Leading Scholar, Display Help UC Remember The Warsaw Uprising

A focus on events in Poland in World War II will help the University of Cincinnati mark the occasion of Holocaust Awareness Weeks 2005.

Acclaimed historian and best-selling author Norman Davies will be speaking in Cincinnati on April 26 in an event co-sponsored by UC's history department, while the Langsam Library at UC will have on display through April 27 a large, traveling historical display on the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

Davies, the foremost historian of Poland, will lead a scholars colloquium and give a public lecture, "Land of Many Tragedies and the American Conscience: Poland 1939 – 1945" (April 26, 7 p.m., Mayerson Auditorium at Hebrew Union College). Davies’ talk is jointly sponsored by the UC history department and The Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education of Hebrew Union College.

Davies believes that the Allied victory in 1945 was not entirely the triumph of good over evil.

On the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and other concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Poland, Davies re-examines the policies and inactions of the Allied powers vis-à-vis Poland. Hitler and Stalin were emboldened by America and its Allies silence. And while Allied victory heralded the defeat of Fascism, it subjugated fully half of Europe to a totalitarian regime for the next half century. This is the Poland that has again been in the headlines as the homeland and ‘training ground’ for the attitudes and experiences that molded the late Pope John Paul II.

Davies has devoted a lifetime of research documenting the genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by both Hitler and Stalin against Poland and its people. The cost in human lives was enormous, and a result of their missed opportunities to deal swiftly against both Hitler and Stalin. According to Davies, the breadth and scale of mass murder inflicted on Poles, both Jew and Catholic, under both Hitler’s and Stalin’s occupation, is even today not fully known. Nor has the full extent of the cooperation between the SS and Stalin’s secret police (the NKVD) been established.

The Holocaust destroyed almost all of Poland’s Jews. Poland had the largest Jewish community in the world at that time, and its end is the most notorious and best-documented tragedy. Less is known in the West of the murderous policies and ethnic cleansing of Polish Jews and Catholics by Stalin, of the eugenics programs practiced in the German-annexed territories, the slaughter of Polish leaders and intelligentsia by Hitler and Stalin, the mass deportations of millions to the Gulag, the slaughter of the Polish resistance by both Hitler and Stalin. Altogether, 6 million Poles in German and Russian-occupied Poland fell victim to these atrocities. Three million were Polish Jews, more than 90 percent of the prewar Jewish population of Poland.

In his latest book, Rising ’44 (Viking 2004), Davies recounts in poignant detail the failed Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and the slaughter of the Polish resistance while the West stood by. He chronicles many little-known events, including the Jewish battalion who joined the battle in which most of them perished. Drawing from a wealth of original sources, including archives which became available in Poland only after 1989, and recently released British and American archives, Davies’ traces the thread of Allied policies toward Poland from 1939 to their eventual ceding of Poland to Stalin’s sphere.

Langsam Library's exhibit, "1944 Warsaw Uprising Exhibit," will be on display on the library's 4th floor through April 27. The 20-panel exhibit uses photographs, maps, and images of documents to tell the story of the heroic and tragic 63-day struggle by the Polish Home Army to liberate World War II Warsaw, Poland, from Nazi occupation. In telling the story, the exhibit covers the terror of occupation, combat efforts, early victories, daily life in Warsaw during the Uprising, causalities of war, and the defeat of the Home Army.

On Aug. 1, 2004, (the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising) the exhibit debuted at UCLA. It has since traveled to Seattle, Denver, San Jose, and San Diego before coming to Cincinnati. The "1944 Warsaw Uprising Exhibit" is organized by the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Los Angeles, Calif., in cooperation with Polish and American War Veterans and the Warsaw Uprising Commemoration Steering Committee.

The exhibit is available online at www.polishconsulatela.com/Warsaw_Uprising1944/