The Warsaw Uprising

Like most events of the past, the Warsaw Uprising in Poland exceeded its historical boundaries once the battle began to be waged on the field of history. A valiant, but doomed, attempt to free Warsaw from Nazi occupation, the Uprising began on August 1, 1944 and lasted two awful months, leaving the city in a heap of smoldering rubble, and over 200,000 dead. While the defeat of the Polish Underground was, for all intents and purposes, a fait accompli, in history and collective memory the truth of that struggle was contested for nearly fifty years, during and after Warsaw’s reconstruction. Why?

After the start of the Cold War, official memory of the Uprising had been appropriated by Poland’s Communist regime, under whose auspices it was savagely reinterpreted. It became, by turns, a criminal misadventure, a Nazi-collaborationist effort, a cry for Soviet liberation, a false memory -- in essence, whatever would both legitimize the new government, which entrenched itself after the Uprising, and discredit the old one and its many loyalists. In other words, it could not be what it ultimately was -- a moment of infamy for the Soviet Union, whose army stood on Warsaw's banks as the city burned, the better to rescue it once it had already been devoured.

There emerged in response a new resistance movement led by dissidents of all stripes – historians, writers, activists, artists, and especially filmmakers – all devoted to a singular purpose (which, in their view, was a continuation of the Warsaw Resistance): to reclaim the past and to tell it truthfully. At stake was both the collective memory of the wartime generation in Poland, which could be manipulated and corrupted, as well as the memory of the emerging generation, which could be altered or erased. As one may imagine, the odds they encountered were staggering. (The dystopian literature of the early 20th century offers a glimpse into the depradations, barbarism, and darkness behind the Iron Curtain). In Soviet-dominated Poland, as in the other Eastern bloc nations, a censorship bureau strictly regulated intellectual and artistic activity, while state-run media propagated the Soviet agenda on current and historical affairs. All attempts to diverge from the Party line were met with severe repercussions. Thus if the truth about the Uprising was to be sought and shared, dissidents would have to circumvent these structures, either underground, which was dangerous, or through oblique strategies, which demanded cunning.

Both channels were employed, but the use of the latter, i.e., the encryption of books, poems, paintings, songs, and films with veiled references, the deployment of symbol and metaphor, was much more common. A prominent example appears in Polish director Andrzej Wajda's wartime film, Canal (1957). In one of the final scenes, two survivors of the Uprising have been wading through the muck of the sewers, and they reach an exit grill on the bank of the Vistula. The last shot has them gazing at the other side of the river, depleted of all hope. No one, of course, could be in doubt as to who had been waiting so indifferently yet ravenously on the other side.

Control over creative output in Poland was alternately tightened and loosened as Soviet policy and leadership changed. By degrees, Poles had learned to distinguish imposed orthodoxy from wink-of-the-eye heresy in everything they read or heard. It was the persistence, though, of lies surrounding the Warsaw Uprising (and separately, the Katyn Massacre) that drove dissidents towards a more comprehensive and accurate retelling of the event -- an ambitious aim which seemed more realistic than ever during the Solidarity Movement of 1980. It was not, however, until the final convulsions of Soviet Communism had exhausted the system in 1991 that the historical record could finally be reconstructed -- and dramatically augmented. Censorship was abolished, state-run media organizations became independent, and state archives were opened. Like many other events in Polish history, the Uprising would undergo a transition from an event fraught with ideological distortion to the object of accurate historical representation, and the public at last was free to learn about it, or in many cases, to relearn it.