I knew that the Russians and the Poles hated each other, but I didn't know much about Warsaw's destruction at the hands of the Nazis,” a man in his 60s says as we conducted some – admittedly highly unscientific – ethnographic research into the Rising. Others questioned on the same streets elicited even less knowledge of the event – a seminal moment in Polish history, but apparently only a footnote elsewhere.
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One elderly German woman confused the Warsaw Rising with the Jewish Ghetto Uprising of 1943, while another thought it could have been Stalingrad. “Or was that Leningrad?” she added. Most of the other dozen whom I asked were apologetic, but ignorant of the Uprising.
Most post-war Germans have come to terms with an often painful and guilt-ridden history, but that hasn't always been translated – it seems – into an understanding of some moments from the victims' perspective.
The Law and Justice (PiS) government, elected in September 2015, wants to put this straight. PiS has placed rethinking how both Poles and the rest of the world perceive Poland high on its political agenda. Last year, for example, it was called for criminalizing the use of the term “Polish concentration or death camps”. PiS has also put a stop to a Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk and publicly scorned world-famous US historian, Jan Gross, for his accounts of Poles killing Jews in the war. In February last year it called into being the Institute for Research into Totalitarianism (OBnT), its mission is to translate and make accessible in English the testimonies of witnesses to German Nazi and Soviet crimes.
“We want to demonstrate to the Western European public the extent of genocide in occupied Poland on the basis of documents and eyewitness testimonies,” Wojciech Kozlowski, director of the institute, told me. It is a huge undertaking, some 100,000 testimonies – all in different ways harrowing first-hand accounts of the Polish experience during the war and in particular the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. It is a handbook of horror, turning the pages revealing fresh cruelty.
The Warsaw Rising was an operation by the Polish resistance Home Army (AK) to liberate the city from German occupation towards the end of the war as the Red Army made its way across towards Poland Germany. It was timed to coincide with the Soviet approach to the eastern suburbs of the city and the retreat of German forces. But the Soviet advance stopped short, enabling the Germans to regroup and demolish the city and crush the Polish resistance, which fought for 63 days. It is estimated that about 16,000 members of the Polish resistance were killed and about 6,000 badly wounded. In addition, between 150,000 and 200,000 Polish civilians died, mostly from mass executions.
During the fighting about 25 per cent of Warsaw's buildings were destroyed and following the surrender of Polish forces, German troops systematically leveled another 35 per cent of the city.