History: An account of the battle for Warsaw raises questions about Allied acquiescence, writes Ian Thompson.
On April 19th, 1943, the Nazis began to dismantle the Warsaw Ghetto. It was the Jewish Passover - a special day in the "Goebbels calendar" - and Jewish families elsewhere in Europe celebrated with unleavened bread. Unknown to the rest of the world, the Nazis attacked the ghetto. By nightfall, the bodies of children and women lay dead on the streets. The few who survived put up a heroic struggle, and the SS pulled back in disarray. The unequal combat lasted a month, until May 16th, when the ghetto surrendered and the Nazis razed the quarter. The Jewish revolt would have astonished the world, had the world then known about it. It was not until 1948 that a bronze monument was erected in Warsaw to commemorate the Polish Jewish uprising.
However, no such memorial was put up after the war to the equally heroic Warsaw Uprising of August 1st, 1944. A year after the ghetto revolt, an estimated 40,000 (largely Catholic) Warsavian mobilised forces to drive out the Germans. The Jewish ghetto had been obliterated, but now all Warsaw was under threat as Stalin moved in rapidly with his troops from the east. The first units of the Red Army had already gathered at the Warsaw gates when the Polish underground took up arms on the left bank of the Vistula. In the course of the 63-day uprising they succeeded in liberating vast swathes of the city, but when Hitler ordered Warsaw and its citizens to be annihilated, the Soviets stood by and watched. Soviet inactivity on the Vistula front may be explained by political cynicism: Stalin wanted to subsume all Poland into the Soviet sphere of influence and the country was to be run by communists handpicked in Moscow. So he did not wish to encounter any vestige of the Polish national resistance on his "triumphal" entry into the city.
Some British and American politicians, fearful of creating bad relations with Stalin, cravenly portrayed the uprising as a criminal venture led by anti-democratic, and probably anti-Jewish, opportunists. For Stalin himself the uprising was merely an "escapade", even a "prank", and destined for the dustbin of history. Consequently, in post-war Poland a commonly heard rejoinder was: "Rising! What Rising?" Official guides were ordered to pass over the rebellion in silence; any out-of-place informality about Polish "martyrdom" could lead to imprisonment or worse.
In Norman Davies's masterful account of the Battle for Warsaw, Rising '44, the Polish capital becomes the battleground between two apparently opposed ideologies: Nazism and Communism. No nation suffered as much as Poland during the second World War. Within two weeks of the German invasion of 1939, Stalin had seized half of the country, his part of a secret deal negotiated a year earlier with Hitler. During the five years of the Nazi occupation, an estimated 800,000 Warsavians perished through mass deportations, executions and forced labour. That was almost half of the city's population. When Warsaw was "liberated" by the Red Army on January 17th, 1945, there was hardly anything left to liberate. The city had been bombed, fought over hand-to-hand, crushingly shelled and, finally, dynamited street by street. The destruction was total. Yet after the war Warsaw was reconstructed brick by brick, a phoenix risen up from the ashes.
This book, which incidentally anticipates the 60th anniversary of the August uprising, is a work of superlative narrative history, and, moreover, commendably honest. Davies admits that he has written only a partial account, as many of the important Russian archives are still not available to historians. Nevertheless, Rising '44 has the feel of an authoritative study and provides an exceptionally detailed picture of guerilla combat in the Polish capital. Davies everywhere seeks to set the facts straight, and points out (for example) that the uprising was by no means exclusively "Aryan" and certainly not anti-Semitic. About 42,500 Warsaw Jews were said to have escaped the ghetto (out of an estimated 489,000) and many of these served with distinction in the anti-German resistance.
Churchill was sympathetic to the uprising, and arranged for the western allies to provide some minor help by air from RAF bases in southern Italy. Yet both he and President Roosevelt failed to put any significant pressure on Stalin to assist an almost unarmed people in their hour of need. Uncle Joe, in fact, looked on impassively as the Germans destroyed Warsaw and its inhabitants. With more than 15,000 Polish insurgents killed, a further 20,000 wounded and 150,000 massacred, Warsavians clung to what little faith they had. Roman Catholicism, with its emphasis on redemption and its belief in the afterlife, offered a powerful consolation, and priests were constantly required to administer the last rites and sanctify last-minute marriages, says Davies. Rising '44 is an important book, which raises awkward questions about the Allies' cynical acquiescence in a totalitarian ideology.
Ian Thomson won the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Award 2003 for his biography of Primo Levi
Rising '44. By Norman Davies, Macmillan, 752pp. £25