BIG READ: The Warsaw Uprising 81 years on

My friend Andrzej Sawa, the Polish photographer later naturalised as a South African, once told me the story of how he had by sheer luck saved his entire family, at the age of five, from the machine-guns of the Red Army.

Though they had narrowly survived a Nazi labour camp, the family had already been lined up for summary execution in wartime Poland when little Andrzej, then a tiny mite, remembered a pro-Soviet song he had picked up and began to sing it in his high little voice.

The astonished Reds’ fingers froze on their triggers, then they burst out laughing and embraced the Sawa family, who had been a hair’s breadth from extermination. It would be the world’s worst understatement to say that it was tough to be Polish in the early 1940s.

Besides the yawning black abyss of the Holocaust that largely played out behind barbed wire in dank Polish forests, it is often forgotten that the Soviets and Nazis initiated World War 2 together. The notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed on August 23 1939, little more than a fortnight before hostilities began, contained a secret clause that carved up Eastern Europe into Soviet and Nazi spheres of influence.

Poland on the eve of war

It is worth taking a few steps back to briefly sketch Poland on the eve of war. A hundred and twenty-three years after being wiped off the map by the Great Powers, Poland was able to rise again in the aftermath of the chaos in Russia’s western colonies provoked by the Bolshevik coup d’état. Its borders were stabilised in 1921 — but Poland’s status as a Wilsonian democratic state was never secure.

The resurrection of the “forever suppressed” Poland deeply concerned the new USSR under Joseph Stalin, which embraced long-standing Russian imperialist attitudes towards its western borderlands. The rising German Nazis saw the new Polish Corridor to the Baltic Sea that cut off East Prussia from the rest of Germany as an intolerable territorial mutilation that provided them a key casus belli.

Political instability and the Piłsudski era

Domestic Polish politics was terribly unstable: in 1922, a right-wing nationalist assassinated the first Polish president, Gabriel Narutowicz; then, starting in 1923, according to historian Rafał Chwedoruk, strikes and street-fighting between workers and the police almost provoked civil war. The army declined to intervene, so finally, in 1926, Marshal Józef Piłsudski seized power by coup d’état, forming a non-partisan government of socialists, liberals, ex-soldiers and part of the democratic left.

The working class base of the Piłsudski regime was formalised in 1930 by the state uniting left nationalists, independents, socialists and anarcho-syndicalists into the 170,000-strong Union of Trade Unions (ZZZ); it had a programme which, according to Chwedoruk, “was a compromise between radical syndicalism and reformism, even solidarity” with the regime.

The invasion of Poland

By the outbreak of war, the revolutionary syndicalist International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) had affiliated Polish unions representing railwaymen, general transport workers and sailors in Poland. Many would fight bravely in the battles to come, while it was also from within the ranks of the heterogeneous ZZZ that much of the armed resistance to imperialist occupation would arise when the Nazi blitzkrieg was unleashed on western Poland on September 9 1939, followed a mere eight days later by the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland.

Notable among the résistants was agronomic draughtsman Tomasz Alfons Pilarski, who went by the nom de guerre “Janson”, a member of the anarcho-syndicalist Free Workers’ Union of Germany (FAUD) in Silesia from 1919 to 1933, who had founded the anti-Nazi Black Ranks militia in 1929 before being forced to flee Germany under threat of execution for high treason.

—  It would be the world’s worst understatement to say that it was tough to be Polish in the early 1940s.

Yet histories of the Polish resistance have been gutted by the bias of more than 40 years of imposed post-World War 2 Soviet imperialist rule, which explains why works such as George Bruce’s The Warsaw Uprising, published in 1972 during the Soviet era, have no anarchist or syndicalist references in their narratives.

But it is far harder to excuse post-Soviet studies such as the otherwise exhaustive Norman Davies work Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw (2003), which is as thick as my fist, for demonstrating rank ignorance of this minority, yet intransigent, component of the capital’s dramatic resistance to the Nazis when its residents rose up in 1944 — which would remarkably draw faraway SA to its defence.

The glitch in the storytelling is of course that before Adolf Hitler turned on Stalin, the Soviets were also primary aggressors in Poland and, like the Nazis and their Einsatzgruppen death-squads, they also had genocidal intentions. The massacre of almost 22,000 Polish military officers, border guards and intellectuals in April and May 1940 at five locales in the USSR by troops led by the Soviet NKVD secret police demonstrated Stalin’s clear intent to expunge Polish leadership and identity.

—  Many anarchists were involved in smuggling food, weapons, letters, medicine and supplies into the Warsaw Ghetto — and Jews out.

Meanwhile, the ZZZ mobilised its workers to resist the Nazi-Soviet invasion, but after the defeat of the Polish armed forces by September 28, the organisation was forced underground. The response across the Polish spectrum was diverse, and initially very politically and organisationally fragmented by the Nazi-Soviet repression.

Several leaders of the ITF-affiliated Polish Railwaymen’s Union (ZKP), which co-ordinated the initial resistance, including general secretary E Grylowsky, were arrested by the occupying Reds and deported to Russia. Despite an ITF appeal to the Russian Railwaymen’s Union, Grylowsky is listed among those ITF members who died in the Soviet gulag.

Those like the anarchists and Jews who had earlier experience of operating clandestinely because of their outsider status naturally regrouped more easily, while those with military or union experience fared best in building disciplined mass underground organisations. Because they are usually airbrushed out of conventional narratives yet formed a significant armed minority, I will describe Warsaw’s resistance, which drew South Africans to the front lines, through the lens of the anarchist and syndicalist experience.

Underground organisations and the Warsaw Resistance

In October 1939, syndicalist militants such as Zofia Hajkowicz-Brodzikowska, who used the nom de guerre “Basia”, formed, according to Pawel Lew Marek’s memoir, a “temporary mobilisation centre for revolutionary syndicalists in Warsaw”, which combined trade unionists and other leftists.

The result of this initiative appears to have been that in November, many ZZZ militants such as Stefan Szwedowski, whose nom de guerre was “Wojciech”,  formed the clandestine Polish Syndicalist Union (ZSP). Centred on Warsaw, the ZSP had up to 4,000 members, according to Chwedoruk, and was represented by Wojciech on the Council to Aid Jews.

The ZSP formed its own armed force, the Call Assault Troops (OSZ), one famed unit of which, the 104th Company of Syndicalists commanded by hydrological engineer Kazimierz “Wroński” Puczyński, seized Nazi weapons and conducted sabotage raids in Warsaw’s Old Town, initially independently and then in tactical alliance with what became the nationalist underground Home Army (AK).

In late 1940, Basia and hardline anarchists such as Janson formed the Freedom Syndicalist Organisation (SOW) as a clandestine formation of the Polish Anarchist Federation (AFP, founded in 1926). Its guerrilla force, the Syndicalist Brigade, harassed the Nazis in the central Warsaw suburb of Śródmieście. The ZSP and SOW traded members among themselves and also with the AK and other anti-Nazi forces.

Supporting the Warsaw Ghetto

Many anarchists were involved in smuggling food, weapons, letters, medicine and supplies into the Warsaw Ghetto — and Jews out. Among them were two AFP militants who later earned the honoured title “Righteous Among the Nations” for helping Jews escape: Stefan Julian Rosloniec and Bernard Konrad Świerczyński.

The SOW was also involved in the astounding bravery of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of January 18 to April 28 1943, in which they assisted the Jewish Combat Organisation (ŹOB), the Jewish Military Union (ŹZW) and other allies for a precious two-and-a-half months in holding the line with small arms and petrol-bombs against overwhelming Nazi forces. Though the ghetto was liquidated, with about 98,000 murdered after surrender, it only hardened the determination of the multiparty Warsaw resistance.

The 1944 Warsaw Uprising

By July 1944, when the Soviet army crossed into Poland again — this time in support of the Allies instead of the Nazis — the AK may have topped 400,000 (some say 600,000), while the agrarian Farmers’ Battalions peaked at 160,000, the right-wing NSZ at 75,000 and the communist People’s Army (AL) at 30,000 — the numbers being guesstimates at best.

With its red-and-black armbands, the 104th Company of Syndicalists acquitted itself well at the outset of the national uprising that the AK initiated on August 1 1944, raiding a Nazi armoury and arming itself to the teeth, growing to about 600 guerrilla fighters over subsequent days. Another syndicalist unit seized the crucial PAST telephone exchange, while the 104th took the Krasiński Palace where it seized German guns and grenades, taking 42 German POWs.

But the uprising failed in Praga on the east bank of the Vistula River, which bisects the city roughly north to south, and the resistance did not manage to capture the airfields, the Gdańsk railway station or the bridges over the Vistula. The Nazis counterattacked on August 5 with the SS, police and Wehrmacht summarily executing perhaps 50,000 residents of Wola in reprisal.

Allied air support and the role of South Africa

The dash and daring of the Poles put the world to shame, however, and from the night of August 4/5, Polish airmen of the independent Special Duties Flight and British airmen of 148 Squadron of the Royal Air Force (RAF) began a perilous long-distance airlift of vital arms and ammunition to the resistance.

Flying overnight on an extended lozenge-shaped route from Brindisi in central Italy to Warsaw, 1,311km distant, and back again, their heavily overladen bombers had no fighter escorts over enemy territory and were vulnerable to flak and Luftwaffe night-fighters.

—  The dash and daring of the Poles put the world to shame … Polish and South African airmen began a perilous long-distance airlift of vital arms and ammunition to the resistance.

From the night of August 13/14, they were joined by airmen of the RAF’s 172 Squadron and 31 Squadron of the SA Air Force (SAAF), followed by the SAAF’s 34 Squadron on August 16/17. “There was no difficulty in finding Warsaw,” recalled SAAF pilot William Fairly. “It was visible from 100km away. The city was in flames but with so many huge fires burning, it was almost impossible to pick up the target marker flares.”

Davies adds: “Visibility over Warsaw was severely limited by clouds of smoke, whilst their approach run, which was made at only 45m ... and at a mere 200km/h … made them especially vulnerable to ground fire.”

In addition, the Soviets not only refused Allied pilots landing rights on territories they occupied, but even fired anti-aircraft cannon at some returning SAAF planes.

By September 2, the AK had taken a tactical decision to withdraw from Old Town, with the surviving 110 guerrillas of the 104th Company covering the rearguard of the resistance’s evacuation of thousands of civilians through the sewers to central Śródmieście, where it merged forces with the Syndicalist Brigade’s remnants, raising its numbers to 256 guerrillas under the command of Cpt Edward “Czemier” Wolonciej.

Rescue seemed at hand when the Red Army seized the eastern Praga suburbs by September 15. But then, on Stalin’s cynical orders, sat on its hands and watched the Warsaw Uprising just across the Vistula play itself out to its inevitable bloodstained conclusion; Stalin was resolute that a non-communist Poland would not emerge from the ruins.

Neil Orpen in his 1984 book Airlift to Warsaw notes that Winston Churchill “agreed with Field Marshal Smuts that the airlift was of little military value”. Yet the airlift continued until the very last SAAF flight, on the night of September 21/22, when bad weather halted the operation. As Davies concedes, “the losses were horrendous”, with one bomber lost for every tonne of supplies dropped.

The resistance even initiated talks with the Wehrmacht that granted them combatant status, but the hard-pressed AK surrendered on October 2. The anarchists and syndicalists fought on for another four days, but then they and the surviving 6,000 or so guerrillas, including a wounded Janson, melted away to fight another day.

While Basia died in Nazi detention, Wroński, the commandant and last veteran of the 104th Company, lived to see democracy return to Poland, dying in 2007 and being buried in the Powązki Military Cemetery in Warsaw.

In 1992, 67 surviving members of the SAAF’s 31 and 34 Squadrons were awarded the Polish Warsaw Cross of the Uprising. Last year, on the 80th commemoration of the SAAF’s role in the Warsaw Airlift, the Polish ambassador laid a wreath at the Katyn Memorial in Melrose, Johannesburg; 80 of the Allied airmen buried in Poland are South Africans.