Warsaw rising survivor tells her story

Sixty-five years ago, at the end of august 1944, the people of Paris rose up against the Germans and with Allied help joyfully threw out their Nazi occupiers. But several hundred miles to the east, in Poland, another national uprising was approaching a tragic yet heroic end.

On a hot summer day, on August 1st 1944, the Warsaw uprising was launched. The two month long battle which pitched ill armed but enthusiastic Polish patriots against the forces of Nazi Germany ended in tragedy and the most brutal repression, with tens of thousands dead, the surrender of the surviving insurgents and the almost total destruction of Warsaw by the Germans.

Visting the Polish capital today, you can hardly fail to notice that the place was entirely rebuilt after the conflict, much of it in a hurry and with scant regard to style.
Monuments commemorating points where patriots fell to nazi bullets abound in the city centre. Chief among these is the highly symbolic Museum of the Warsaw Uprising, just north of the central district.

The message conveyed by the museum is that of the sacrifice of a generation of young people that summer in 1944 in the name of freedom and justice for their homeland. Of those who died, most were very young and from the best and most educated families living in the Polish capital.

After the war controversy raged for years about the sense of the uprising. A senseless sacrifice? Was its failure a cruel and deliberate ploy by Stalin to eliminate a free Poland? Or was it an understandable tactical decision given the situation at that particular time and place?

To get a feel for how it was, a Polish friend puts me in touch with a survivor of the event who is keen to communicate her vision of events following many years of official misinformation. She is Dr Eleanora Zaremba, a retired urologist living in retirement in the pleasant neighbourhood of Mokotow. At the time of the insurrection she was aged 17.

“By 1944 virtually the whole of Poland was part of the resistance which had become really well organised under the German occupation,” she tells me. Pulling out an old black and white portrait I am impressed by how young and pretty she was then. Dr Zaremba speaks to me in fluent French which she learned in the numerous years she spent working in Africa under a Polish cooperation programme.

“There was a whole underground government network including high schools, a medical service, courts and the Home Army, called the AK (Armia Krajowa,)” she explains. ”In the cities it involved millions of people, while in the forests guerrilla groups were active. The way you got recruited into the AK was through recommendation by a friend.”

“My father who was a professional officer went underground when the Germans invaded in 1939. In 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo and was put into Pawiak prison where he died three months later.”

“Meanwhile I had been recruited into the AK who organised training and military discipline.” Eleanora’s role was to ready herself for the fight she and all the other young resisters knew was coming. “All the young people were desperately looking forward to the insurrection. At that time, remember that nobody could be sure of being alive the next day and we all preferred to fight rather than just to die.”

In 1943 the Germans eliminated the Warsaw jewish ghetto, deporting or killing all the inhabitants and burning the houses to the ground. Dr Zaremba was aware of what was happening although she could not know the ghastly scale of the massacre. “At that time I was living in the Joliborz neighbourhood and to get there, one took a tram which passed alongside the ghetto. We did realize that horrible things were going on there but the dimension of the killings did not become clear until after the war. People couldn’t imagine that human beings were capable of such a terrible thing,” she says.

“I was part of the 4th platoon in the 4th company of the ‘Thum’ battalion, part of the ‘Kryska’ brigade. My wartime nom de guerre was ‘Maja’. We had very few weapons, there were some grenades. During the battle which followed, seven hundred of the Kryska brigade members died.

“The AK commanders decided to launch the rising on August 1st 1944, as Soviet forces were reaching the eastern edge of Warsaw on the eastern side of the Vistula river. Our orders were to defend the Cherniakov district along the western side of the river bank near the Poniatowski bridge. The Germans had a strong point at the end of the bridge though which they held onto.”

“W Hour was the moment for it to begin, at 1700h, and everyone was rushing to get to their designated rallying points. Some were unable to get there. As for myself, I was ordered to join a barricade across a street which had been thrown up by local inhabitants with whatever materials came to hand including furniture and all kinds of stuff. We had to work extremely fast because the barricade was supposed to protect us, that was the first thing to do. The we dug narrow trenches to use as firing positions.”

“At the beginning there was a wonderful atmosphere, we felt free and independent,” Dr Zaremba remembers with a smile.

“In the first few days we gained some ground and people were very happy. Then the battles in the city centre started getting closer and closer. We had orders to hold onto the area, which would act as a bridgehead where we could welcome the Russians when they crossed the river. In fact we were certain about it, that was the idea of the rising – that the Russians would cross over to help. But they stopped.”

“A small number of them did come across, it’s true.” recalls Dr Zaremba, “Many of them were shot down because they were not trained for street fighting. I believe about a thousand of those boys of the Berling army died with us.” (General Zigmunt Berling commanded a USSR backed Polish brigade.)

“Soon our territory was cut off. Surrender was out of the question because the Germans were killing every Pole they could find. We were reduced to two or three streets surrounded by the enemy. We were inside some houses and the Germans were in the ones next door, you went in or out through holes at street level,

“At the beginning of the fight we were upstairs while the residents hid in the cellars but we soon learned to join them. There were dead and wounded everywhere. Towards the end of august I was wounded by a grenade blast. I was thrown under a pile of wreckage but fortunately my comrades got me out of there,

“My duties as a courier involved taking messages to our sentries and accompanying wounded fighters to the medical post. We had been equipped with big bags containing materials with which we are able to make bandages. But soon there was no more water, and without water you can’t do much for the wounded.”

Meanwhile the situation was becoming desperate. The Russians had failed to arrive as expected. Air drops of supplies by US, RAF, Polish and South African aircraft flying all the way from Italy proved totally insufficient. Many of the planes were shot down.

At the end of September, with the remaining civilian population starving, with ammunition running out, and in the face of a massive German onslaught, the AK commanders decided to capitulate. On September 23, members of the Cherniakow detachment including Maja’s unit were ordered to save themselves by crossing the Vistula river.

Mrs Zaremba recalls that night in horror: “Some Berling solders came over at night in small craft to take us with our wounded, ten to fifteen in each boat. The night was as as clear as day because of the fires blazing and rockets fired by the Germans. Many died that night on the Vistula. I know that I was in the last boat. We were under fire continuously from rockets, machine guns and shells. Soon after the boat became full of holes and we had to throw ourselves in the water. Luckily the river ws very shallow at that point with the water just coming up to chest level.”

It must have been a terrifying ordeal, I suggest. “No!” she cries. “Not that, what was terrifying was when a comrade fell dead next to you. What was terrifying was the realization that the rising was over and had been a failure, it was the end of our hope because we always believed the Russians would come over and save us.”

The doctor is silent for a time then shares a moving thought. “You know there was one moment during those days which marked me for ever. I was at the first aid post with Father Stanek, chaplain to the battalion. A boy came over with a hand which had been shattered by a grenade, blood was pouring from the wound. He asked me: “Amputate my arm, I beg you!” But I said I couldn’t do it, neither could the priest. There was no doctor. I thought to myself, it must be so simple but I just don’t now how! The boy went away and died.”

It was a moment in the insurrection which profoundly marked Eleanora Zaremba and which motivated her to study medicine after the war so she could be a doctor and save lives. During her later career she was to work in hospitals in Guinea, West Africa, and in India.

Father Josef Stanek, mentioned in Dr Zaremba’s story, was hanged by SS troops outside his church on Setember 23, 1944. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1999.

Dr Zaremba continues: “When we got to the other bank of the river we ran to the neighbourhood of Saska Kepa which was under the control of the Russians. Some soldiers stopped us and told us to come with then to their HQ where we were issued with some soup. We hadn’t eaten anything for four and a half days and were very hungry. An officer told us we would have to join the Red Army the next day, but first we would be spending the night at a police station. A soldier was pointing his weapon at us. What an unbelievable welcome, we thought!”

“Just then we had a stroke of luck. A captain told our escort the police station was full up. So I told him I had family living nearby, to which the captain said: “All right, but come back tomorrow.”

“We got away from there, the whole group, to my relatives where we changed. Then we found ways of getting out of town immediately.” Maja avoided military duty in the Red Army , managing to get to Lublin in eastern Poland where she had an aunt. There she learned that her mother had miraculously survived the battle and was in Kracow.

How justified in Dr Zaremba’s view was the AK command in ordering the rising? “It was tragic but it had to be done otherwise the Germans would have killed everyone,” she asserts. “They wanted to kill us all, to eliminate Poland completely. The experience united us. It was the people of Warsaw!”

The terrible events of that time leave a mark on all Poles, young and old, today. The rising will be recognized by future historians as a seminal moment in Polish history. Every year on August 1st, at the moment of “W Hour” at 5pm, a huge crowd gathers at the Powazki military cemetery to pay homage to a generation of young people who died fighting for a free Poland. Dr Zaremba will not be missing the commemoration this year.

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Muszeum Powstania Warszawskiego
(Warsaw Rising Museum)
Grzybowska 79
00-844 Warsaw, Poland
www.1944.pl