Warsaw Boy by Andrew Borowiec

A Memoir of a Wartime Childhood. First published 2014.

Dedication: For all the Warsaw boys - especially the ones who never grew up.

Note: I wrote this review in 2017, but somehow it got stuck in Drafts, maybe because it looks unfinished...

This book is a mixture of personal stories and a commentary written with the current knowledge of world history. The personal touch is very valuable. It shows the events, how they looked like on the ground.

The story starts before the war when Andrew was a young boy living with his father, a Polish army officer, and a governess in Kielce. We follow him to Cracow (Kraków) and then, through the September 1939 campaign in Lviv (Lwów), when the city defended itself from a German onslaught only to surrender to the Soviet army.

"On 18 September, the day after the Soviet intervention, the Luftwaffe littered the city with thousands of leaflets urging our garrison to surrender. Simultaneously, the commander of a Russian armoured brigade was busy telling a Polish envoy that the Red Army were there to fight the Germans and, in order to do so, required unhindered passage into Lwów. This, of course, was an enormous lie."

Later, he escapes from the Soviet annexed Lviv to General Government, a German administered area for Poles. The Soviets and Nazis were allowing limited population exchange, but his governess had to lie about his identity to be let go - she said he was a child of Volksdeutsche parents, who sent him with her to Lviv for safety.

He is an eye-witness to the deportation of Polish Jews from Maków on 23 August 1942:

"[...] overnight Maków had been disfigured by a rash of printed wall posters. In German and Polish they ordered the entire Jewish population to assemble in the grounds of a sawmill near the railway station. Failure to report for Umsiedlung (resettlement) was punishable by death."

"[...] these men, women and children living alongside us had, with sullen acquiescence, assembled to start a foul journey towards an uncertain fate without a word of protest from themselves or anybody else. It was as if we all somehow accepted that the Germans had some unchallangeable right to do this. [...] I felt ashamed."

And speaking with his father afterwards:

"'We could have worked together -' I began.
'Don't you think there were efforts to organize joint resistance? Do you think you're the only one who ever had the idea? All kinds of approaches were tried. But the elders of their community, those in the long black coats and with the pejsy, were against it. 'Let us be patient and God will reward us,' they were saying. Their people should tear them apart.'"

Andrew took part in the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944. In the days before the uprising:

"[...] for several days now we had also been hearing comforting rumble of distant artillery as the Red Army and Wehrmacht exchanged fire outside Praga". 

Praga is the collective name of Warsaw districts on the right side of the Vistula river.

"'No doubt Warsaw already hears the sounds of the battle which is soon to bring her liberation,' cooed the broadcaster from the Union of Polish Patriots, the Communist front organisation that had set up shop in Lublin. 'Let those who have never bowed their heads to Hitlerite power join us for the decisive action.'"

"But the Germans were also reminding the Poles of old battles and pleading a common cause. Warsaw Governor Ludwig Fischer, who earlier in the year had narrowly escaped an attempted assassination for the many executions he had ordered, had announced the call-up of all males [...] to help dig a deep anti-tank ditch build other fortifications [...]. 'Just as it did in 1920, Warsaw will defend itself and defeat the Bolshevik enemy,'"

He describes the ill-executed start of the uprising, which took away the advantage of a surprise.

Where he was not a witness himself, Andrew includes eye-witness accounts of other people, like Wanda Lurie, who survived Wola massacre - the killing of 40-50 thousand civilians in just 7 days of August 1944:

"I came last and kept in the background, continuing to let the others pass, in the hope that they would not kill a pregnant woman, but I was driven in with the last lot. In the yard I saw heaps of corpses three feet high, in several places. [...] There were about twenty people in our group, mostly children of ten to twelve. [...] They were all killed. [...]"

The order to kill all was executed mainly by two groups of low-life scum, counting together about 2500 men: Oskar Dirlewanger's German and Volksdeutsche criminals, and Bronislaw Kaminski's RONA - Russian National Liberation Army - Russians, Ukrainians, Cossacks and Turkic-speaking Soviet soldiers recruited from German prisoner of war camps.

The Germans also used Polish women and children as human shields on tanks and barricades:

"With our backs turned to the insurgents we knelt or crouched and the Germans placed themselves on the ground behind us, or knelt on one knee, firing over our heads. [...]".