The History of a Warsaw Insurgent

Copyright © 2013 Peter Badmajew.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-8631-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8632-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8633-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013906845

iUniverse rev. date: 4/23/2013

Contents

Introduction

Before the Uprising

The Beginning of the Uprising in Bielany

Toward Kampinos

Return to Zoliborz

In the Firehouse

The Last Days of the Uprising

The End of the Uprising

The First Years after the War

How Politics Can Change History

I thank you to my grandson, Joe Krawczyk, who at age 15 agreed to polish my English.

Introduction

I do not pretend that these memoirs are a history of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. They contain only very fragmentary descriptions of the fighting in Bielany and Zoliborz, the northern districts of the Warsaw, and Kampinos, the forest on the outskirts of the city. I’ve described the course of events as they were perceived by a teenager; while they occasionally may appear naive, they faithfully present the mentality of a young soldier.

The average age of the insurgents was between fifteen and twenty years of age. Most volunteers gave an older age to prevent rejection.

To introduce the reader to the environment of the preuprising period, I would like to briefly present the situation that existed in Warsaw at the end of July 1944. It was a time filled with surprises, characterized by changing situations from day to day. For five days straight, a large wave of defeated German, Hungarian, and Romanian soldiers along with civilians riding on the carts with all their belongings came through Warsaw’s main Jerozolimska Avenue, leading from east to west. They were fleeing the Russian troops. At that time, one could buy a rifle for a bottle of vodka.

When the wave of panic-stricken troops ended, the first Soviet tanks appeared at Warsaw’s eastern suburb on the other side of the Vistula River. At the same time, German armored divisions started to roll through the Jerozolimska Avenue, this time from west to east.

On July 28, 1944, the Polish Home Army issued an order for a first combat alert, which was called off after one day. A second combat alert was ordered on July 30, 1944. The beginning of the uprising in Warsaw was set for August 1, 1944, at hour W, which meant 5:00 p.m.

In Bielany and Zoliborz, fighting started at 1:00 p.m., because a few of the assembled points had been discovered by German gendarmes. In Praga, which was the eastern part of the Warsaw, lying across the Vistula river, the uprising was crushed by the Germans within three or four days.

The Germans divided Warsaw’s left bank into the five districts: Wola, Starowka, Zoliborz, Srodmiescie, and Mokotow. The Polish Home Army used each district as a separate fighting bastion. Connections between districts were made through the sewer canals. Toward the end of the uprising, the districts became completely isolated, and communications between the commanding officers were made via London by radio.

The first to fall was Wola, which resulted in a slaughtered civilian population and burned, wounded soldiers in the hospitals. The next was Starowka (the Old Town), which was completely destroyed, followed by Mokotow, Zoliborz, and the last one, Srodmiescie (downtown) on October 4, 1944.

During the uprising, the Germans treated insurgents as though they were bandits and executed captured insurgents on the spot. The day before capitulation, under the pressure from the allies, the Germans recognized the Polish soldiers as combatants protected by the Geneva Convention. (That meant that the Germans could no longer assassinate captured insurgents.)

Weapons were dropped into the Warsaw area and Kampinos Forest by Polish, Canadian, and British pilots, flying from Italy. In the second month of the uprising, the Russians also started supplying weapons via airdrops.

Before the Uprising

My best memories are from my childhood. I was surrounded by love, wealth, and a lack of interest in material things. My father used to say, Do not look for the money; it will find you by itself. To him, the highest values in a man were awareness, willpower, and compassion. I remember my mother asking me to give my best toy to my French girlfriend. This environment charged the batteries in my life with such amounts of energy that I survived the worst time in my life, and I keep going on through my eighties.

My father, Vladimir Badmajew, obtained his MD in Moscow; his godfather had been the last czar of Russia, Nicolas II. My father’s paternal uncle, Peter Badmajew, was the first person to introduce Tibetan medicine to Europe. He was Nicholas’s physician and a politician.

When World War I started, my father was in charge of the military medical train. During the Bolshevik revolution, he escaped to Poland, where he settled in Warsaw and continued to practice Tibetan medicine. In the beginning, his herbs were produced as the tinctures in the city’s Gesner Pharmacy. In 1935 my father opened a herbal laboratory at 18 Piusa Street, under the supervision of K. Kowalewski, a graduate student of the medical faculty of Warsaw University, and later a professor at the University of Alberta in Canada. Several monthly and weekly bulletins and books on the subject of Tibetan medicine were published

My father was the physician of two presidents of Poland, Stanislaw Wojciechowski and Ignacy Moscicki. The latter was visited by my father on a regular basis at Warsaw’s castle and Spala, the president’s summer residence, for physical therapy, which my father called a dry operation and which consisted of an abdominal and spinal massage. My father gave President Moscicki a chest with numbered glass tubes containing the herbal tablets, which the president took according to instructions. Because of the healthy climate, my father suggested the president spend the summer in Jurata, located in the pine forest at the Baltic seashore. For his service and introducing knowledge of Tibetan medicine to Poland, my father was awarded the Golden Cross of Merit by President Moscicki.

I remember my personal encounter with President Moscicki in Spala when I was a boy. I was sharpening my scout knife on a stone when the president and my father walked by. The president asked me for whom I was sharpening the knife. I answered, For the Germans.

Mother knew several foreign languages, although she forbade Father to use Russian. For her, only Polish was acceptable. She was a great Polish patriot.

I had an older half brother, Richard, who was arrested by Gestapo in 1942 for hiding a British officer who had escaped from the prison camp. Richard died in Canada in 1970. In addition, I had younger twin siblings. When my brother, George, saw a German laughing for the first time, he was very surprised that the guy was laughing in Polish. George died in 1980. My sister, Mimi, was a famous ballerina; she died in 2008 while traveling in India.

Before World War II, I was a student in the elementary school in Warsaw. The summer of 1939 was beautiful; we were in Jurata. Before noon I swam in the sea, and then rode on my bicycle with a wet swimsuit on my head to the Pucka Bay, where, under the guidance of my instructor, Mr. Szelestowski, I trained for a swimming competition. In addition, I rode a water board drawn by a motorboat, holding a stick with the rubber ball and trying to push the other contestant into the water. I won the swimming competition. The same evening, in a beautiful ballroom with the orchestra playing, I received my cup. I remember the juicy taste of the greengages (a type of plum) sold on the beach. Occasionally, mounted Polish officers appeared on the beach, arousing pride and admiration among the vacationers. The war was very distant and unrealistic; besides we were strong, confident, and ready. According to the chief commander, Edward Rydz-Smigly, we would not give even a button from our overcoats. We knew, too, that our allies, France and Great Britain, were powerful countries.

We returned to Warsaw by car, skirting the German Gdansk. At Wejherowo, while passing close to the barracks, somebody played a sad tune on a trumpet; it stuck in my memory. We arrived in the capital at night; for the last time, I saw a glow of the blinking lights of the prewar, happy Warsaw.

On September 1, 1939, I was supposed to go to school; however this now-historic day started with the first German air raid on Warsaw. Initially, everybody thought that it was a Polish Air Force exercise. Only when the bombs started to fall did it become obvious that the war had started.

Instead of going school, I took an active part in Warsaw’s defense. I used sand to extinguish incinerated bombs that had fallen on roofs and in attics. I dug antiaircraft ditches. Near to our house in the parliamentary building was the post where heavy machines guns were shooting at the bomber aircraft. I delivered water, food, and gloves to the soldiers, who were managing their guns with bleeding hands. I helped to transfer wounded soldiers from the ambulance to nearby Ujazdowski Hospital. During the siege, we had a visitor, General Wladyslaw Bortnowski, a friend of ours; despite his heroic struggle through enemy lines to get to Warsaw, he looked elegant, and confident. He gallantly kissed my mother’s hand, and left us with hope.

My father left Warsaw with the Polish government and headed for Romania. However, before crossing the border, he decided to return to Warsaw to be with his family. During this time, I was with mother and my younger siblings; there was shortage of food and water. We were under constant shelling. I picked tomatoes in a nearby garden and got water from the city pump. Once shrapnel passed between my hand and the kettle, tearing off the cover. When the canned pickles factory started to burn, I took home several cans.

We had a small garden at the corner of Wiejska and Piusa Streets in a shape of the letter V. One of the cavalrymen left his heavy wounded horse in our garden. Maybe he wanted to save him from horse eaters, since all dead horses lying on the street were quickly consumed by hungry people. The horse had a large shrapnel hole in its abdomen. I treated him with father’s antiseptic herbs, pushing them into the horse’s wound. I obtained hay and water. I took care of him during almost the entire siege. The horse recovered and started to walk. Unfortunately, during the massive escape of men from the besieged capital, my horse was stolen. In the evening when I was closing the shutters, I heard some suspicious noise in the garden, but Mother called me, and I did not have a chance to check the source of noise. The following day the horse was gone; he left a broken gate and disturbed ground. I was in despair; I had lost a dear friend

Panic broke out because of rumor that Germans would execute all the men after they took Warsaw. Fear also increased after the government left the capital. Only the mayor of the city, Stefan Starzynski, tried to keep us in high spirits. He continued to defend Warsaw; his patriotic radio speeches were interrupted by warnings of incoming enemy aircraft—Attention, attention, approaching L27, B37—and the siren announcing the alarm.

Soon after Warsaw’s capitulation, my brother Richard returned from Britain by avoiding Germany and traveling via Finland and Brzesc, a town in the eastern part of Poland. He joined the Polish army. During the German bombardment, he was buried under the rubble; luckily, he survived.

Earlier in 1939, my parents had sent Richard to England for further education after his high-school graduation. Since he was born on a British ship in 1919, when my mother was escaping the Bolsheviks invasion from Odessa, he was entitled to British citizenship. Despite this, my brother decided to return to Poland after the war started. According to him, the British were not very eager to keep a citizen of a country involved in a war. His journey on foot from Brzesc to Warsaw was complicated by Ukrainian hostilities toward Poles. In one village they wanted to hang him; only Father’s herbs saved his life, for he used them to treat a Ukrainian child with pneumonia.

When crossing the Poniatowski Bridge, he asked passersby, How does the Parliament area look? Some answered that everything had been destroyed; others claimed that a few houses were still standing. Richard started to run toward the area of Three Crosses Square, which had become one big cemetery. He rushed into our apartment, dirty, dressed only in shorts, shirt, and tennis shoes, but happy that he’d found us alive. The happiest was Mother; he was her first, dearest son. Richard took the initiative to supply us with the basic necessities—firewood, water, and food. Our supplies came from destroyed houses, warehouses, and food centers organized by the town. At the end of October, my father returned; luckily, the whole family survived.

The first very severe winter under German occupation began. My father continued his medical practice. The herbal mixtures were produced in our laboratory. There was a shortage of herbs, but some strange salesman from Germany was able to deliver them. When he stayed in the