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Kevin's on holiday and I've been asked to step in. So the newsletter comes from Warsaw, where I used to be the 成人快手 Correspondent. I went back this week as veterans and politicians were marking the start of the Rising sixty years ago. The city looks smarter than when I left. There are new designer shops, fresh geraniums on the main shopping street. But much remains the same: including, in the July heat, optimistic old ladies manning restaurant cloakrooms, hoping someone has a heavy coat to leave, and 40p for them.
The Warsaw Rising is NOT the ghetto rebellion immortalised in Roman Polanski's film "the Pianist", but the far bigger event the following year. There's huge confusion between the two, which infuriates veterans like Stanislaw Likernik. He was in K-division of the Polish underground army, a commando unit which was fighting well before the Rising was declared on August 1st 1944. He's quite tubby now, a little deaf, but still full of energy. He told me he was gloomy about the success of the Rising from the outset, because he was worried the Russians would not help. And it's true the Red Army waited on the outskirts of the city - never coming into the centre. The Poles fought alone for 63 days. Thanks to German bombs and heavy weaponry the city was reduced to rubble - the "moonscape" as it's known in Warsaw. 200,000 Polish people died in the Rising and its aftermath.
For decades it's been seen as a typically Polish heroic failure, in the great tradition of the failed risings of the nineteenth century. The Poles are seen as passionate, brave - but disorganised and ill-judging. There's a cartoon by David Low from the London Evening Standard of October 1944 captioned "unhelpful friend" which shows a Polish officer having some kind of tantrum by the ruins of "tragic Warsaw". - just as their pilots had helped win the Battle of Britain.
The received wisdom here has been that the Poles called the Rising too early, before they'd got a formal agreement from Stalin. But Professor Norman Davies, the British historian considered the authority on modern Poland, says it was the right moment, and Britain and America should have done more, and put pressure on the Soviet leader. I went to the launch of his book about the Rising in Warsaw last week and it was as if a major Hollywood star had come to town. The room, in a skyscraper overlooking the city, was packed with TV crews and journalists. What's often forgotten in Britain is that history is unfinished business in central and eastern Europe. For generations the communists tried to control national memory, and naturally they skated over the Rising. The underground army, the genuine and popular Polish resistance, was described as a group of "bandits".
So it's only in the last fifteen years that the occasion's been marked and the veterans honoured. Nine years ago, when I interviewed Lech Walesa about the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, he said: "I think Poland is going to be betrayed again.... just like we were at Yalta". He was wrong of course, Poland IS now a full member of NATO and the European Union. But the Prime Minister, told me he thought "putting history straight" would help him even now. Poland has many troops in Iraq, and it's an extremely unpopular campaign. As well as many soldiers, a journalist who was Poland's John Simpson, a man I knew well, was killed earlier in the year.
Back to Mr Likernik. Like many of the surviving veterans he has an extraordinary story to tell. At one point, he was lying wounded with more than one hundred others in an improvised cellar hospital. A German unit entered, executing the wounded as they went. One soldier stopped as he reached Stanislaw, who was naked except for a pair of boots. "Those are German boots!" he exclaimed, as he aimed his pistol at the Pole. One of Stanislaw's friends started talking in German and "it gave the German a shock... it was as if a cow started speaking human language". Surrounded by dead bodies, in a cellar below the fighting, the two men started discussing the origins of German names. And so Stanislaw Likernik was saved - again. He has written an account of his experiences which WAS published three years ago in Britain, but it received so little attention he told me that the publishers are now planning to pulp the remaining copies. "By Devil's Luck" is still (just) available from Mainstream Publishing.
Sanchia
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