Maciejewski has an intimate familial connection to the Warsaw Uprising, visiting the Polish capital on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the armed struggle to, along with his family, pay respects at his father’s grave, who fought in the Uprising and who was later buried by the side of his twin brother, who was killed in the fighting.
After World War II Maciejewski senior was among scores of thousands of Poles who settled in the U.K. in favor of remaining in or returning to a Poland ruled by Soviet-installed communists in the aftermath of the agreements made between the Great Powers.
“I think there was a big sense of guilt in Britain about Yalta,” Maciejewski said, referring to Churchill’s failure to keep Poland, a country in defense of which the U.K. joined the war in the first place, from becoming a Soviet satellite.
“And yet Britain was the country in which my father found freedom. And my father found a home after the war. And we grew up in Britain,” he adds.
But aside from Poles who settled in Britain, there is more to this “shared story,” as Maciejewski refers to it, pointing to “over 250,000 Poles [who] fought with Britain shoulder to shoulder throughout the Second World War,” as well as the efforts of RAF pilots who died while trying to deliver supplies to the Warsaw Uprising, a fact “Often forgotten.”
“So I regard this story and the aftermath and the legacy as very much a shared story between Britain and Poland,” he said.
Maciejewski believes that teaching his children about the history of the uprising with which his family is so deeply connected, is important because the decision to rise up against the German occupiers in spite of the odds “was an excruciating dilemma for everyone involved, and there are no easy answers.”
“But ultimately, they made the decision to stand up and fight for freedom and fight for what was right.
“This is perhaps one of those chapters in history where it is simply good against evil. [...] [People] have to fight, even if the consequences might be terrible, the consequences of not doing something are even worse, potentially.
“I think those lessons and those values that are tied up in those lessons are incredibly important lessons to hand on to the next generation,” he said.
The decision to launch the uprising remains a contentious one among experts and historians, who cite the horrible loss of life and the wholesale destruction of the city, but while Maciejewski agrees that “What happened in Warsaw was simply horrific,” he admits that his own father was “always hot and cold” about the subject.
Maciejewski points out, however, how eight decades later after the uprising, Warsaw is a “vibrant” and “wonderful city.”
Good against evil
He said that “in many ways, given the evil that Warsaw was facing, Warsaw had to be destroyed in order to be saved, [...] the soul of Warsaw in many ways was preserved by their [insurgents’] willingness to fight for good against evil.
“And I think this is a very difficult thing to comprehend, but compromising with evil would have left, somehow, a stain on the soul of Warsaw in a way that the soul is not stained because of this tragic event.”
Although the Uprising caused so much death and destruction, Maciejewski points out that when the Uprising started, it was popular among the civilian population, who endured the siege of the city in 1939 and years of subsequent brutal occupation, including witnessing the destruction of the Jewish population of the city during and after the 1943 Jewish Ghetto Uprising. In part also because “There was a sense of optimism because of course, they could see the Red Army approaching and they realized they could hear the guns of the Red Army,” but primarily that after so many years of enduring German brutality, “in many ways they had nothing to lose.”
In the end, Maciejewski said he believes that “the most important thing for us to do is not to judge either one way or the other, but merely to reflect on the values and the courage of those that took part in the Warsaw Rising, both civilians and the Home Army.”
The Uprising from the British perspective
Maciejewski admits that knowledge about the Warsaw Uprising in Britain is lacking, as the period during which it happened was when Brits, along with other allies, primarily the U.S. forces but also the Polish armored division under Gen. Stanisław Maczek, were involved in heavy fighting in Normandy and “suffering casualties that they had not suffered since the First World War.”
“In 1944, Britain was aware of the Warsaw Rising,” Maciejewski said, but while “people were very much aware of it [...] there was a sense of powerlessness as to what to do about the Warsaw Rising,” although, as he mentioned earlier, the RAF made an effort to assist and “flew planes from Italy all the way to Poland, the longest flight ever by the Royal Air Force to drop supplies into Warsaw during September of 1944.”
And while the 1943
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising appears to be better known among Britons, Maciejewski said “That is changing now because we have nearly one million Polish people living in Britain [...] and therefore this sense of shared history is much stronger now than it was when I was a child 40 years ago.
“So I think every year that passes, there's a greater awareness in Britain through its connections with Poland of this incredibly courageous but also tragic chapter in Poland’s history,” Maciejewski said.
