On 1 August 1944 at 5.00pm Poland time (nowadays known as "W hour" or "godzina W" in Polish) an uprising across the Warsaw began.
It wasn't an easy task as only one out of ten had a firearm at all. Nazis who were occupying entire Poland were way stronger in terms of army equipment.
Despite lack of heavy weapons, the morale of Poles who were fighting were high. There was even a radio station called "Błyskawica" ("Thunder") which ran across the entiriety of the Warsaw Uprising (the core which was powering the transmitter is now available to be seen in Warsaw Uprising Museum).
However, almost entire Warsaw got grounded as a result of that. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed.
Despite lack of success, the memory of people fighting for free Poland should be remembered forever.
Today we review ‘20 Days in #Mariupol , #Moscow is struck overnight, and we visit a Ukrainian refugee center in #Poland.
It’s the screaming that gets me.
As a former #U.S. #Army combat medic, the blood and gore doesn’t affect me very much nowadays. I trained for that, studied it, and feel as comfortable as one can get, really, in its presence.
Tim here: I toured #Poland last month with members of the Kaplan Public Service Foundation, an organization dedicated to bridging the military-civilian divide.
Together, we visited a refugee center near #Warsaw, where those displaced from the war in #Ukraine were still living.
The conditions were spartan but clean. In a giant room that would have once been a warehouse, hundreds lived in an open space with plywood for walls and blankets for doors.
One third of young Poles plan to vote for the far right at this year's election, more than for any other political group, a study of voters aged 18-21 shows.
It also found that 80% say they are "frustrated with the current political situation in Poland".
I was hoping for change from young voters at the coming #elections in #Poland, but if the country moves even more to the right, that is bad news for all the lovely and open-minded people I met this May in #Warsaw during #MDAG.
According to the UK Telegraph, Belarusian dictator Lukashenko is 'having trouble' controlling Wagner forces from attacking Poland that fled to Belarus after the supposed failed coup by Prigozhin. Wagner is supposedly calling to take Warsaw.
This, along with threats to Poland by Russia that any attack on Belarus is an attack on Russia. Fun times.
Writing my post about Vienna yesterday, I have completely forgotten that the #Warsaw underground have also made all of their announcements publicly available. Those are read by the late Tomasz Knapik, one of the most famous voice-over voices of the Polish movie scene. Explanation: before 1989, the available movies of the West were sparse in Poland and so it was cheaper to employ a voice-over i.e. one person reading all of the dialogue in Polish dubbed over the original audio track in whatever language a given movie came in. The tradition has stuck and now most of us wouldn't imagine it any other way. https://metro.waw.pl/strefa-pasazera/komunikaty-dzwiekowe/#Accessibility#Blind#PublicTransport
The first 30 prisoners arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp on 20th May 1940 from the Sachsenhausen camp. By the time the camp was liberated in January 1945 of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million were murdered. The number of victims includes 960,000 Jews, 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Romani, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,000 others. 1/2
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Yiddish: אױפֿשטאַנד אין װאַרשעװער געטאָ) ended on 16th May 1943. It was an act of Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto in German-occupied Poland during World War II to oppose Nazi Germany's final effort to transport the remaining ghetto population to Majdanek and Treblinka death camps. By the end of the uprising 56,065 Jews were killed/and or captured of which approximately 36,000 deported to extermination camps.
Does anyone have good sources on where to find information (either in English, or in a format where I can easily run translation on them) on the works going on in #Warsaw? Specifically, what #train stations are closed when over the summer and recommended alternative routes for those with baggage.
I am helping with a festival this summer that'll see quite many people changing #trains in Warsaw on route to Lublin and it would good to be able to flag this information early.
BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting an account of the archive that secretly recorded daily Jewish existence in the Warsaw Ghetto called "The Warsaw Ghetto: History as Survival". It's on at 13:45 (GMT) each day this week. Narration by Anton Lesser with Elliot Levey.
In Nazi-occupied Poland, historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who headed the Jewish Self-Help Society (Jewish relief organization) in Warsaw, asked Rachel Auerbach to organize a public kitchen. Once Jews were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, public kitchens supplied the hungry masses with a daily meal. 1/2
Auerbach also became a member of the clandestine Oneg Shabbat (“Joy of the Sabbath”) Archive. In this capacity she documented the sights she encountered in her everyday work and the starvation of the Ghetto's inhabitants. 2/2