Salvete Omnes,
today is the 82nd anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising or Rising1944 - Hail to the heroes!
Pacem aeternam!
 |
| return to Warsaw in the fall of 1939 |
 |
| Jewish ghetto in 1942 - note the bicycle rickshaw |
Nazi Germany occupied Warsaw in the last week of September 1939. They organized a Jewish gheto within the capital and as you can see from the photos below there were horse-drawn vehicles a, trams an cars in the ghetto prior to 1943 etc.
Prior to the war the Warsaw horse transport had been giving way to the electric streetcars and various cars and trucks, thus in 1938 there were 2,4 thousand registered taxis and 1,000 'dorozki' aka 'drozhki' (horse carriages used as taxis), and horse-drawn vehicles constituted 12% of all privately owned registered vehicles in the capital. I have not yet found information on how many hoses worked in Warsaw prior to the Uprising 1944.
Wola district (within the Warsaw metropolitan area) was a traditional home of the many thousands of draft horses used for pulling the wagons and droshky (carriages) in the occupied left-bank Warsaw.
When the Uprising broke out on August 1, 1944 many hundreds or even thousands of horse carriages and their drivers were caught in the late afternoon fighting - from 1700 onward.
Apparently horses had fodder in the first week or two inside the city, since there were many gardens and green spaces within the capital, and people cultivated them for potatoes and fruits etc. As the Uprising persisted into the 2nd week the civilians and horses (and some locally kept cows) were subject to bombings by the German Air Force and artillery bombardments.
Starting early into the Uprising the Germans carried numerous massacres of civilian population of Warsaw, especially notable was the horrible massacre of the civilians in the very district of Wola (5th through 12th of August 1944), largest civilian massacre in World War II,
When the slaughter and banishment of Wola inhabitants was taking place the German Army troops and the Nazi Police forces killed and starved to death thousands of these working horses, and naturally they also took some of them as the spoils of war or to carry the loot from the burning districts.
Horses in the districts still in the hands of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) were eventually killed by many bombardments and their flesh and bones boiled and eaten by the soldiers and civilians. After August 15 many thousands of Polish civilians and AK soldiers were often semi-starving or outright starving.
In 1945 yet again horses returned to Warsaw to work in the rebuilding of the capital.
Valete
