Poland Remembered III |
Monday Apr 09 2007
By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is the third in a four-part series.
The new museum dedicated to the Battle of Warsaw is a compelling place to visit. It opened the weekend we arrived, and the queue stretched around the block. But after being informed of Dad’s participation in the battle, we were afforded special treatment, moving quickly to the head of the line. Serious deference is paid to elders. People give up their seats on trains and trams; seniors are acknowledged in the streets, especially those who, like my father, wore the pin bearing the insignia of the resistance, a stylized ‘P’ with curving feet. He did not wear the Cross of Valour, awarded to him in absentia, for sustained courage in the face of the enemy. This an honour I only learned about recently.
Two days earlier, we had walked the street across from Saski Gardens, where dad had been dug in. It is a broad roadway now, flanked with new buildings for the most part. At the intersection of Marszalkoska-Krolewska boulevards, he pointed this way and that with his cane, to mark the presence of the German Army behind what were then trenches in the park, and where lay the heaps of rubble in which he and his comrades hid and fought not more than a few hundred yards away. He described the mortar that had been brought in by the enemy to smash the resistance, which fired projectiles so massive they could be observed as they ‘floated’ down toward them, affording sufficient time to flee to the tunnels and cellars below. On one occasion, when one of the shells failed to explode, it was dismantled by the intrepid defenders so the powder within could be used for homemade grenades. Sure enough, we found a grainy photograph of an unexploded shell from the mortar the Germans had nicknamed ‘Karl’, surrounded by grinning, emaciated members of the resistance, on the walls of the museum.
Some time after our trip to Poland, I asked my father why he had not been forthcoming about the horrors of war and his part in the enduring of them, including his woundings and his capture and transport by cattle car to a prison camp in northern Germany.
“I was young and foolish,” he replied. “I had no real idea of the danger, no thought other than survival. I didn’t know any better.”
It’s hard to accept simple answers to great questions. But even in the barest of responses, one senses a powerful verity that is not always necessary to express. Survival connotes a tooth-and-nail hiding-place dug into the side of the abyss of death. But the survivor, as Camus explains it in The Myth of Sisyphus, is a hero because he confronts that feeling of absurdity brought on by the profound discrepancy between human hopes and a reality indifferent to them.
The ascent from the hell that the Battle of Warsaw and its aftermath must have been had to have indelibly stamped my father with a love of life and an understanding of the nature of courage.
© 2007 Stuart James Whitley. All rights reserved.
Tagged with: battle_of_warsaw courage history poland
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