Remembering Warsaw's fight against Fascism in the name of Democracy and Freedom
1st of August is a special day in the hearts of
all Warsovians, and the Polish people, it marks the start of the Warsaw
Uprising in WW2. It is a day for remembering heroes who fell, a day for
remembering heroes who took part, and those who are still with us. For remembering people who escaped
from concentration camps and ran to Warsaw to fight, and who dedicated their
lives to ensuring the nightmare of the occupation, concentration camps and
ghetto annihilation were never forgotten.
The day a nation remembers the 200,000 plus civilians who
died during Nazi reprisals for the uprising. Warsaw and Warsovians fought the Nazis, fascists, for freedom, so their city could be free ,Polish and Poland's capital.
Rather than tell the story I have written about previously, I have linked underneath articles I have written over the years. They make harrowing reading of atrocities and mass murder, rape and barbarism. Warsaw and its people paid a heavy price for their fight for democracy, and to rid the city of fascists.
We would like to commemorate a brave lady who stood at her barricade, outside where our office is, with her gun, ready to give her life and fight for her city, democracy and freedom.
Smiling as she readies herself for battle, this brave lady was nicknamed "Jadzia"
Jadzia we salute you and love your beaming smile
Jadwiga Włodarska aka "Jadzia" of the 3rd platoon in Storm Batallion Kilinski on ul Grzybowska
Here are the articles , I have written in previous years about the Warsaw uprising, and retaliation by the German occupiers against civilians
When the sirens sound at W hour (Godzina W) we join the city in standing solemnly, at the call to action, now a call to remember and respect, those who fought for our freedom from tyranny and totalitarianism.
Since 1989, when communism in Poland ended, and the hand of the Soviet Union delving in to Poland's affairs ceased, Poles became free to remember their real history . Poles became free to commemorate the Warsaw uprising, previously forbidden under the rule of PZPR (Polish United Workers Party) and their Soviet overseers. Forbidden, because to do so truthfully would be to reveal that the Soviet army sat over the other side of the Wisla river, doing nothing to help as Warsaw burned and Poland's AK army fought the Nazis. To do so, would be to expose Stalin's refusal to allow Britain's Royal Air Force, (RAF) access to Soviet held airfields to supply the Polish army. To do would also expose that whilst the Red army sat doing nothing to help, they complicitly aided the Nazis to eventually defeat the Polish army and insurgents. During that same period ,the NKWD (KGB predecessors) ran riot through Warsaw's eastern suburbs and Praga, rounding up and imprisoning/torturing/executing Polish AK members, opposition and anyone else who they found disagreeable. In the meantime at ul Twarda 22 in Warsaw's centre, some plotted another vision of Poland, the creation of Krajowej Rady Narodowej - the National Council. A political body which set out a plan to create a self proclaimed parliament which allegedly represented Poland and allegedly was authorized to act on behalf of the people and control its fate until the liberation from occupation. In essence the establishment along Soviet lines of a Polish communist state.
The ruins of ul Twarda 22
Strangely no plaque or monument stands on the site of ul Twarda 22, today, now the car park of Spektrum tower. As all this chicanery, espionage, obfuscation and dark deeds occurred at the hands of the Soviets and their puppets, Warsaw fought the Nazis , it burned, bled, and for 63 days struggled for freedom until forced to surrender. After the war, Poles were forbidden to publicly commemorate the uprising , and no books discussing the subject seriously were published before 1980. No monument to Poland's AK army soldiers was erected until 1989. Post war, AK soldiers and officers were captured, executed , many sent , hundreds if not thousands of miles to camps in the East, senior officers imprisoned and tortured in basements of buildings in Warsaw's Praga and Wlochy suburbs.
Monument in ul Strzelecka to AK prisoners held + tortured here
On the 1st of August every year, Warsaw and Poland commemorate the fight and sacrifice of their capital city, at Godzina W (Hour W) 17:00. Memorial stones at the many execution, and atrocity sites are cleaned by local school children, flowers and candles are placed at each one with the Polish red and white flag and the symbol of the uprising. In Powaski cemetery and the park of remembrance where the graves of 200,000 plus Warsovians and soldiers lie, candles flicker, as Red and White Polish flags billow in the breeze.
At 17:00 the sirens sound, the city comes to a complete standstill and silence, not a car or tram or bus stirring. All public transport carrying the red and white flag of Poland and the Yellow and Red flag of Warsaw. For all the commemoration in Warsaw and Poland, since 1989, this was a subject which was mainly hidden from Western eyes, post war. A subject not written about in truth until the 1980s, and still many atrocities, stories and accounts have still not been told in English. Communism and the Polish language prevented the world from seeing the true horror of what unfolded in Warsaw for 63 days in 1944.
It is important that the world knows what went on in Warsaw in 1944, it is vital that the tragedy, atrocities, and inhumane acts carried out by the Nazis are recorded and shared so the memory of those murdered, tortured, raped and barbarically killed are not forgotten or lost in vain. The Warsaw uprising itself has since been documented by the BBC, and the battles shown in Miasto 44 and The Piano Player feature films notably. Whilst surviving insurgents and proud families of the fallen are now able to publish pictures, memories and memoirs of the battles and their bravery, the fate of Warsaw's civilians in 1944 is a story rarely told in the West, and exceedingly rarely in languages other than Polish. Every year I translate and write real life history of Warsaw uprising battles, and stories from the official testimony of the participants and witnesses. I do so to share Warsaw's bloody tragic past with the world , to educate, to show what hatred, intolerance, and war does.
But this year there is no writing of battles, it is time the story of the Wola massacre was told.
Wola massacre monument
It is grim reading, no parts have been censored or changed, nothing held back, just the harsh truth, of what war, prejudice, hatred does. To show what fascism and Nazi''s enacted on the streets of Warsaw to Poles. The Wola massacre ( Rzeź Woli, ) was the systematic killing of between 40,000 and 50,000 people in the Wola district of Warsaw by German Nazi troops and collaborationist forces during the early phase of the Warsaw uprising. From 5th to 12th August 1944, tens of thousands of Polish civilians along with captured Home Army resistance fighters were brutally and systematically murdered by the Germans in organised mass executions throughout Wola. The Germans hoped that these atrocities would crush the insurgents will to fight and put the uprising to a swift end. However, the ruthless massacres in Wola only strengthened Polish resistance. On 3rd August SS General von dem Bach-Zelewski was placed in command of all German forces in Warsaw. Following direct orders from Himmler to suppress the uprising without mercy, his strategy was to include the use of terror against the inhabitants of Warsaw. No distinction would be made between insurgents and civilians. Himmler's orders explicitly stated that Warsaw was to be completely destroyed and that the civilian population was to be exterminated. On 5th August, three German battle groups started their advance towards the city centre from the outskirts of Wola, along ul Wolska and ul Gorczewska. The German forces consisted of units from the Wehrmacht, SS Police Battalion, as well as the mostly Russian SS Sturmbrigade RONA and the SS Sturmbrigade infamous Waffen SS convict unit led by Oskar Dirlewanger . British historian Martin Windrow described Dirlewanger's unit as a "terrifying rabble" of "cut-throats, renegades, sadistic morons, and cashiered rejects from other units". "It was a clear hot summer day, that 5th of August, not at all a time to be thinking of death, let alone of the sort of hideous slaughter awaiting the innocents of Warsaw. The units of Dirlewanger had begun assembling for their first major counter-attack in the early hours of that sultry morning. The target was Wola; Dirlewanger's 1st Battalion took up a position south of the main street, Wolska Street. Meanwhile in Ochota, the southern area of Wola, some 300-400 Polish soldiers were to face 1,700 of Kaminski's men under the command of Major Frolov, a turncoat Russian. The fact that the Poles stood firm and prevented Kaminski from moving more than 300 yards was not due solely to Polish battle skill. Kaminski's men did not want to attack until they were assured that they could loot and plunder to their heart's content. Although SS Command in Warsaw had fixed the attack deadline for 0800 hours, it proved quite beyond Kaminski to keep it. Indeed he was not ready for another 90 minutes.
Wola Massacre memorial at ul Gorczewska
It was but a small delay for Warsaw. What happened once Kaminski teamed up with Dirlewanger should perhaps not have surprised or shocked anyone. It was as if the subordinates of Himmler had actually stayed their hand until then, waiting to unleash against their hated foes a vast holocaust of terror and cruelty, the ferocity of which had been kept in cold storage. Himmler's two morally abysmal executioners went to work . On 5th August, Dirlewanger's SS convicts managed to advance about 1,000 yards. Their concern was not solely getting to grips with Polish insurgents. Fuelled by vodka, and amphetamines like demented men, they stormed into the houses they passed on or near the battle-line. Inhabitants were ordered to leave. There were promises of "evacuation". But the fate that awaited them was to be herded into cellars, cemeteries, gardens, backyards, factory forecourts and squares. Then the murder squads set to work on men and women and children, often assembled in their nightclothes and with no time to remove the sleep from their eyes. The prisoners were burned alive, the babies impaled on bayonets and stuck out of windows like flags, the women were hung upside down from balconies in rows. The purpose, Himmler had told Goebbels, was that the sheer violence and terror of repression would extinguish revolt "in a very few days."
Women and children being "evacuated by Germans on ul Wolska 1944
Witness testimony
Record No. 60 On August 7, 1944, about 9 p.m., at No. 15, Gorczewska Street, the three and four-storeyed Wawelberg blocks were surrounded by Germans (SS-men). They threw hand-grenades inside, surrounded the houses with machine-guns, and set them on fire from all sides. Any persons who tried to get out were killed. People in flames ran to the windows. Nobody could escape from the fire; they were all burnt alive. It was a miracle if someone escaped. I know of one woman who jumped from the second storey and thus succeeded in saving her life. The front entrance was full of the bodies of those who had tried to escape from the flames. I saw among them women with babies at the breast. The houses were completely surrounded, and I suppose there must have been about 2,000 people living in them. No one came out alive unless by miracle, as in the case of the woman I have mentioned above." The corpses were piled in large heaps, phosphorous powder or petrol was poured over them and they were set on fire. The killers covered over ashes and bones with the rubble of ruined houses. Buildings that remained were burnt down.
Witness testimony Record No. 59 On August 5, 1944, at Warsaw at about 4 or 5 p.m., the houses Nos. 105,107, 109, Wolska Street immediately behind the railway bridge, the so-called Hankiewicz houses, were suddenly surrounded from all sides by Germans, who threw hand-grenades and set then on fire by means of some white powder, which they carried in bags. There were many inhabitants there and lots of people had come here from town. No order to leave the houses was given. After the Germans had surrounded them no one left them: everyone was burnt alive or else killed by hand-grenades. No one could escape. Only those were saved who had left the houses at some earlier hour. It was said that the Germans burnt all the houses in which insurgents had stayed. In the Hankiewicz houses some 2,000 people or perhaps even more found their death." But this was not the end of the suffering . Dirlewanger's men stormed into the hospitals in Wola and Ochota area. The sick and wounded were shot in their beds. Sadism ruled that day and it was turned on nuns, nurses, doctors and voluntary helpers. The Curie-Skiadowska Radium Institute, containing women suffering from cancer, suffered the worst. The patients were dragged from their beds. The drunken drug crazed mercenaries raped them and their nurses. Nazis ran amok in an orgy of murder, pillage and the 'collection' of rings and jewels, watches, and gold. The Police units joined in the general dance of death to stiffen wavering ranks of Dirlewanger in a strange alliance of traditional enemies united by their taste for cruelty and violence.
Wola Massacre memoria at Szpital Wolski
Hundreds of other patients and personnel were killed by indiscriminate gunfire, flamethrowers and grenade attacks, or selected and led away for executions. The greatest number of killings took place at the railway embankment on ul Górczewska (ul is street in Polish )and two large factories on ul Wolska. The Ursus factory at ul Wolska 55 and the Franaszka Factory at ul Wolska 41/45 - as well as the Pfeiffer Factory at 57/59 ul Okopowa Street. At each of these four locations, thousands of people were systematically executed in mass shootings, having been previously rounded up in other places and taken there in groups.
Ashes of 4000 Wola massacre victims murdered at the Franaszek factory
buried in a hole in the ground and commemorated by provisional cross
Between 8 and 23 August the SS formed groups of men from the Wola district into the so-called Verbrennungskommando (burning detachment ), who were forced to try to hide evidence of the massacre by burning the victims' bodies and homes. Most of the men put to work in such groups were also later executed. Witness testimony Record No. 506 I was taken from Dlugosz Street (as a civilian) at 6 a.m. on August 6, 1944, and led to Sokolowska Street to the so-called Arbeitskommando head-quarters. Next day I volunteered for work with 50 other thinking that in this way I should be better off. We were sent to a house opposite St. Adalbert’s Church in Wolska Street, where about six hundred bodies of men, women and children were lying in heaps. Near by were a few dozen more, which we added to the heap. Then we went to No. 60, Wolska Street, where, on both sides of the courtyard lay the bodies of more than 100 men, as far was we could judge, victims of a mass execution. In the garden of this same house we found in a thicket the bodies of more than a dozen women, children, and babies, shot through the back of the bead. We carried out from the house at the corner of Plocka and Wolska Street (a large yellow house) several dozens of bodies of men, women and children, partly burnt, who had been shot through the back of the head. From a house in Plocka Street, between Wolska and Gorczewska Streets, we carried out about 100 bodies. In one of the houses we found the half-burnt body of a man holding two children in the arms. When we returned to No. 60, Wolska Street, we made a wooden platform on which we laid the dead; and then we cleared the ground of all traces of the German crimes, such as documents, clothes, or linen, which we placed on the pile of dead, sprinkled with petrol, and set alight. While we were thus burning the bodies, a drunken SD officer arrived in a car. He picked out three men of about 20 or 30 from a group of refugees passing by. He shot them through the back of the head in the course of a "friendly" conversation. After having murdered the first man he ordered us to throw him on the burning pyre before the eyes of the remaining two. On Aug. 8, 1944, they led us to the yard of the "Ursus" works in Wolska Street. The whole courtyard, about 50 metres (55 yards) square was strewn with dead bodies so thickly that it was impossible to pass without treading on them. Half of them were of women with children, often with infants. All the bodies bore traces of robbery. Their position showed that they had each been murdered separately and in an especially bestial way. The number of bodies burnt there amounted, as far as I could estimate, to more than six hundred. Their clothes and suit-cases showed them to be refugees. When we were transporting bodies from neighbouring houses I found a great number of corpses in a flooded cellar in a house at the corner of Skierniewicka Street. We could not get out more than a few dozen of them, as the water was too high. I suppose they had been thrown in here after having been murdered in the courtyard, where we still found more than a dozen bodies. Then they took us to th e "Franaszek" works in Wolska Street, where we burnt in the same way as before about the same number of bodies as in the "Ursus" works, mostly of women and children. On one of the following days they took us to work in Sowinski Park, where again the bodies were mostly those of women and children; I found even pregnant women. The position of these bodies lying in a row seemed to be proof of a mass execution. We then burnt more than a thousand on two pyres. They made us search the bodies and give fall valuables to the SD-men. As to paper money, we were ordered to burn it, together with all other evidence of the crime. " On 12 August, the order was given to stop the indiscriminate killing of Polish civilians in Wola. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski issued a new directive stating that captured civilians were to be evacuated from the city and deported to concentration or labour camps. 200,000 Poles died in the Warsaw uprising, 25% of these during the Wola massacre, in 7 days, 10,000 in one day alone. Civilians, men, women, children, babies, not soldiers.
Just innocent victims.
The perpertrators of this vile outrage were never brought to justice, Dirlewanger died in a French prison, and Reinefarth retired on a general's pension in Germany and died in 1979.
The Warsaw uprising museum published a list of the surviving perpertrators and their addresses, to date none has been prosecuted. Monuments ensure the victims are not forgotten, and their sacrifice never will be, especially now their stories are known to the wider world.
Memorial stone in ul Wolska
72 years later, Wola is rebuilding, and developing, it was always Warsaw's industrial area.
Today new workplaces, offices, skyscrapers, new flats and residential, retail development abound. Amongst the development stand the few remaining original buildings in ul Zelazna, Chmielna, Panska, Bema, Wolska and Gorczewska like silent witnesses to the tragedy of the past.
Today and yesterday's Wola ul Grzybowska view from Plac Europejski
But Warsaw and Wola thrive and I sit writing in Warsaw's former Jewish ghetto, 300 meters from ul Twarda where the Polish communist conspiracy commenced, and 500 meters from where 500 people were shot and burned at Hala Mirowska food market. Today Poland is a member of the UE and has a thriving economy,
The fact we all live here , work here and make business here and this city ticks over and hums with human life, the beat of its pulse is proof humanity triumphed over barbarity.
The fact Warsaw is rebuilt like a phoenix is a big one fingered reproach to communism and fascism.
The memorial plaque on the "PAST" building in Warsaw
Today in the Centre of Warsaw
We remember
every 1st of August the heroic sacrifice made by Warsaw’s
inhabitants of all creeds in the Warsaw uprising commemoration. A remembrance ceremony
banned by communist authorities for many years because of the complicity of the
Soviet Union in not lifting a finger to help the Polish army or Warsaw’s
citizens. Despite pleas from Churchill, Stalin refused to engage the German
army occupying Warsaw or allow Britain or America to use Russian airfields to
drop supplies. The Soviet red army sat
in Praga on the other bank of the Wisla watching a horrific tragedy and
genocide unfold.
The Wola Massacre monument in Warsaw
The City and Poland celebrate the sacrifice of the AK (Polish army) and citizens who
fought in the uprising; they mourn the total destruction of their city, the
loss of 200,000 civilian lives. They mourn the Wola massacre, carried out in
revenge for the uprising where 50,000 people were executed and murdered.
Before the destruction of the city and the massacre of its inhabitants was carried out in revenge for the uprising, Heinrich Himmler said:
"The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation."
His order wasn't successful.
Warsaw’s
schools and pupils look after war monuments and remembrance plaques, cleaning
them, lighting candles and placing flowers and Polish flags on all of them
before the 1st of August.
Polish school children cleaning and decorating memorial stone in Warsaw
Warsaw’s
cemeteries are full of victims of the uprising, but sadly the streets of Warsaw
hold many more. Places where ordinary life goes on, where people, work, walk
and shop. The pavements cover the bodies of the unknown dead. Hala Mirowska where 510 Poles were shot, and their bodies burned in a pit below the market hall
being one such place.
Hala Mirowska food market in Warsaw where 510 people were executed
The inhumanity
exhibited exceeded any level of barbarism known to man. The number of executions,
exacted by a shot in the head, or mostly being beaten to death with a rifle
butt or shovel, as the German army were told not to waste bullets, was
unprecedented.
Buildings were set alight with flamethrowers, escaping women
raped and killed, often forced first to watch their children being thrown back
in the burning building. Inhabitants of whole buildings marched out on to the
street and killed in cold blood.
After the war, Warsaw lay in ruins, the level of destruction, almost
impossible to describe, the picture below gives a perspective of how little was
left and the scale of the devastation.
Warsaw Ghetto 1945
A view of Warsaw from the roof of a school in ul stawki. If you know the girl in the photo please contact us
Not one
German was punished or convicted ever for the Wola Massacre, some of the perpetrators died in captivity during the war, some lived on until their death
in Germany. Some of these animals still live, their names on a murderers list
published by the Warsaw Uprising Museum.
But what happened to the victims body’s
who perished in the uprising ?
Many were buried in the Warsaw uprising combatants cemetery, but many more were not.
One story we
do know thanks to Donat Szyller who wrote on “na temat.pl ” in Polish about "the
mass grave" underneath his residence. It is important the world knows what happened
in Warsaw; this can’t be hidden or prevented from being known by the language
barrier.
So I have
translated Donat Szyller’s article and used his photographs so the world may
see the horror of the end result for some of the victims who tragicallywere murdered during the Warsaw uprising.
I have not
changed his words at all, to ensure the stark reality of which he writes is not
demeaned when you read his words.
There is
a place in Warsaw, where the number of living inhabitants is seven times
smaller than those are dead. This is one of the biggest mass graves in
this part of Europe. I live in this place. Today I want to tell this story.
My apartment is a concrete box packed in a Gierek style block. Seven little box
like flats on each floor, and four floors in the block. In each box , there lives between
one to three people. This makes a total of nearly 60 residents.
However, those 60 aren’t all the residents, beneath my feet, just four floors below;
there lie the remains of men. 70 years ago between, 1940 and 1943 more than seven
thousand people were shot and buried here, Jews and Poles. They are my neighbours.
I have seven thousand neighbours.
The mass
grave at the stadium
Today
this is one of the few places in Warsaw where people still live on mass graves.
In this place today, stands H frame blocks of flats made from reinforced
concrete filled with bricks
On the eve of the 25th
anniversary of the exhumation of some of their graves, which took place on the 13th
December 1988, several people, will light a candle. The ceremony will be
attended by officials, priests, rabbis, representatives of the Nissenbaum
Foundation and the Jewish community. But it is not enough. It's much too
little. That's why I want to remember the story of what happened here decades
ago. Nazi crimes in other places in Warsaw are widely known, but it is the
story of Ul Gibalskiego, lying almost in the centre of Warsaw, which is forgotten
and covered with dust.
Today the street is associated more with the wave of
mafia crime from the 90s than with the occupation terror.
Before there were blocks of flats here, there was the sports stadium. It was created in 1926. The pitch
belonged to the Sports Club of Workers and Academics (SKRA). The stadium of
Skra sat in a rectangle marked out between ul Okopowa, and ul Mirecki and confined
by the walls of cemeteries belonging to the Jewish and Evangelical religions.
Skra stadium and on the left ul. Mirecki. Early 1960s
from www.facebook.com/Jestem.z.Woli
In
October 1940, the stadium became part of the Warsaw ghetto. Germany banned the
practice of any sport. The pitch was empty. Until finally, in one of the Nazi
bureaucratic head’s sprouted the thought: why let such a good stadium go to waste?
For
three years through the pitch of the stadium passed thousands of people. Women
and men, Poles and Jews, young and old. Everyone received a death sentence and
was executed on the spot. Those bodies stayed there for many years naked, in
torn dirty rags and buried in the pitch or in a mass grave in the
adjacent Jewish cemetery. Jews were brought here and buried who were killed in
other parts of the ghetto.
"No longer the land of the dead to
burial"
said Emanuel Ringleblum, the chronicler of the underground Warsaw Ghetto archives, when he wrote about the area on 20th May 1940, he went on to say
"The
dead were buried at night, between the hours of one and five in the morning,
without a shroud of white paper, they are then put in mass graves. At the
beginning the corpses were piled in separate graves next to each other, now they
are put in one grave. No longer the land for burying the dead."
Victims of starvation in Warsaw Ghetto 25th may 1941 source bundesarchiv.de
"Of particular
interest is a shed in which lies during the day dozens of dead people. I was stood in the shed. It is simply macabre. Dead bodies are lying covered with a black sheet of paper. You can see shreds of their clothes here and there. Dead people are just skeletons. Bones covered with skin, that's all you can see, almost like an abattoir. These skeletons of dead men, I can see only thin skin stretched over their bones."
Three months later Ringelblum noted
"In the heat that belches from these mass graves, the stench is so strong that it is impossible to walk past them, if you do not plug your nose."
Franz Blattler (actually Franz Mavick, his real name) a chauffeur of the Swiss medical mission, described the place two years later in 1942.
"Beside the
old Jewish cemetery there is one of the biggest mass graves that ever existed,
full of Jews from all parts of Europe. The corpses imported in two-wheeled
wheelbarrows.
Women and men are buried in separate graves. When you pull up with
yet another wheelbarrow, a man comes up, one of a few Jews who, thanks to this
work remain temporarily still alive. Each of them grabs a corpse behind its
head and by the legs and, depending on the sex of the corpse, puts them in one foul swoop
down on the right or left. Then you hear a bad sound which sounds like an empty
stomach hitting the ground, as if resonating like through the sound box of a
violin - in the truest sense, the melody of a horrible death."
August 1,
1944, the Warsaw Uprising. Ul. Mirecki and Skra stadium fence
AK Radosław Archive, www.info-pc.home.pl/whatfor/baza/foto.htm
Photos from the past
Today
the living residents of this neighbourhood don't need to move far from the
computer to compare views of the stadium from decades ago. The military aerial photographs from before
the war taken in 1935, show the stadium in full glory. The Football pitch and
the athletics track next to it. The trees growing around both cemeteries: the evangelical
(pictured on the left, and to the east of the stadium) and the Jewish cemetery
(above, to the north).
Skra stadium. Aerial view in 1935 • Google Earth
In 1945, just after the war, Soviet
airmen photographed the place again. After the war there is hardly a trace of most
of the cemetery trees. In the picture you can see plundered, empty spaces
surrounding the ruins of the stadium. In this view the stadium looks disgraced
- bare, stripped like a flower with no stems and foliage. It resembles a naked,
dead body. However, much scarier is the image of the ruins of the stadium
recorded on the grainy black and white photo. It shows nine holes - seven
freshly dug and two partly covered with soil. Masses graves, a gift left behind
by the German army.
Aerial
1945 • Google Earth
Aerial view 2013- Google Earth
12 Tons of Human ashes
Today, at
this point runs ul Edward Gibalskiego (Edward Gibalski street) , and on the
former pitch of Skra stands blocks of flats built in the 60s and 70s.
According
to the office of the borough of Wola in Warsaw, registered living here today are
1076 residents. For everyone living there are seven more lying dead. The number
of victims who were buried under ul Gibalskiego is more than seven thousand.
During
the reign of Warsaw Gestapo chief Ludwig Hahn it was noticed that in the
capital there was a special unit called Sonderkommando 1005 supervised by the
SS and police officers from the battalion III / SS-Polizei Regiment 23. Branch.
The unit was known in Warsaw as Leichenverbrennungskommando (the cremation
division) their task was to attempt to hide and obliterate Nazi war crimes. In this
task, its members exhumed and burned thousands of corpses of murdered victims.
In Warsaw there was a network of crematoria managed by them with branches scattered
all over the borough of Wola.
One of
them was right here - at Skra stadium. Here bodies were burned, in the open
air, with 6 to 8 furnaces working most of the time. Bodies were brought here
from all over the borough, victims of street executions, shootings in the
ghetto, or people who died of starvation and disease.
How many
murdered peoples bodies and ashes are buried here, and how much ash was buried
under the earth in this place?
Hundreds
of kilos of ash? Maybe thousands of kilos?
We will
never know.
As a comparison – we can see how much ash was
collected from the streets. In 1945, after the massacre of Wola, from the
streets of this district Poles collected the ashes of people murdered and
burned by the Germans. There were 12 tonnes of ash. That weight is equal to a
whole Warsaw double city bus filled with people during rush hour.
Jewish prisoners forced to work by Sonderkommando 1005,
posing on a machine to crush bone •
wikipedia.org
Exacavation extracts remains
After
the war, in 1945, some graves were exhumed in part at the Skra stadium. The
dead were transferred to the Warsaw Insurgents Cemetery. But a small part, not
all. In fact just a few, too few, too
little.
Then
after this, the graves were no longer talked about. The city built blocks of
flats here and laid out streets. Until 1988.
On the left Skra stadium. View from ul Okopowa. Probably 1960.
• photo. Theodore Hermańczyk, CAW archive
I
remember that day it was October, then I sat taking a lesson at a nearby
elementary school. That day powerful excavators were working at a construction
site of a residential building, then the diggers revealed hundreds of human
bones in the soil. Construction was halted, and the dead were excavated to the
surface. This way the remains of about 300 people - Poles and Jews were saved.
On December
13, 1988 they were entombed in an underground concrete catacomb sandwiched
between two blocks of flats, and a monument was erected. A ceremony took place
with the ritual of Judaic and Roman Catholic religions. In a joint prayer, the
ceremony was attended by 21 rabbis who came to Warsaw from all over the world
and Catholic priests with Bishop Henryk Muszyński at the helm.
Monument Joint Martyrdom of Jews and Poles in Warsaw • wikipedia.org
A year
later, Bishop Henryk Muszyński stood there again at the Monument of Martyrdom of
Poles and Jews.
How many unnamed
residents still rest in undiscovered graves beneath the pavements, parking lots
and foundations of our blocks? No one knows. But I at least, try not to forget
these people and remember them.
Donat
Szyller 2013.
Incidents
like this remained hidden from the world’s view due to communist indifference
and the language barrier, of Polish and Yiddish preventing people finding out
what happened.
Warsaw
stands today, rejuvenated, growing, alive, with Warsovians bringing up families
and working, and carrying out our business on the streets of the Warsaw ghetto. Everyday
Poles and foreigners of all religions tread the streets where genocide and atrocities
took place. The fact we are here, and our city lives is testimony to those who
lost or gave their lives to defend this city. The fact we are all here,
bustling and rushing around working and living proves, the Nazis didn’t win,
Warsaw lives on.
On 1st
of August the town will stand still, as we remember those who lost their lives
in the Warsaw uprising, and we do it like this .
