of Warsaw while in another, and just far enough away to be invisible, occurred the kind of horrors that are normally experienced in your worst nightmares.”
In the city centre, Borowiec’s group of insurgents had food, water, power and held out for a time – and captured German prisoners. “Disarmed, helmetless, unbuttoned and unbelted they almost looked like civilians. They no longer had their hands up, and they walked normally. I noticed some of them felt relaxed enough to smile at the younger women in their audience, who sometimes smiled back.”
Borowiec punctuates his memoir with such moments, eerily placid counterpoints to the horrors unfolding in and around Warsaw as the insurgents vainly wait for a Soviet advance from the east and cling to positions near river crossings on the Vistula.
The Germans began to move into central Warsaw. They used flame-throwers, heavy artillery and a fearsome robot-like vehicle called a Goliath, which carried a huge explosive charge and could knock out an entire building. Civilian casualties mounted; Warsaw’s citizens began to voice doubt about the insurgents’ strategy. Where were the Soviets? The headiness and exhilaration of early August was battered by grim reality: “The only full bellies belonged to the rats feeding off unburied corpses, and wounded comrades who should have recovered died because of thirst and infections.”
Evacuation plans were made, the resistance making use of Warsaw’s extensive network of sewers to move civilians and wounded men out of the Old Town, which was besieged by German forces. As the resistance tried to secure a bridgehead on the Vistula, Borowiec redeployed to one of Warsaw’s northern suburbs. It was a bloody fight, chaotic and confused.
With a group of soldiers, Borowiec retreated down a sewer for safer ground. He then re-entered the city centre, where he was wounded and captured.
The book’s closing section recounts his time as a PoW in Stalag XI-A, where he was sent by his captors. It was a polyglot setting – there were fellow Poles, as wells as French, Belgians, Greeks, Yugsolavs and Dutch. His treatment was decent, given the tenor of the time.
Partisans in other countries were treated savagely; not the Poles, who were treated according to the standards of the Geneva Conventions. (Still, many prisoners suffered from mistreatment.) Borowiec entered the camp hospital for treatment, where a British doctor conspired to keep him by telling the Germans that he was suffering from depression. Yet Borowiec chafed at his surroundings, and elected to leave the hospital.
It was a decision he regretted. Dangers lurked everywhere; the Germans were getting desperate in the war’s closing weeks, and prisoners feared they might be gassed. Borowiec also wanted to avoid being liberated by the Russians. A work order sent him to an estate in the direction of the British and American advance. It was the right move – but the young man was confronted with the most existential of questions when the war came to an end. Where was home? The Soviet Army occupied Poland. Here were the beginnings of the division of Europe and the start of the Cold War. He secures a place in a Polish corps in Italy and then settles in Britain. “A lifetime’s exile had begun in the growing Polish diaspora,” he muses.
In this packed, wise memoir, he describes a journey that is nothing less than an odyssey through the most harrowing of circumstances. Given the fate of many of his fellow Poles, that there was a happy ending for Borowiec is remarkable.
Matthew Price is a regular contributor to The Review.
