[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 101 (Thursday, July 28, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: July 28, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
              THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE WARSAW UPRISING

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Ohio [Ms. Kaptur] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight, as I have done every evening 
this week, to pay tribute to the courageous people of Poland on their 
upcoming 50th anniversary of the Warsaw uprising which occurred during 
the months of August and September of 1944. This is the fourth in a 
series of special orders that I will give to bring attention to this 
event.
  I will continue this evening by reading excerpts to the membership 
from the book ``The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under Nazi 
Occupation, 1939 to 1944'' by Richard Lucas, in which over 250,000 
innocent people were murdered brutally in the streets and homes of the 
town that they had known since their youth. Their valiant and heroic 
struggle is one that the West has heard little about, largely because 
after World War II so much of the history of that region was 
suppressed, and only now are we coming to learn the magnitude of what 
happened to people who so very much wanted to share our democratic 
values over the last half century.
  This weekend and next week our Vice President, Al Gore, and a United 
States delegation will travel to Warsaw to help to commemorate those 
who lost their lives and to join with the Polish people in remembering 
this most terrible period of their magnificent history.

                              {time}  1820

  Mr. Speaker, reading from Mr. Lucas' book, he says,

       But the most hideous episode involving Kaminski's men began 
     at 10:00 AM on August 5 at the Radium Institute. After 
     invading the building, they robbed everyone--the nurses and 
     the ninety patients. The Russians under German command even 
     stole hospital equipment, and what they could not cart off, 
     they destroyed. A band of them tore apart the pharmacy and 
     drank the rubbing alcohol until it ran out. Then they 
     consumed ether. The orgy of plundering and drinking 
     degenerated to raping not only the nurses but also the cancer 
     patients, most of them elderly women. By Sunday August 6, the 
     men shot inmates and began to burn the hospital room by room. 
     Some of the patients vainly tried to escape through the 
     windows by tying sheets together. Thirty people died in the 
     flaming rooms of the building or were shot that day. The 
     others managed to save themselves by finding a place in the 
     basement of the building and hiding there. The atrocities at 
     the hospital did not end until the middle of the month.
       Among the casualties on August 6 were the well-known 
     artist, eighty-two-year-old Victor Mazurowski, and his famous 
     pianist wife, seventy-five-year-old Jadwiga Zalewska-
     Mazurowska. For not keeping up with the column of refugees, 
     the distinguished couple was shot.
       The murdering reached so feverish an intensity by August 7 
     that one eyewitness had the impression everyone in Warsaw 
     would be decimated:
       When we passed No. 9 Gorczewska Street (a house which 
     belonged to nuns), we were called into the house and ordered 
     to carry out the corpses which were there. The courtyard was 
     a dreadful sight. It was an execution place. Heaps of corpses 
     were lying there; I think they must have been collecting 
     there for some days, for some were already swollen and others 
     quite freshly killed. There were bodies of men, women and 
     children, all shot through the backs of their heads. It is 
     difficult to state exactly how many there were. There must 
     have been several layers carelessly heaped up. The men were 
     ordered to carry away the bodies--we women were to bury them. 
     We put them in anti-tank trenches and then filled these up. 
     In this way, we filled up a number of such trenches in 
     Gorczewska Street, I had the impression that during the first 
     days of the Rising everybody was killed.
       Warsaw was subjected to one of the most systematic acts of 
     plunder of any occupied city during the war.
       Although wounded in Warsaw, Kaminski was determined not to 
     lose the opportunity to engage personally in wholesale 
     looting. After one of his fleecing escapades, he sat on a 
     Warsaw balcony, a girl on each knee and drank champagne.
       Special railway police were sent to Warsaw to insure more 
     expeditious transport of the spoils. The Germans even 
     dispatched an expert to supervise the loading of hospital 
     equipment.
       During the first ten days of August, about 7,000 railway 
     cars loaded with property arrived in Wartheland. Upon arrival 
     there, the spoils--consisting of machinery, raw materials, 
     food, clothing, medicine and furniture--were placed at the 
     disposal of Greiser, who distributed them among various 
     German groups in the Posen area.
       Motoring along the western rim of Warsaw on August 5 was a 
     distinguished, impeccably-dressed officer in an SS uniform. 
     He was General von dem Back-Zelewski, the man appointed to 
     quell the insurrection in Warsaw. As he drove by the 
     cemeteries bordering the city, he saw a large pile of 
     civilian bodies. German police were about to set fire to it. 
     Standing nearby was a group of civilians who were to be 
     executed then and there. Bach-Zelewski lurched from his seat, 
     stopped the car, and ordered the executions to stop 
     immediately. Then he repealed Himmler's standing orders. 
     Bach's reasons were not so much humanitarian as they were 
     practical: ``A military force which loots and massacres, 
     ceases to fight.''
       Bach did not have too much difficulty getting rid of 
     Kaminski after word of what his brigade had done in Warsaw 
     got back to Hitler's quarters. General Alfred Joll testified, 
     ``I reported this fact to the Fuhrer, and he immediately 
     ordered the dissolution of the brigade.'' True, the 
     atrocities did not disturb the man who had six million Jews 
     murdered during the war. Rather, it was the inefficient and 
     orgiastic way the Russians went about it. After all, there 
     was a prescribed way for Nazis to commit murder.
       Bach arrested and sentenced Kaminski; the Gestapo in Lodz 
     shot him in the back.
       The Kaminski Brigade itself was transferred first to Stawki 
     and later to the Kampinos Forest area. It was there on the 
     night of September 2 that a Polish unit led by Lieutenant 
     Colonel Adolf Pilch took revenge for the atrocities committed 
     by Kaminski's men. The Poles threw grenades into the cellars 
     of buildings housing the headquarters of two of its 
     battalions, virtually annihilating the unit.
       By August 11, the western part of Warsaw had been taken.
       Bach left City Center, the strongest fortified sector, and 
     Zoliborz in the far north for the last. This strategy, in 
     effect, virtually abdicated to the Poles the initiative in 
     City Center, while Bach-Zelewski concentrated on clearing the 
     western banks of the Vistula. Bach gradually succeeded in 
     splitting up and defeating them in isolated pockets.
       The situation for a AK grew more difficult as the days 
     passed. When the decision was made to rise up, the AK had 
     enough ammunition for only a few days and not more than a 
     week. Now two weeks into the battle with no pospect for 
     Soviet relief, Bor kept sending his desperate messages to 
     London, emphasizing his army's plight and asking for 
     supply drops.
       The hostility of the Soviets to the AK was summed up in a 
     Polish report of August 16: ``Diversive activities helpful to 
     the Soviets are continued in the Radom district. The attitude 
     of the Soviets toward the Home Army is hostile.''
       As a consequence, the resistance fighters on August 1 were 
     simply not equipped for anything like a long-term struggle 
     against the Germans. They had a total of 43,971 hand 
     grenades, 3,846 pistols, 657 submachine guns, 30 flame 
     throwers, 2 anti-panzer guns, 406 anti-panzer grenades, 
     12,000 incendiary bottles, 2,629 carbines, 6 mortars, 10 
     howitzers, and small amounts of ammunition and explosive 
     material. Heavy weapons were nonexistent. With only 2,629 
     carbines, only about 6 percent of the soldiers could be armed 
     with rifles.
       The RAF sent ten supply missions to Warsaw during the 
     uprising; and several other missions, intended for the Polish 
     capital, dropped supplies outside the city. Casualty rates 
     were very high; the Poles alone lost 16 crews. In all, 245 
     Poles, English and South African airmen were shot down, and 
     only 41 of them survived.
       As the level of fighting intensified and casualties mounted 
     on both sides, the number of corpses in the streets made the 
     entire city look like an open cemetery. The ``gatherers,'' as 
     the corpse collectors were euphemistically called, had the 
     awful job of removing the bodies from the streets and 
     buildings. Sometimes the corpses lay there for weeks, and 
     when they were touched by hooked poles used for this purpose 
     they fell to pieces, often exposing swarms of rats who fed on 
     decayed flesh. For this dreadful work, the Germans, whenever 
     they could, used Polish captives.
       The Germans quite by accident discovered the Poles were 
     using the sewers. Early in September they started to dig a 
     tunnel of their own from their positions in Saxony Park to 
     the Polish stronghold in the Exchange Building, which they 
     wanted to destroy. During their digging operations, they 
     found a sewer four feet in diameter. At first they simply 
     took their own tunnel under it. But when they heard the sound 
     of movement in the sewer, it dawned on them what was afoot. 
     The Germans then immediately tried to stop Polish use of the 
     subterranean maze by throwing grenades, mines, gas and rubble 
     into the passages. Even hand grenades without their pins were 
     hung so that when an unsuspecting person hit one, he was 
     blown to bits. There were full-scale battles below, as men 
     fought hand-to-hand and drowned each other in excrement.
       Bach-Zelewski tried several ploys to get the Poles to stop 
     fighting in August. Concerned that the uprising would spread 
     throughout the country, they tried to offset the murderous 
     image the Germans acquired earlier in the month in Wola and 
     Ochota.

  Mr. Speaker, in ending my special order this evening, let me just say 
that as the Poles and their friends memorialize their forebears, they 
also remember their history as a freedom-loving people whose democratic 
values were unique in that region of the world. They did not deserve 
extinction, and they deserve the respect of today's NATO members and 
expeditious consideration of their desire to join the councils of 
freedom-living people everywhere.

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