Group portrait of prisoners liberated from the Gesiowka concentration camp by the Zoska battalion of the Polish Home Army during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
Overview
- Caption
- Group portrait of prisoners liberated from the Gesiowka concentration camp by the Zoska battalion of the Polish Home Army during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
Among those pictured is Jakub-Ber Miodowski (now Bernard Miodon, on the far right). The donor, Juliusz Bogdan Deczkowski, was a member of Zoska battalion. Deczkowski himself was a prisoner in the Pawiak prison from May 10, 1941 to February 16, 1942. - Date
-
1944 August 05
- Locale
- Warsaw, Poland
- Variant Locale
- Warszawa
Varshava
Warschau - Photo Credit
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Juliusz Bogdan Deczkowski
- Event History
- The Warsaw uprising began on August 1, 1944. Under orders from the Polish government-in-exile in London, the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) began attacking the Germans in hopes of winning control of the city before the impending arrival of the Red Army. Numbering only 23,000 under-armed men, the Polish fighters, under the command of General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski, faced a German force of tens of thousands of heavily armed troops. Most of the Poles were young people and some units included Jewish and non-Jewish members of the Communist-oriented Armia Ludowa (People's Army, formerly Gwardia Ludowa or People's Guard). On August 4, the Poles liberated several hundred Jewish prisoners from the Gestapo prison on Gesia Street. These Jews, who were mostly Greek and Hungarian, joined the Poles and fought alongside them. Polish civilians also helped the insurgents by providing first aid and organizing supplies and postal service. Within four days the fighting had spread to large parts of central Warsaw and some of the city's suburbs. On August 5, the Germans launched a counterattack, under the command SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski. Aid from the western Allies did not amount to more than a few arms drops. In the first stages of the revolt, the Soviets hindered Allied support; only in mid-September, did the Soviets themselves drop some supplies. On September 14, Polish army units that had previously been parachuted into Warsaw, seized control of the right bank of the Vistula River, but ultimately could not bring relief to the insurgents. The Germans regained control of city on October 2. Over 18,000 Polish fighters and 150,000 civilians were killed during the uprising, including several thousand Jews who had been in hiding following the liquidation of the ghetto. Warsaw's remaining inhabitants were expelled to nearby internment camps, sent as forced laborers to the Reich, or dispersed in the General Government. The Germans then razed those parts of the city not damaged in the fighting, destroying Warsaw in its entirety.
[Source: Guttman, Israel (ed.). Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. "Warsaw Polish Uprising," MacMillan, 1990.]
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005188.
Rights & Restrictions
- Photo Source
-
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumProvenance: Juliusz Bogdan DeczkowskiBeit Lohamei Haghetaot (Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum)
Copyright: Agency Agreement
Keywords & Subjects
- Record last modified:
- 2008-01-31 00:00:00
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1147089
