WW2 in Warsaw

July 30, 2018

Today we took our 3rd walking tour of Warsaw. In the first we went to various locations in the Stare Miasto, Old Town. The second was about Communist Warsaw, led by a woman who grew up during that era.  She had to stand in line for everything,  and witnessed the suppression and growth of Solidarity, leading to the downfall of the Iron Curtain.  This afternoon we took the tour of WW2 Warsaw. It takes you to the Jewish ghetto and the location of some of the sites of the uprising in October 1944.

Memorial to Jewish victims of the Nazis

The ghetto was set afire by the Nazis to defeat the 1943 uprising. Today its location is marked on the pavement- they speak to you of the nightmare the Nazis created. Rations were a mere 200 calories a day for Jews, and 500 for Poles. Jews were allowed no medicine. If anyone helped a Jew, the penalty was death for that person and the entire family.

Memorial to resistance fighters
Memorial to children who helped fight the Nazis.
Statues of resistance fighter entering the sewer system

The resistance used the sewers to move from several areas in and near the old town.  The sewers were in use at the time, unlit and required one to walk bent over.  Movements had to be in complete silence.  Eventually these were closed down by the Nazis.

In preparation for the 1944 uprising, the underground raised money for weapons and supplies by robbing a bank.  Money was transferred from the Polish central bank by armored car.  They raised the about $10 million in today’s dollars.  The uprising took a heavy toll on the city and the population.  The Nazis killed 200,000 people, destroyed about 90% of the old town and 65% of Warsaw as a whole.

The bank from which the resistance stole $10m. You can still see wartime damage to the brick

These two uprisings were the largest of occupied Europe.  The 1944 uprising not only hoped to help defeat the Nazis but to keep Poland out of Soviet hands, whose invasion of Poland made no friends in the county.  The result of the Yalta conference as well as their defeat in the uprising, while the Soviet army watched from across the river, led to post war deportations and murders by the Soviets and 50 years of bad governing.

Poland’s Enigma in WW2

We ran across the sculpture and exhibit concerning the breaking of the German Enigma code while walking in the downtown area of Poznan.    I’d heard both that the Polish a Brits broke the enigma code.  There is an excellent movie called “The Imitation Game” about Alan Turing, (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing ) 

In late 1932 Marian Rejewski broke the code of the German Enigma machine.  Without knowing how the machine was wired, he was unable to read the messages. Hans-Thilo Schmidt, a French spy obtained information including the daily keys used in the fall of 1932.  They put these materials into Polish hands. With that information and actual coded messages Rejewski was able to turn the coded messages into understandable text.  Later the Germans added two more rotors.  The Poles did not have the resources to break the code again, and thus passed the baton to the UK in July of 1939.  Rejewski, and cryptanalysts Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski in the interim developed extensive materials which they gave to the UK as well.  Thus Turing was not starting from scratch.