By Subodh Rana.
The grainy black and white film runs incessantly like a recurring nightmare: there are half-starving Varsovians fighting with all means at their disposal, children running the gauntlet to supply the soldiers, women frenetically tending to the wounded and the dying.
The faces look gaunt yet determined, hunger has not quelled the human spirit’s thirst for freedom; fathers fight for their sons, mothers for their daughters. They know that their own life has come to naught, trampled under the jackboots of Nazi Germany, ripped asunder by fire bombs raining down from the skies; their homes and neighbourhoods are a heap of ruins.
But they need to fight one last time before they die, before the Red Army parked across the Vistula River to the east cross over to liberate them from the Nazis only to tie them up in the bondage of Soviet Communism.
The Museum dedicated to the Warsaw Uprising is a poignant reminder of human cruelty; the various -isms that have brought such devastation to the “civilized” world of the 20th Century. It is also a monument to the irrepressible human spirit that rises from hopelessness to hope, from fear to courage and from bondage to liberation! The museum tells the story of the Warsaw Uprising that started on 1st August 1944 in sights and sounds that thunderstruck me.
Amidst the screeching fury of Stukas dive bombing on their targets, there is the martial music of the Third Reich drowning out the cries of anguish and the incessant, almost hypnotic, synchronized thuds of the Wehrmacht jackboots on Warsaw’s cobbled streets. There are pictures of the dead and dying, makeshift anonymous graves, firing squads firing without respite.
I peek and crawl into a manhole the insurgents were using as the mode of transport and communication albeit without the darkness, the stink and the grime floating. I view the city skyline from the roof of the museum to find a few war time buildings standing here and there to remind and to warn future generations. Earlier I have seen a 3D documentary of the devastated Warsaw shot from a low flying aircraft immediately after the war. I can see one church spire standing tall like a beacon of hope amongst the debris. This was the Warsaw Ghetto area where we live today, I am told.
I see a kaleidoscope of personalities, heroes and villains. The Hall of Infamy showcases Hans Frank the Nazi Governor General of Poland posing with his happy family. There is Eichmann here and Himmler there. There is Hitler taking the first salute from his conquering troops in Warsaw.
Names and faces etched in my mind from reading countless books on the subject, watching countless movies too. My first introduction to the Uprising and the Warsaw Ghetto was the book Mila 18 by Leon Uris I read at school. Then there are the Allies – Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt – sealing the fate of the erstwhile independent Poland at Yalta. The West had enough of fighting to fight Stalin. It would take a Polish Pope, Solidarity and Gorbachev to undo this terrible injustice nearly 50 years later.
The Uprising ends in capitulation two devastating months later. General Bor, the Commander of the Home Army signs the treaty suspending warfare in Warsaw. Under its terms both the insurgents and the civilian population is mandated to leave the city. More than 18 thousand insurgents and 180 thousand civilians die. Only 64 out of 987 historical buildings remain standing. Just a handful of Poles and Jews remain when the Red Army enters the city on January 17, 1945. These are the so-called “Robinsons”.
I mentally note that just like rebuilt Warsaw’s skyline reaching for the skies, the hopes and aspirations of a nation is soaring high too. The museum reminds Poles how easy it is to lose one’s nationhood lest the new generation forgets. Somewhere there is a lesson for an -ism afflicted Nepal. Will there be a rising there too?
