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Anne Applebaum - Columnist

In Warsaw, a 'Good War' Wasn't

By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, June 2, 2004; Page A25

The veterans have left town. The flags have been packed away for the Fourth of July. The memory of the Second World War, our Second World War, has been honored -- so now perhaps it's worth taking a moment to honor someone else's. An opportunity to do so will present itself this Sunday, when CNN broadcasts an unusual documentary called "Warsaw Rising." The timing of the broadcast is deliberate: the week after the dedication of the National World War II Memorial, the 60th anniversary of D-Day and -- soon -- the 60th anniversary of the Warsaw uprising itself, which began on Aug. 1. As CNN puts it, here's a chance to listen while "the survivors of this little-known tragedy of the war finally tell their story."


For the story of the Warsaw uprising really is the story of the destruction of Poland's "greatest generation." The uprising began when the leaders of Warsaw's underground army launched a rebellion against the Nazis who had brutally occupied their city for nearly five years. Hearing the Soviet Red Army guns to the East, knowing of D-Day and the American entry into the European war, they assumed the fighting would last just a few days, until the Allies joined and the city was freed. "We believed so much in the West," one of the survivors wistfully told CNN.

But their assumption was incorrect. Stalin not only refused to send Red Army troops to help what he described as a "band of criminals," he also refused to allow British and American planes to refuel in the Soviet Union, making airlifts impossible. Neither the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, nor the American president, Franklin Roosevelt, thought it important enough to pressure the Soviet dictator. With the exception of one airlift, the planes never came.

The Poles were left to fight alone. In the battle, which lasted 63 days, more than 200,000 people died, among them most of the country's intellectual and political leadership. The scale of the catastrophe, the psychological, physical and economic damage, is almost unimaginable. Original underground army footage, obtained by CNN reporter David Ensor, shows vast stretches of central Warsaw reduced to rubble, people living in ruins, teenagers building barricades out of the remains of homes. As Norman Davies, the historian of the rising, points out, more civilians died every day for those 63 days than died on Sept. 11. Others escaped through the sewer system, walking 20 hours through raw human waste.

When the Red army did finally "liberate" Warsaw the following winter, there was almost nothing left. Soviet secret police officers rounded up and arrested the remaining underground leaders, on the grounds that anyone brave enough to fight Germans would probably fight against the Soviet Union too. Again, Roosevelt and Churchill did not object: They had already consigned Poland to the Soviet "sphere of influence" during their conference with Stalin at Yalta, and had washed their hands of the country's fate.




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