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Conclusion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2022

Jadwiga Biskupska
Affiliation:
Sam Houston State University
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Summary

On January 12, 1945, the stalled Red Army offensive lumbered into motion toward Berlin.1 Soviet soldiers and their allies, who had spent months across the Vistula from Warsaw, advanced into the Polish capital. The Nazi General Government was gone. The Polish intelligentsia had been captured or evacuated; stragglers lived amid the ruins. A member of the Warsaw elite greeted the arrivals: Polish-Jewish pianist Władysław Szpilman, who had survived the anti-intelligentsia campaigns, ghetto liquidation, the ghetto uprisings, the Warsaw Uprising, and the evacuation and demolition of the city. Much the worse for wear, he remembered that unlikely moment:

Around one o’clock I heard the remaining Germans leaving the building. Silence fell, a silence such as even Warsaw, a dead city for the last three months, had not known before […] Not until the early hours of the next day was the silence broken by a loud and resonant noise … Radio loudspeakers set up somewhere nearby were broadcasting announcements in Polish of the defeat of Germany and the liberation of Warsaw. […] I began slowly coming down the stairs, shouting as loud as I could, “Don’t shoot! I’m Polish!” … The figure of a young officer in a Polish uniform, with the eagle on his cap, came into view beyond the banisters. He pointed a pistol at me and shouted, “Hands up!” I repeated my cry of, “Don’t shoot! I’m Polish!” The lieutenant went red with fury. ‘Then why in God’s name don’t you come down?’ he roared. “And what are you doing in a German coat?”2

Szpilman heard radio in his “dead city” in Polish for the first time since Starzyński’s voice had faded from the airwaves. A UNESCO commission sent British and French experts to assess the destruction shortly thereafter. The shocked observers reported that,

Type
Chapter
Information
Survivors
Warsaw under Nazi Occupation
, pp. 278 - 296
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Conclusion
  • Jadwiga Biskupska
  • Book: Survivors
  • Online publication: 27 January 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026017.011
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  • Conclusion
  • Jadwiga Biskupska
  • Book: Survivors
  • Online publication: 27 January 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026017.011
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Conclusion
  • Jadwiga Biskupska
  • Book: Survivors
  • Online publication: 27 January 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026017.011
Available formats
×