History's face has many expressions, a metaphor that was amply demonstrated during "Two Uprisings in Warsaw: Retrospectives on 1943 and 1944," a special program presented by the Office of Scholarly Programs in the Madison Building's Mumford Room on Jan. 3.
Four presenters offered a lively, sometimes contentious mix of personal recollection, historical analysis and musical interpretation of these wartime uprisings.
Leokadia Silverstein, a senior cataloger with the Library, gave a moving personal account of the 1943 ghetto uprising -- a last-ditch attempt by Warsaw's Jews to evade the Nazi death camps. She was followed by Col. Andrzej Pomian, 85, a distinguished historian who served as a leader of the Polish Home Army's insurrection against German occupation in 1944.
Patricia Miller, professor of music at George Mason University and an internationally acclaimed mezzo-soprano, performed a song associated with each uprising. Finally, Michael MacQueen, senior historian with the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, provided sometimes controversial analysis and comment on the two events.
The Polish-American Congress, the Polish Library of Washington, the American Center of Polish Culture and the National Capital Area Chapter of the Fulbright Association were among the event's cosponsors. Because of the partial government shutdown, the U.S. Holocaust Research Institute (the scholarly division of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum) was unable to participate as originally planned. The standing-room-only crowd included distinguished guests such as Jan Nowak-Jezioranski, founder of the Polish-American Congress.
The room was hushed as Ms. Silverstein described her service as a courier for the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB, or Jewish Battle Organization), the underground Jewish youth league that spearheaded the 1943 uprising. Ms. Silverstein, with her blue eyes, youth and native Polish, posed as an Aryan and smuggled messages, food and weapons into the walled Jewish ghetto. Secret preparations for the uprising took more than a year, hampered by numerous problems, including the constant presence of informers and the reluctance of older Jews to challenge their oppressors.
By April 1943, however, "each fighter had his or her pistol, with the last bullet reserved for themselves because of their steely determination not to fall into the hands of the enemy," recounted Ms. Silverstein. On April 19 -- the eve of the final mass deportation to the death camps -- an uprising was launched.
Though initially the young fighters had the advantage of surprise, the well-armed Germans gradually regained the upper hand. After 27 days of bloody fighting, the uprising finally was crushed in a horrific conflagration that reduced the entire ghetto to rubble. Warsaw's thriving and prosperous prewar Jewish community, which had numbered around 375,000, was obliterated.
Ms. Silverstein watched the inferno side-by-side with German soldiers and Polish citizens who thought she was Aryan like them. To the Poles the spectacle was a source of morbid curiosity, Ms. Silverstein said. To her, "I was witnessing the end of an 800- year-long presence of Jews in Poland. I felt terribly alone, abandoned by men and God alike."
Her family had died earlier in the war, but the man she loved as well as many friends she had known since childhood were among those who died that day. "I was sobbing on the inside but smiling on the outside so as not to betray my identity. It was such a difficult moment, I can't find words to describe it."
The final act of the Warsaw Jews defies the common perception that Jews in the Holocaust "went to their death like sheep to the slaughter," Ms. Silverstein said. The rebels showed the world that "Jews had risen to the level of fighters for human dignity ... that the most important things in life are life itself and freedom, and you have to fight for both of them."
Ms. Silverstein received a standing ovation for her moving testimony, which was followed by Ms. Miller's poignant rendition of the Yiddish song, "Varshe" ("Warsaw").
Col. Andrzej Pomian, a prominent historian who served as the voice of the Polish underground on Radio Free Europe in 1946- 1977, was responsible for resistance propaganda in the Armia Krajowa (Polish Home Army), which carried out the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.
The 1944 event was the largest, and last, nationalist protest against Nazi occupation. Warsaw was laid to waste in a battle that lasted 63 days and took as many as 300,000 lives.
According to Mr. Pomian, who was assigned to London at the time, the Home Army intended the uprising to be "a final blow" against an enemy collapsing under pressure from the Allies. But the infamous 11th-hour duplicity of the Soviet Red Army -- which sat across the Vistula River watching as the revolt was crushed by the Germans -- ended that hope. Mr. Pomian described in convincing detail how Stalin arrived at the decision to allow the uprising to fail, neatly eliminating any threat to his own regime from a strong Polish nationalist army.
Though the uprising failed, it may have been an important reason behind Stalin's choice not to absorb Poland into the Soviet Union after the war, said Mr. Pomian. "It underlined the will of the Polish people to be free and independent," he maintained. His assertion was captured musically by Ms. Miller's stirring rendition of the Polish song "Marsz Mokotowa."
But Mr. MacQueen, in his comments on the two events, suggested that the 1944 Warsaw Uprising floundered primarily because the revolt itself was ill-conceived and ill-timed in its goal of freeing Warsaw from the Nazis.
"The optimistic targets and timetable were simply unrealistic. In the systematically dynamited rubble of the [Jewish] ghetto, the Poles might have foreseen the fate of the rest of the city," he asserted.
The price of the rebels' valor was high, Mr. MacQueen said - - the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and devastation of the cultural and political heart of Poland. Moreover, Mr. MacQueen argued, in direct contradiction to Col. Pomian, the uprising "delivered not only what was left of Warsaw, but the rest of Poland, into the hands of the communists."
MacQueen also gave a revisionist view of the Jewish uprising, suggesting that the revolutionaries sought "neither life nor victory," but only to choose the method of their death.
"'It was always death that was at stake, not life,'" Mr. MacQueen quoted a survivor of the ZOB. To deny the Nazis "the decision of how the Jews died," he added, "was perhaps the ultimate rebellion."
Thus, he concluded, the Warsaw Jews fulfilled their mission while the Polish rebels failed to achieve their goals.
Prosser Gifford, LC's director of Scholarly Programs, said that the two events symbolize "the desire to die affirming ... what one believes when death is the only assertion left."
Although public interpretation of such watershed events is always controversial, he added, "I do not believe there is any disagreement that these embattled groups were fighting, not just for themselves, but for freedom of conscience, of religion, of dignity and human worth."
