Читать книгу Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City - Alexandra Richie - Страница 26

That there would be an uprising against the Germans was a foregone conclusion in wartime Poland. Resistance against the Nazi tyranny was visceral. The country, painstakingly recreated after the First World War, had been invaded in 1939 and unceremoniously carved up between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Warsaw had been mercilessly bombed, with 20 per cent of its buildings destroyed or badly damaged and over 25,000 people killed. After the city’s surrender the Soviets and the Nazis had rounded up thousands of innocent people and imprisoned or killed them, making the Poles simultaneously victims of two of the most vile dictatorships in history. There was no alternative but to fight back. The need, the desire, for action was to exact a heavy price, but it would have been unthinkable for most young Warsawians to have turned their back on the fight. The patriotism and the fervour to act led, rightly or wrongly, to the terrible events of August 1944.

The Armia Krajowa, or AK, was officially formed in February 1942, born of the shock of the German invasion and Blitzkrieg victory over Poland in 1939, and reinforced by the Soviet invasion that followed. Warsaw capitulated to Hitler on 27 September. On that tragic day seven Polish army officers gathered secretly in an apartment in the city and started the group (then called the SZP, or Polish Victory Service) that would become the AK. It was headed by General Michał Tokarzewski, with General Stefan Rowecki as second in command. The group contacted General Władysław Sikorski, commander-in-chief of the Polish armed forces and Prime Minister of the Polish government-in-exile, who was already in Paris, and were quickly established as the government-in-exile’s Polish-based military wing.¹

General Bór-Komorowski was preparing to escape to France too. ‘Looking over Kraków, I saw the swastika flying from the Wawel, for centuries the residence of Polish kings. The walls of the houses were covered with German notices and orders. A couple of phrases seemed to recur in all of them insistently; one was “strictly forbidden” and the other “penalty of death”.’ Just before he left, Bór met Tadeusz Surzycki, a respected member of the National Party (Stronnictwo Narodowe), one of Poland’s dozen pre-war political parties, who convinced him to stay in Poland. ‘One can hardly envisage the possibility of everyone going to France … We must fight in this country,’ he said. He asked Bór to help set up a military wing of the National Party, but Bór refused. ‘As a regular army officer, I recognised only one authority – my commander-in-chief General Sikorski, in Paris. I maintained that there should be only one military organization, common to all and independent of political opinion.’ Equipped with false papers that listed him as a dealer in wood for making coffins, Bór set about creating an underground army in south-west Poland. Even in those early, desperate days he felt that the entire nation stood behind him: ‘A country, completely overrun by two invaders and torn in half, had decided to fight. No dictator, no leader, no party and no class had inspired this decision. The nation had made it spontaneously and unanimously.’²

General Tokarzewski went to the Soviet zone of occupation to determine whether or not resistance could be organized there, but he was arrested by the NKVD, and Rowecki (known as ‘Grot’) was placed in charge of the fledgling AK. Recruitment began immediately. The idea behind the underground army was that it should be all-inclusive. Every Pole who wanted to contribute would be included in the fight. The AK was to represent the entire nation.

The first members were largely army officers, but before long the net was cast far wider: doctors, workmen, engineers, teachers, farmers – in short, people from all walks of life joined the fight against the common enemy. Rowecki and Bór also recruited through pre-war political parties, so that, with the exception of fanatical right-wing nationalists and Communists, virtually all political points of view were represented, ‘every class and profession’.³ The AK was unique in its broad appeal to virtually every Pole, irrespective of background. The entire country was to join the fight.

Because of the need for absolute secrecy in the face of the Gestapo, people were recruited into small groups by friends or colleagues, and were not told about the work of other underground members. Stefan Korboński, who was soon to become the AK’s Chief of Civil Resistance in Warsaw, had escaped from a Russian PoW convoy, and returned to Warsaw unsure what to do with himself. ‘The idea of waiting passively until the end of the war did not appeal to me,’ he said. ‘I was, of course, like thousands of others at that time, thinking about some kind of underground activity against the Germans.’ A friend, the former Speaker of the Polish Parliament Maciej Rataj, told him that a resistance organization was being set up. Within days Rataj had been arrested by the Gestapo, and Korboński was asked to stand in as his representative until he returned. A meeting was organized so that he could meet Rowecki: ‘I entered a dimly-lit room, to be welcomed by a thick-set man in his forties … Our talk lasted for several hours, during which I was mostly a listener,’ he recalled. ‘At that time I was not aware that I was sitting in front of a man who was to be one of the most heroic figures of the coming struggle.’⁴ Rowecki would play the decisive role in the creation of the AK; ‘Bór’ Komorowski replaced him after he was arrested by the Gestapo on 30 June 1943.

Jan Karski was recruited in a similar way. He too had escaped from a PoW convoy, and went to see an old friend in Warsaw, Dziepatowski, in the hope that he would help him find a place to live. Karski did not know that Dziepatowski was already working for the resistance. ‘Conditions here are very bad,’ he said. ‘A man like yourself – young, healthy – is in constant danger. You can be picked up at any moment and sent to a forced-labour camp. You must be very careful. Avoid visiting your family. If the Gestapo learned about your escape it would mean the concentration camp. They may be searching for you already.’ Dziepatowski handed him false identity papers. ‘You are going to have a new name,’ he said. ‘Call yourself “Kucharski”. The apartment I am sending you to is owned by the wife of a former bank employee.’ Karski was still reeling from this information when he left to embark on his new life. ‘Although I did not know it at the time, this was my initiation into the Polish underground organization. There was nothing extraordinary about it; nothing at all romantic. It required no decision on my part; no spurt of courage or adventure. It came about as the result of a simple visit to a good friend, dictated largely by my despair, gloom, and the feeling of being utterly at a loose end.’⁵

Thousands of young people were recruited like this. Stanisław Likiernik joined after attending secret university courses. ‘I am not sure exactly how and when it happened, but eventually I became a full-time member of the underground. I received a small amount of money, enough to live on … I spent a lot of time cycling around Warsaw, meeting people, passing on and receiving intelligence in friendly shops, secret haunts and safe houses.’⁶ Stanisław Aronson, having escaped from the train that was taking him to Treblinka, was recruited into the ‘Kedyw’ unit by its head Józef Rybicki after an interview in a friend’s apartment; he became one of approximately a thousand Jews who fought in the AK during the uprising.⁷

The AK also had a large number of women in its ranks, many of whom had participated in the First World War and the 1920 war against the Bolsheviks as couriers, runners, nurses or drivers. When these conflicts were over they had refused just to ‘return to the kitchen’, and threw themselves into various paramilitary organizations like the Ochotniczy Legion Kobiet (Voluntary Legion of Women).

The most important source of female AK recruits was the Przysposobienie Wojskowe Kobiet (Female Military Training), or PWK, a paramilitary organization set up between the wars. By 1939 it had 40,000 active members and 1,500 instructors. An estimated million women had been through its rigorous courses, learning everything from first aid to how to shoot. Antonina Mijal was typical of its leaders. A crack shot, she had spent years directing training camps for the PWK. She was approached by Major Zofia Franio, and joined her new female sappers’ unit in October 1940; in February that year she had become the liaison officer for Jan Kiwerski, the deputy commander of the sabotage unit of the AK, who had overseen the abortive attempt to assassinate Hitler during his visit to Warsaw in October 1939.

By the outbreak of the uprising the AK had over 300,000 volunteers, the vast majority of whom were young men and women who had for years dodged German round-ups and restrictions, waiting for the day they could fight back. They were from every imaginable background – politicians and peasants, professionals and students, workers and writers, musicians and army officers – all joining together in an outpouring of patriotism and indignation that the nation which had been recreated after the First World War had been taken from them. Twenty thousand Polish nurses, runners and snipers, sappers and soldiers would lay down their lives in the summer of 1944 in the fight for their capital city.