80 years ago, on Jan. 17, 1945, Soviet and Polish military formations entered Warsaw bringing an end to years of Nazi occupation—however, this did not bring liberation but a new wave of terror and repression.
It had not been in Hitler’s plans to surrender Warsaw lightly. Arriving at a midnight situation conference in Berlin just hours before, the Führer harbored the delusion that Warsaw—which had been designated ‘a fortress city’—was being stubbornly defended.
JOIN US ON TELEGRAM
Follow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official.
Told by General Guderian that its evacuation was already in full swing, a raging Hitler ordered Warsaw to be held to the last bullet. His maniacal ravings had no effect.
With the last Germans in full retreat, Polish and Soviet forces encountered only small pockets of resistance as they swept across the river in a pincer-style movement. What greeted them was a wasteland gouged of its soul and spirit.
Ludwik Skokuń of the Soviet subjugated 1st Polish Army recalled: “It was a phantom city. We saw a few civilians. Bodies were everywhere. I saw a German soldier lying there without hands and legs, still alive—he was crying to us, probably calling to us to kill him.”
Initially, Skokuń’s unit proceeded with caution: “The soldiers went timidly at first, not sure if the Germans were hiding and ready to attack. But it soon became clear that they had left in a hurry. Evidence of panic was everywhere,” he wrote.
Polish General Sacked After Missing Anti-Tank Mines Found in IKEA Railway Wagon
By noon, Warsaw had been taken in its entirety. This was not, however, the city once advertised as ‘the Paris of the East’.
“The Soviet troops who made their way into Warsaw on January 17 found it a dark and terrible place,” wrote the historian Alexandra Richie in her book ‘Warsaw 1944’.
“The city was in ruins. Shards of buildings pushed up through the snowdrifts; collapsed houses covered the decaying bodies of thousands of men, women and children, and piles of smoldering rubble and rubbish filled the air with acrid smoke,” she added. “Even in the cold, the stench of decay was unbearable.”
The vanished city
The end of the Warsaw Uprising on October 2, 1944, saw the Nazis visit new vengeances on a city that Hitler had come to view as his nemesis.
The cost of the 63-day insurgency had been immense—while precise figures remain unclear, most sources agree that the final death toll stood at around 15,000 insurgents and approximately 200,000 civilians.
Under the terms of the surrender, the half-a-million residents that had survived were expelled from the city and marched to transit camps. Combatants, meanwhile, were interred in POW camps.
Contrary to the provisions of the capitulation act signed by the Uprising’s leaders, Nazi sappers then methodically set about destroying the structures that had survived, paying particular attention to sites of cultural importance. “It was a veritable orgy of destruction,” wrote Richie.
Later, even those well-accustomed to the horrors of war expressed their shock. Visiting Warsaw shortly after Germany had fallen, U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower was moved to confess: “I have seen many towns destroyed, but nowhere have I been faced with such destruction.
”Yet under the 20 million cubic meters of rubble that smothered Warsaw, even as early as January 17 life began to stir.
The Robinsons
Although the Germans had driven the population out, hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Varsovians had refused to leave—some of these were Jews who could not afford to be spotted marching out of the city, others simply did not trust German assurances that they would be safe in exile.
Hiding in cellars and sewers, these hideaways became known as Robinsons in reference to Daniel Defoe’s fictional castaway, Robinson Crusoe.
“We lived like Robinson Crusoe, with the one difference that he was free, could move about freely, while we lived in hiding,” wrote Dawid Fogelman, a former Robinson, in a diary discovered after the war.
Some Robinsons took strength from numbers, opting to survive in packs. As an example, Warsaw’s Jewish Historical Institute cites the case of a 40-strong group that hid in a city center basement.
“They introduced iron discipline to govern their days, distributed the chores and even came up with extracurricular activities to help maintain morale,” the Institute describes.
“They read books gathered during raids in search of food, played card games and chess, and gave educational lectures.
”Others, though, faced a more isolated existence. Most famous of all the Robinsons was Władysław Szpilman, a Jew whose wartime ordeal was later turned into a best-selling book and the Oscar-winning film, The Pianist.
Starved and on the verge of death, for Szpilman January 17 was surreal. “At around 1 o’clock I heard the remaining Germans leaving... Silence fell, a silence such as even Warsaw, a dead city for the last three months, had not known before.”
This eerie quiet was eventually broken by “a loud and resonant noise.”
From afar, crackling loudspeakers broadcast announcements in the Polish language declaring the defeat of Germany and the liberation of Warsaw.From the ruins, the wraith-like figures of Warsaw’s Robinsons emerged, many half-blinded by their first glimpse of daylight for several months. This, though, would not be the celebratory moment that many had envisaged.
The reality of ‘liberation’
For Szpilman, the moment he had long dreamed of quickly turned sour when he found himself shot at and pursued after being mistaken for a German. For others, even worse awaited.
Ludiwka Z., a double agent working undercover for Poland’s Home Army, was among the very first Poles to cross into western Warsaw as part of an NKVD (the Soviet secret police) unit.
“I saw a wilderness, terrifying sights,” she later remembered. But it was not these that disturbed her most, but rather the reception she received on returning to her unit headquarters back on the other side of the river.
“They [the NKVD] immediately jumped on me, demanding to know if I had met any Home Army types, if any conspiratorial cell was still operating.”
No-one who had survived in the rubble of Warsaw was immune to the NKVD.
“In the eyes of the NKVD, they were illegals who had been living on the enemy side of the front and who, having failed to die, were potential collaborators,” wrote the historian Norman Davies. “Without exception, they were hauled in for questioning.”
For several, ‘questioning’ would precede captivity, hard labor or, even, execution. With the Uprising vilified by Stalin, and the Home Army branded “illegal” and filled with “bandit insurrectionists” that had been commanded by “treacherous leaders”, the hunt for those deemed hostile to the Soviet regime began with immediate effect.“
One of the early tasks was to put up propaganda posters denouncing the ‘coughed up dwarfs of reaction’ to be seen by all subsequent returnees,” wrote Davies. “Here was an unmistakable signal that all former insurgents belonged to a condemned species.”
By January 19, General Ivan Serov reported to Lavrenty Beria, the head of the NKVD, that filtration points had been set up around Warsaw to ‘control the traffic’. This was little more than a euphemism for the instalment of checkpoints designed primarily to weed out returning—or departing—members of the Home Army or other perceived anti-Communist threats.
Already by January 1945, 50,000 Poles had fallen foul of the Soviets to find themselves deported eastwards and on to the gulags, and this number would grow as Stalin’s noose around Poland tightened even further.
“Liberation was a key word in the Communist arsenal of lies,” wrote Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance in a 2017 op-ed. “It became the foundation for all further falsifications leading to the apparent legitimization of power forced down on us by the neighboring eastern force.”
Free as Warsaw was from the Nazis, January 17 ushered in a new tyranny to fear and to fight—for this modern-day Carthage, there would be no respite.
See the original here.
You can also highlight the text and press Ctrl + Enter
