The Warsaw Uprising has always been to me “a family rebellion”, a patriotic act discussed at home, and then at school after 1956, when the communist authorities first allowed it to be discussed in public. Before, we could only hear about this event by mouth, or by listening to Radio Free Europe or to the BBC Polish Broadcasts. The father of Mariusz, my then best school-friend, Tadeusz Wirski-Witt, fought in and survived the Uprising. After the war, he and thousands of former Warsaw combatants dispersed all over the country or fled abroad to avoid questioning and imprisonment. Mariusz and I listened attentively to his father’s tales of street battles, and to reports of the always jammed and illegal foreign radio stations. For us, in our early teens, it was like a patriotic conspiracy, and we took pride in learning about the Uprising from people who really took part in it.

After the abolishment of the cult of Stalin, which came about in Poland only in October of 1956, most of the imprisoned insurgents came back home and started their new life in their communist-dominated homeland. The political “thaw” of ’56 restored dignity and recognition to the participants of the Warsaw Uprising, but never ended the continuous spreading of lies about this important wartime event. At school, then at the university, we were told the Uprising had been deliberately staged by the Polish Government in Exile in London to prevent the Russian Communists from taking over the political power in the, then, liberated Poland. The dark side of the communist propaganda was an imputation of bad will and cynicism to the commanders of the Warsaw Uprising, who, allegedly, sacrificed their soldiers and the civilian population of Warsaw to achieve their own political goals.

The truth came out, slowly over time, and it took the last 60 years to reveal what really had happened during the 63 heroic days of the Uprising. Poland was “sold” to the Soviets at Yalta and there was nothing that could be done about that. Writing on the 60^th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, Jerzy Marek Nowakowski, the Foreign Editor of “Wprost Magazine” and historian by education argued that after the Katyn Forest murder of Polish POW officers (in 1940), under orders by Stalin, the second act of mass murder of the best of the Polish resistance fighters came in 1944 in Warsaw, at the hands of the Nazis, with the “help” of the Soviets.

Any significant historical event can be observed and judged from many perspectives sides. The tragedy of the Warsaw Uprising certainly had its political reasons and strategic considerations. But the heroic 63 days had also been the sum of individual acts of tens of thousand of soldiers and of several hundred thousand Warsaw inhabitants, who, generally, were helpless and exposed to cruel treatment, injury and death by the Nazi occupants. A friend of mine, Bronislaw Tronski, was a young intelligence officer of the Polish Home Army (AK, secret resistance army), when the Uprising broke out on August 1, 1944. He fought bravely, survived and then wrote one of the best books on the Uprising, a diary entitled “Death Passed by This Way”. The book was first published in Poland, after 1956, then fragments were translated and published in the West. But only in the last edition, in the 1990s, he could reveal peoples true names, their true assignments on the battlefield and their secret work, and their later fates. A member of my family, also a Warsaw insurgent, Zbigniew Specylak-Skrzypecki, received a round from a German machine gun on Kierbedzia Bridge in Warsaw. He was seriously wounded: he lost one eye, and was shot through the chest. But he survived, made his way to the Eastern border of the Vistula River and there some Soviets placed him in a field hospital. But when he could get up and walk again, they jailed him. Brave “Zbig” served in clandestine units of the Home Army until the late 1940s. When attempting to smuggle some people to Sweden, he was caught again and arrested. But he lived long enough to see Poland free again. A friend of our family, Antoni Pospieszalski, was a paratrooper trained in Britain. During the Uprising, he went on a secret mission to Poland, returning to England after the capitulation. Then he became a BBC journalist for most of his life. In the 1970s and 1980s he used to come over to Poland to help the democratic opposition. At 93 years of age he is still living in London.

Just a few names, out of many thousands of Warsaw insurgents, dispersed all over the world. On the eve of the 60^th anniversary, my aunt, Alfreda Jamrosz, came to Poland from Baltimore, U.S.A., via Rome and the Vatican. In 1944 she was just a young girl, helping soldiers in the Uprising. After the capitulation, she was a POW in Germany. After the war she made her way to Italy, then returned to Poland and escaped to the U.S. with her husband in 1962. Aunt Freda went to see the Pope, dressed in her Home Army uniform, then she came to Poland to meet her girlfriends from the 1944 Uprising, maybe for the last time. Her husband, Stanisław Jamrosz, died after 13 years of disability. She took care of him daily. Before his death, in America, they both received medals from the Polish Republic: he for his wartime achievements in the 2d Corps in Italy and in the intelligence, she for her modest contribution to the Warsaw Uprising. Talking to Aunt Freda, I felt that the events she participated in 60 years ago had been the most important part of her entire life. And she is not an exception.