August 1: Warsaw Remembers

Today is August 1. Warsaw stops. At 5:00 p.m (11:00am in Boston), sirens rise and wail across the city. The noise pierces through traffic, conversations, and thought. People freeze. Cars stop mid-street. Cyclists dismount. Everything halts for one full minute. It’s not a tradition. It’s an act of defiance, memory, and mourning.

On this day in 1944, at exactly 17:00 “W” hour the Warsaw Uprising began. A city rose against all odds. Against one of the most sadistic armies Europe had ever seen, from the 1st to the 4th it was a heroic battle against evil. Five days later on the 5th of August the Nazi Third Reich high command under order from Hitler and Himmler ordered that every Polish civilian is to be treated as a combatant and to kill all who are not in German uniform and destroy every building. On the 5th of August they unleashed the worst of their forces in the entire German military, Oskar Dirlewanger’s penal brigade SS-sonderkommando Dirlewanger, and Bronislav Kaminski’s Cossacks SS-RONA militia. These men were not soldiers. They were butchers, rapists, drunks and sadists. They sickened and terrified other Waffen SS units and Einsatzgruppen and especially the Wehrmacht and their respected generals. 

Matthias Schenk, an 18 year old Belgian Wehrmacht sapper (explosives engineer) who witnessed the carnage firsthand, later testified:

"They raped even eight-year-old girls. They threw infants against walls. They laughed while doing it. I saw a woman raped in front of her son and husband, then shot. The Dirlewanger men were animals, worse than animals. We couldn't believe they were part of the SS."

If you want to hear a testimony not from a Jew, not a Pole, not Russian or Communist but a Belgian 18 year old boy in the Wehrmacht in 1944 who was sent out East to combat the Red Army but diverted to fight Polish Home Army, he thought it was relief not fighting the brutal Red Army or Soviet Partisans and an easier enemy….however his “comrades” he fought alongside gave him a lifetime of trauma. Reading his testimony is probably the greatest testimony of the Dirlewanger men and other SS in Warsaw during the Uprising and drives home the reality of why the Belarusian Red Army turned into savages after what these SS did to their home and now Warsaw. August 1-4 was a battle, on the 5th until surrender it was pure murder and destruction and a fight for basic survival. Later on I will be writing a blog post about Matthias Schenk and his testimony of what he called "My Warsaw Madness". First hand account witness from a boy who worked right alongside these monsters. 

In Ochota, the city’s upscale district where there was a peaceful market place turned into a rape camp by the Kaminski Brigade, Cossack units of the SS-RONA (anti-Stalin Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian units). The Ochota Zieleniak market place once a peaceful green marketplace for Warszawians became a rape camp prison of horror, where women & girls were raped, tortured, and discarded many times in front of their families and loved ones by these drunken Cossacks. The RONA men drunk on vodka looted apartments, dragged civilians into the streets, shot innocents and set homes ablaze with families still inside. They were so bad in Warsaw that even the German leaders wanted their leader Bronislav Kaminski dead, so they killed him quietly halfway through the Uprising making it look like it was the Poles. 

In the neighborhood of Wola, the first to encounter the Dirlewanger men, the massacre reached a scale unmatched in Nazi-occupied Europe. Within just the first few days of their arrival; over 40,000 civilians, men, women, children, hospital patients were systematically executed by Dirlewanger’s men, Kaminski’s Cossacks, and SS Reinfarthe troops. People were marched out of basements and shot in courtyards, behind churches, against walls. Infants were bayoneted, the wounded burned alive. Bodies piled meters high in churches such as St Lawrence Church on Wolska street which still stands, hospital patients murdered, women in basements and nurses in hospitals raped and tortured by drunken sadistic Dirlewanger men. It was not combat. It was a slaughter. Entire streets became mass graves. The goal was clear: to terrify the city into submission. But Warsaw did not break.

And still after all this, Warsaw fought these demons for 63 days, the people civilians, teenagers, scouts, nurses, Polish partisans and soldiers held the line. With pistols. With Molotovs. German arms they pick up off the dead, and sometimes a knife. All with nothing but fire in their hearts to be free.

A city once celebrated as one of Europe’s most diverse Poles, Jews, Russians, Germans, Armenians, Ukrainians was reduced to ash, rubble, and silence. Over 200,000 civilians were killed. Shot. Burned. Buried under the ruins. And after the Nazis, came the Soviets. The Soviet secret police the NKVD rolled in not to liberate, but to arrest. To purge the Polish Home Army. Replace one occupation with another. The nightmare didn’t end in 1945. It dragged on. No true peace until 1993, when the last Soviet troops finally left Poland.

Yet despite everything, Warsaw rebuilt. Brick by brick. Memory by memory. Bullet holes still mark the facades. Plaques hide behind bus stops and coffee shops. Beneath this modern capital, the ghosts still breathe. On my first visit to Warsaw I thought it was a cool young hip city with cool people. Now when I am there, I see a strong resilient bloodline with trauma no one could understand in the west and might never will. For what they went through I am surprised Poland is as strong as it is today. 

So when you see many Red & White Polish flags on August 1, don’t just watch and say “they’re just all nationalists, why are they so patriotic”. Stand. Listen. Feel it. The Uprising is not gone, still less than 100 years ago the city was burned, murdered, raped, looted, and nearly destroyed completely. But the phoenix rose from ashes. It echoes in every brick, every stone, every name. You can see it around the city with many plaques dedicated to Poles who were executed and many traces of war where there are bullet holes, explosion shrapnel marks in different parts of the city on walls. Do not forget what these people have endured. 

Warsaw remembers. And so do I.

Warsaw Heroes Uprising Monument in Old Town in January