On 10 September 1939, just nine days into World War 2, Warsaw was already a city shaped by war – pillars of smoke trailing to the sky; roofs caved in; rubble strewn across the cobbled streets. A citation from Max Hastings’ ‘All Hell Let Loose’ viscerally captures what it was like to be a Varsovian in that fateful summer of sandbagged streets & terror bombings…
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‘The horrors of blitzkrieg mounted: while Warsaw Radio played Chopin’s Military Polonaise, German bombing of the capital was now accompanied by the fire of a thousand guns, delivering 30,000 shells a day, which pounded its magnificent buildings into rubble. “The lovely Polish autumn [is] coming,” fighter pilot Mirosław Feriimage wrote in his diary, recoiling from the irony. “Damn and blast its loveliness.” A pall of grey smoke and dust settled over the capital. The Royal Castle, opera house, national theatre, cathedral and scores of public buildings, together with thousands of homes, were reduced to ruins. Unburied bodies and makeshift graves lay everywhere on the boulevards and in the parks; food supplies, water and electricity were cut off; with almost every window shattered, glass fragments carpeted pavements.’
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In 1939 as in 1944, some have asked why Warsaw didn’t simply capitulate – why carry on such a struggle against such unlikely odds and amidst such ruin and hardship? Perhaps Jan Karski answers it best in his autobiography ‘Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World’:
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‘In Poland there is a meaning to defeat that perhaps is unknown in countries differently situated. Along with a strong sense of unity as a people, there is present an awareness that a defeat in war entails unique and drastic consequences. Other nations may be oppressed and dominated after losing a war; they may have war reparations imposed on them, or limits on their army, sometimes even their boundaries are changed. But when a Polish soldier was beaten on the battlefield, the specter of total annihilation swooped down upon the entire nation: its neighbors would pillage and divide up its land, and try to destroy its language and culture. That is why, to us, war took on the character of total war.’

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