The forgotten heroes

Imagine, if you can, a post-war London in which the pilots of the Battle of Britain were not recognised as heroes, and a post-war Britain in which they were arrested, jailed, denied their medals and written out of the history books. The result would have been disorientation and a generation's worth of confusion about what actually happened during the war.

But that, in essence, is precisely what happened to the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising - or the Battle of Warsaw, as it was called at the time. The uprising was launched in the summer of 1944, when German troops were retreating from eastern Europe, and the Soviet Red Army was already waiting on the eastern bank of the Vistula river, which divides the city of Warsaw. The battle had political rather than purely military goals: the Home Army, Poland's powerful underground force, wanted to take control of the city before the Germans left, in order to be able to greet Soviet forces from a position of strength.

The plan failed. Underground troops, poorly armed, never stood a chance against German forces. The Red Army, which had been expected to join the battle, never did. Help from Britain, also expected, never arrived. Instead, the Germans defeated the insurgents, murdered hundreds of thousands of Warsovians in the process and destroyed the old city forever. In the wake of the Communist takeover of the country a few months later, the entire story of the rising was suppressed, and would remain suppressed for the subsequent half-century. No monument was built until the end of the 1980s, and the survivors were denied the medals and honours awarded to their compatriots who had fought
alongside the Russians in the East.

To this day, most foreign visitors to Warsaw mix up the Warsaw uprising of 1944 with the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943. But even in Poland, the uprising became part of underground history, or rather legend. Following the Communist regime's declaration of martial law in 1981, the anti-Communist political underground thought of the wartime resistance leaders as role models, even as official history books downplayed the story or ignored it altogether.

All of this, of course, also makes the subject compelling to historians, who have not, until now, been able to write about this subject using documents - and why it is particularly compelling to Norman Davies, who has long been obsessed with the forgotten history of Poland and eastern Europe. He has decided not to begin the book with the uprising itself, instead starting in an apparently roundabout way, first telling the separate histories of Poland's position within the Allied coalition, of the Red Army's march through eastern Europe, of the German occupation and of the Polish underground. The insurgency is not actually launched until well past page 200.

Before it is possible to understand why the uprising's leaders took the seemingly irrational decision to launch the battle when they did, it is also necessary to understand just how terrible the joint Soviet and German occupations of Poland had been, and just how desperate the citizens of Warsaw had become.

Davies is at his best when he focuses on issues such as everyday life during the uprising and the terrible deprivations of life in a city that was slowly being turned to rubble. At the end, there were only a tiny number of inhabitants left, and they survived by drinking rainwater that had collected in bathtubs left open to the sky, and scraping around bombed-out cellars looking for food.

Following "liberation" at the hands of the Red Army, things didn't get much better, however. The end of the book is so tragic as to be almost unreadable: the arrest, imprisonment and trials of Home Army members - on the grounds that they supported a free, not a Soviet-occupied Poland - and the exile of the uprising's leadership. The stories of their new lives in Australia or in distant London suburbs are sometimes surprisingly upbeat, but often merely sad.

The almost complete indifference of the outside world to this story continues to bother Davies, as it continues to bother Poles. Polish soldiers were not allowed to participate in Allied victory parades - and anyway, they didn't feel much like celebrating "victory" in 1945, when their country appeared destined to remain occupied. Fifty years on, it is too late to reward them - and too late for them to help rebuild their country, which has, in the meantime, changed almost beyond recognition.