After the defeat in 1939 Poland was occupied by Nazi Germany and her Eastern territories by the Soviet Union. A Polish Underground was formed which comprised of clandestine educational systems, social organisations, the Boy Scout movement, and a military resistance movement. Many young people considered their duty to join. Military battalions were organised from Boy Scout units. In 1941 the German-Soviet war began and by 1944 the Soviet army had advanced into Poland. The military command of the Home Army (the Armia Krajowa or AK) decided against an uprising in Warsaw at that stage and most weapons amassed in the city were despatched in the Spring to the partisans outside Warsaw. However, when the Soviet army approached the River Vistula in July 1944, the command decided to liberate Warsaw by itself. The Uprising began on 1 August. Because of the shortage of arms and ammunition, particularly those suitable for fighting in built-up areas, practically no German strong-points were taken and no East-West road or strategically important train routes were intercepted. After the first week of fighting the insurgents lost their offensive initiative and for almost two months thereafter defended themselves in isolated districts which the Germans took over one by one, up to the beginning of October 1944, when the City Centre surrendered. The heaviest battles took place in the city districts of Wola and the Old Town. Most of the highly trained Scout units in these districts suffered heavy losses, and almost all the survivors were wiped out in the district of Powiśle, when they tried to join the Polish battalion under Soviet command that took part in an unsuccessful crossing to the western bank of the Vistula.
The author of Warsaw 1944 – An Insurgent’s Journal of the Uprising belonged to the generation of independent Poland which became known as the ‘Columbus Generation’. These were admirable young people, in most cases teenagers in 1939. Born into a free and independent Poland after the First World War, they were trapped in the events of the Second World War. They experienced its cruelty and if they survived, in many cases left Poland to become emigrés in many different countries around the world.
Zbigniew Dębczyński was born in Warsaw to a family of doctors. His father, an army surgeon, died in a car accident when Zbigniew was very young. His mother was a well known and much respected doctor, devoting herself to many, mostly poor, patients. During the German occupation she became deeply involved in the Underground Resistance movement, working closely with the High Command of the Home Army. Her activities were discovered by the Gestapo who broke into their apartment and shot her on the spot. Zbigniew who was in the next room, managed to jump out of a window, slide down the drainpipe into the courtyard and escape.
From that moment life for this teenage boy was one of conspiracy, using the name of Czajkowski from then on. He continued his education in a secret study group organised by the teachers of one of the top Warsaw schools, the Lelewel. Teachers would go from one private house to another, at the risk of dire punishment, teaching small groups of pupils. At the same time he was involved with Underground Boy Scout movement, which took the name of ‘Grey Ranks’, with aims different from those of the pre-war years (although perhaps not that different from those set by the creator of the movement, Baden-Powell).
In 1942, at the age of sixteen, Zbigniew already belonged to the so-called Battle Schools (BS) concerned, among other things, with minor sabotage. He then joined the Assault Groups (GS). Apart from intensive training he took part in a number of subversive acts against the occupying forces. That period of his life and his activities are briefly described in his journal.
In August 1943 a new Scout Battalion was created from those who took part in military action. It was named ‘Zośka’ after the pseudonym of the recently killed commander Tadeusz Zawadzki. When a sister battalion was formed in 1944 named ‘Parasol’ (‘umbrella’) Zbigniew was transferred to it as a patrol leader. His commanding officer was the battalion’s second-in-command, the poet Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, later recognised as one of the greatest poets of his generation.
At the start of the Uprising, the Parasol’ went into action in the district of Wola. But orders did not arrive in time to Zbigniew’s patrol. It found itself instead in the Theatre Square and fought there in the first days of the Uprising. On the fourth day of fighting his superior officer Baczyński was killed. The description of his death in Zbigniew’s journal, which appeared in the Polish Press in 1948, was a valuable account of the early days of the Uprising and the circumstances surrounding the death of the great poet.
Warsaw 1944 – An Insurgent’s Journal of the Uprising is an exceptional book, written in plain, unpretentious prose, and its reader is moved by its authenticity, directness and restraint. It is instinctively a work of great literary merit. Concise, almost dispassionate descriptions of many terrible experiences in the short – and at the same time long – month of August 1944 in the Old Town, the main period on which the author has concentrated, make a strong impact. Here Corporal ‘Deivir’ (his pseudonym) not yet eighteen, commanding a patrol of colleagues of a similar age, after years of preparation in conditions of conspiracy, set out to defend his and their city from the hated and cruel occupiers. He was deeply conscious of his responsibility for them. Already twice wounded he tried to protect them as much as he could, yet the situation continued to develop in the worst possible way. In the final days Corporal ‘Deivir’ became a helpless witness while they, one by one, almost to the last one, perished. Superhuman efforts to help the wounded were thwarted by renewed, ever worsening blows. No reader will forget such scenes as the attack on the Stawki Street, the burial under rubble of the hospital in ‘Pamfil’, or the last fight by the Town Hall. In these hundred pages of ‘Deivir’s’ account is contained the whole magnitude of heroism and futility in battle.
The book belongs to the documentary literature genre, factual and truthful. There is a total absence of pathos and what one might call hero-making, either of the author or the events. There is no drawing of morals or looking for the guilty parties in the tragedy either. The facts he describes speak for themselves. (He had subsequently expressed his opinion in articles written by both of us and published in the emigré press, that the decision to launch the Uprising should be regarded as a mistake.) His rational account in the journal is set in a deep emotional context on the human level. He emphasises in his introduction that from the perspective of years later he found himself ‘in the happy situation’ where he ‘could study in peace and work in a field totally different and distant from the events which are the subject of this book’. He dedicates it to ‘friends and colleagues who had less luck, but first and foremost to those for whom those years did not exist’.
The third part of the journal describes concisely the second month of the Uprising. After repeated but abortive attempts to cross from the City Centre to the district of Czerniakόw, where the remains of the Parasol battalion defended themselves until practically total annihilation, the author fought on the barricades near the Polytechnic. He was commended for the Cross of Merit, which he never subsequently claimed.
After capitulation he was taken to a PoW camp, Stalag XP in Sandbostel near Bremen in Germany. After liberation he went back to school. He matriculated from a Polish school set up in Lubeck. Although I too was in a PoW camp in Sandbostel, I only met Zbigniew in Lubeck. He was to become my closest friend for a great many years. Together we came to England where Zbigniew finished his engineering studies at the Polish University College (affiliated to the University of London, with teaching in English).
He was a brilliant engineer. At first he worked for several British firms before starting his own company and enjoyed many professional successes.
We often discussed and carried within us the Warsaw Uprising in which we had both taken part. We were critical of the way it was planned and executed. Both of us published in the emigré press reviews of books on this great and tragic topic which appeared in Poland after the political ban was lifted as result of the ‘thaw’ of October 1956. Zbigniew also maintained contact with those associated with Parasol living in Poland. In 1999 we took part in the unveiling of a plaque in memory of K.K. Baczyński and in a commemorative ceremony which took the form of a grand spectacle on the Theatre Square in Warsaw. Zbigniew talked about the places where they had fought and where Baczyński had died. I read out my poem dedicated to the poet. This was to be Zbigniews’s last visit to Poland. He died in October 1999 in London. His ashes rest in the Powązki Military Cemetery in Warsaw, not far from his colleagues.
This remarkable man is gone. What remains are memories of him and his extraordinary, deeply moving journal.
Boleslaw Taborski
Author’s Note
After many years, when I wandered around the streets of Warsaw I had last seen from cellars, barricades and piles of rubble, that world seemed as unreal as if it had been on the moon. Only the manhole leading to the sewers on Długa Street was the same and greeted me as one of its old friends warmly with its round entrance. I hope it will never have to accommodate any more seventeen-year-olds.
It is a moment of reflection considering I am writing this fifty-five years after I had gone down that hole. Yes, for me studies, work, family and retirement became real. I had not become yet another inscription on the stone monument in the Parasol sector of the Powązki Military Cemetery in Warsaw: ‘Deivir’ [my pseudonym] 3 Comp., age 17, Aug. 1944, Old Town.
This book is for the most part a journal I had kept for a few months after the Uprising and finished shortly after the war. It was not written with publication in mind, merely the impressions of a seventeen-year-old insurgent jotted down without a specific aim, hence entirely candid. I had not planned to share them with anyone. After the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Uprising I had changed my mind and the first edition was printed in 1969. Half a century later, preparing for the second edition, I decided not to change or add anything to the period from 26 July to 2 September. I have added a chapter on the days before the Uprising – a small insight into the lives of a group of youngsters from that time, and another on the final days from 3 September to 8 October.
At the start of the Uprising there were ten of us in our squad. Three survived the Uprising and are still alive at the time of writing.
To those seven comrades and friends for whom the years that followed did not exist, I dedicate this book:
‘Gryf’ (Roman Wojtowski), age seventeen
‘Zorian’ (Zbigniew Romaniszyn), age eighteen
‘Kruk’ (Waclaw Przypkowski), age seventeen
‘Lis’ (Bogdan Dworakowski), age sixteen ‘Walgierz’ (Napoleon Wolski), age eighteen
‘Bohun’ (Ireneusz Jędrzejewski), age seventeen
‘Butrym’ (name unknown), age seventeen
The names stated are their pseudonyms. It was unwise to know the names and surnames of comrades in the Conspiracy so as not to give them away under torture, if caught.
Zbigniew George Czajkowski
February 1999