The Warsaw Uprising: 63 Days, 1944
1944 · event
At five in the afternoon on 1 August 1944 the Polish Home Army came out into the streets of Warsaw against the German occupation. The Soviet front had reached the eastern bank of the Vistula, and the rising was timed to liberate the capital before the Red Army entered it, so that Poland would meet its next occupiers as a country with a government of its own. The insurgents expected to fight for a few days. They fought for sixty three.
Warsaw had been under occupation since 1939 and had already seen the destruction of its Jewish population and the crushing of the ghetto uprising in 1943, a separate event with which this one is sometimes confused. In August 1944 tens of thousands of fighters, many of them very young and armed with captured or homemade weapons, held districts of the city, ran their own postal service through the sewers, printed newspapers and broadcast on the radio.
Soviet forces halted on the far bank and did not intervene for weeks. Western allies flew supply drops from Italy at long range and at heavy cost, and most of the containers fell into German hands. The city was reduced street by street. Around sixteen thousand insurgents and, by most estimates, well over one hundred and fifty thousand civilians died. The capitulation was signed on 2 October, the surviving population was expelled, and demolition squads then destroyed most of what was left standing.
Warsaw was rebuilt after the war, its old town reconstructed so faithfully from paintings and drawings that it was later placed on the World Heritage list. Every year on 1 August the sirens sound at five in the afternoon, and the traffic and the pedestrians of a modern European capital stand still for a minute in the middle of the street.