Every year at 5pm on August 1, life in Warsaw pauses. Whether working, walking, driving or cycling, everyone in the Polish capital stops in silence for 60 seconds. They stand to acknowledge those who fought and the many who died in the appallingly costly Warsaw Uprising that began on that date in 1944. My father, Jerzy Rabel, was one of those fighters.
By the time of the uprising, Poland had endured almost five years of Nazi occupation, having been the first victim when Adolf Hitler launched World War II. German bombers attacked Warsaw relentlessly from the war’s first day on September 1, 1939. When the Polish forces were finally defeated on October 6, the thousands of bombs dropped on Warsaw had killed more than 20,000 people. Worse was to come.
The city suffered terribly under the Nazis – none more than its Jewish citizens. The Warsaw of my father’s youth in the 1920s and 1930s was a vibrant, cosmopolitan city of 1.3 million. More than 380,000 inhabitants were Jews, making it the world’s second-largest Jewish city at the time after New York.
The Nazis created Europe’s most populous ghetto in Warsaw by forcing Jews from surrounding areas into an area of 3.4sq km. At its height, as many as 460,000 people were imprisoned there. Then the Nazis began exterminating them, as they did across Europe, shipping many to death camps while arbitrarily murdering or starving others.
Grimly resolving to die fighting, Warsaw’s Jews launched an uprising in April 1943, the largest by Jewish people in WWII. It ended with the brutal destruction of the ghetto and effectively ended Jewish life in Warsaw. Only a handful miraculously survived, among them Władysław Szpilman, whose story has been depicted in the movie The Pianist. The ghetto’s fate was a harbinger of what awaited the rest of the city the following year.
Despite the depredations of the Nazi occupation, Polish resistance persisted throughout the war. At its heart was the Polish Home Army (the Armia Krajowa or AK). Eventually comprising more than 300,000 volunteers, it was the largest underground army in wartime Europe. My father had secretly joined the AK by the time its leaders decided to launch a general uprising in Warsaw – based on hopes that German forces were reeling from advances by Stalin’s Red Army and that seizing the capital would give a free, post-war Poland leverage against possible Soviet domination. Both hopes would be dashed.
Resistance fighter
On August 1, 1944, Jerzy, then aged 24, was typical of thousands of young Varsovians (Warsaw residents) who mobilised to fight, taking on pseudonyms for security reasons. His was “Jur” and he was assigned to the “Kanal” squadron. He spent the next weeks in Warsaw’s dark, dank sewers guiding AK leaders and fighters to different parts of the city.
According to my father, his charges once included “Bor” (Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, the commander of the uprising). He also told of serving alongside a young woman whose pseudonym was “Sylwia”. When checking Warsaw Rising Museum archives, I discovered an interview recorded when Sylwia was 86, in which she mentions Jur going back under fire to retrieve arms left behind by AK fighters.
Jerzy would eventually receive Poland’s highest military decoration, the Virtuti Militari, for that action. It took 50 years to be awarded and arrived a few weeks after his death (although he had the consoling knowledge in his last month of life that it was coming).
Sylwia and Jerzy were remarkably lucky to survive the horrors inflicted on Warsaw’s citizens for having the audacity to revolt against their occupiers. The grisly death toll totalled more than 150,000 civilians and about 20,000 AK fighters. At the end of the uprising, Hitler furiously ordered the city razed to the ground. Its remaining citizens were expelled – 60,000 were despatched to concentration camps and almost 100,000 consigned to forced labour in Germany.
Warsaw’s utter destruction was one of the most heart-wrenching tragedies to befall any European city during WWII.
Displaced persons
Although Jerzy evaded death, the uprising changed his life irrevocably. At its end, he became a German prisoner of war. When Poland became a communist state after the war, Jerzy remained in West Germany, surviving through black market enterprise. In 1950, he travelled on the Dundalk Bay to New Zealand with other displaced persons from Eastern and Baltic Europe.
In Wellington, he met and married my mother, Nives Mahulja, in 1954. She, too, was a displaced person, but from the other edge of the Iron Curtain that descended on Europe after 1945.
Like my father, the war and its aftermath turned her world upside down. A post-war territorial dispute between Italy and Yugoslavia left her living for several years as a refugee in Trieste as part of the “esodo” (exodus) of more than 230,000 Italian-speaking people from the Istrian peninsula. Outside Italy, this is one of the least remembered of the 20th century’s many human displacements.
In 1951, Nives arrived on The Goya with her young son from a first marriage to make a new life in New Zealand. A plaque on Wellington’s waterfront commemorates the vessel’s journeys carrying to this farthest of refuges a small number of the millions of Europeans displaced by war.
I was born in 1955, but my parents’ marriage was short-lived. They divorced when I was 4 and my mother, half-brother and I went to live with my grandmother, who had followed my mother to New Zealand. I joke that I grew up a “Polesan in Newtown”, as the language of our household was the Italian dialect from my mother’s hometown of Pola (now Pula) in Croatia.
In the early 1960s, my father married one of the “Polish children” ‒ émigrés taken in by New Zealand in 1944. They were among a million Poles deported to Siberia when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany divided Poland in 1939, following the cynical Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. After Hitler invaded the USSR, a group of Polish children were sent on to temporary placement in Iran.
Then-prime minister Peter Fraser agreed to Polish Consul Kazimierz Wodzicki’s request to shelter some 700 of them for the duration of the war. Their arrival, too, is recorded on a plaque on the Wellington waterfront (and in Pahiatua, where they were first housed). They would form the core of the post-war Polish community in New Zealand.
After a stint running Suzy’s Coffee Lounge in the capital, Jerzy and his wife, Teresa, moved to Rotorua, where they had two sons. I would visit them on school holidays.
My father died on May 8, 1995, the 50th anniversary of the ending of the war in Europe that upturned his life. (My mother died 20 years later to the day.) Less than a year earlier, he had made his only return to Warsaw since the war to attend the post-communist Polish government’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the uprising.
Jerzy’s other family
Ten years after Jerzy’s death, I had a book launch at Parliament. The ambassadors of the two countries of my cultural heritage, Poland and Italy, were there, and both invited me and my family to visit the next day. At the Polish one, I was stunned when the ambassador told me he was working on my “case”. He explained that my father had been married in Poland and that I had two half-brothers born during WWII. One of them had died before my father but the other had recently emailed the ambassador because his mother, Jerzy’s first wife, had died and they needed to contact relatives to complete legal formalities. After absorbing this news, I emailed my newly acquired half-brother’s family. But I received no reply.
Years passed without contact. But after moving from Dunedin to take up a role as pro vice-chancellor (international) at Victoria University of Wellington, I engaged with successive Polish ambassadors. After one of them organised a study tour for me to Poland in 2018, I began collaborating with colleagues at the University of Warsaw, who invited me back the following year.
On the eve of departing for Warsaw in 2019, I received an email from my nephew Paweł's wife, Magdalena. She explained that circumstances had prevented them being in touch since 2005 and advised that my oldest half-brother, Andrzej, had now died. When I replied that my wife and I would be in Warsaw in the coming week, they readily agreed to meet.
That meeting was predictably emotional and also unexpectedly revealing of my father’s past. Paweł Rabel told me that Maria, my father’s first wife, had been pregnant with their second son when the uprising began. She and 1-year-old Andrzej left the city for safety.
Like me, Paweł was unclear about what happened after the war, but he surmised that my father could not rejoin his wife and sons because the communist authorities may have issued a death sentence against him, which was distinctly possible. Those who had fought in the uprising were not regarded as heroes by Poland’s new communist overlords and many were imprisoned or executed because they were considered anti-communist.
Paweł told us that Jerzy had corresponded with Maria after the war, but she told him to stop writing because it was dangerous. Paweł knew that as children, his father and uncle were regularly visited by the secret police asking about their father. It was hard to fathom the dilemma my father had faced. On one level, Jerzy had abandoned his family, but on another he had no choice. A connection was maintained: his mother, Katarzyna, lived with her daughter-in-law and two grandsons until she died in the 1960s.
There were more revelations. On his visit to Warsaw in 1994 for the 50th anniversary of the uprising, it turned out my father had met his family, though he never mentioned it back in New Zealand. He had found Andrzej, whom he’d last seen at the age of 1. Andrzej then took him to Maria. After she got over her initial response – to slam the door on him – Maria had dinner with Jerzy. My nephew told me she never divulged what they discussed after not seeing each other for half a century, during which time my father had wed twice while still technically married to her.
A thriving hub
Since that memorable first meeting with my Polish family in 2019, we have seen each other often during my four times as a visiting professor at the University of Warsaw. In 2020, Paweł took me to Andrzej’s grave that lies next to the Warsaw Insurgents Cemetery, where the remains of more than 100,000 mostly unknown people killed in the uprising are interred.
The city is filled with such places. Rebuilt and revitalised after the ravages of Nazism and Stalinism, Warsaw is once again a thriving hub. But history hangs heavily over its cityscape. Polin (the Museum of the History of Polish Jews) and the Warsaw Rising Museum are perhaps the most moving centrepieces in remembrance of the city’s darkest hours, but memorials and plaques are everywhere, recording the evils that were inflicted on Warsaw’s indomitable citizens and celebrating their lives.
For the descendants of that wartime generation, Warsaw is a city of haunting memories that are no less meaningful for being experienced second hand. For me, they are even more precious for creating a more complex picture of the life of Jerzy Rabel: a wartime hero, a flawed father, a victim of history.
That store of memories has grown over the course of my visits, highlighting the close relationship between the personal and the political in Polish history through the microcosm of our family. After writing about my father in a Polish publication, I was contacted by the family of my father’s cousin, Wiktor, who fought alongside him in the uprising. Like my father, Witkor fled Warsaw after the war and started a second family in Brazil.
This year, for the first time, I will join my family and the rest of Warsaw’s population to stand and remember at 5pm on August 1. It will be a moment of mixed emotions, thinking about how Jerzy’s heroism during the uprising and his post-war dilemmas tore him away from his Polish family but made my own existence possible – and how the two parts of his family from different hemispheres have improbably come together again to stand in remembrance on the 80th anniversary of the uprising.
As an academic historian for much of my career, this family journey from Warsaw to Wellington and back affirms for me how the political, the personal and the universal are always intertwined.
I am conscious that it is a variant of millions of family stories from wartime Europe about resistance, death, trauma, survival, separation, dislocation – and new lives and reconnection in my case. It underlines how much whakapapa matters – especially how whakapapa connects us to others and to history.
Emeritus Professor Roberto Rabel is a Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Strategic Studies, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington.