Horses of Warsaw 1939-1944

 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

Walter Spitzer and his own Holocaust

Salve,
this post is not about the horses or riders.
It is about a book I finished reading yesterday.

Walter Spitzer (Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial & Museum has a page about him, and Buchenwald Museum  too) is a painter and sculptor living in France who wrote a book about his life  between the early 1930s through the summer of 1945.
The book I devoured like a hungry wolf.
It is titled Sauve par le dessin ( Saved by the  drawing - I read the Polish edition, Uratowany rysunkami, to my knowledge there is not English edition) and it is not a simple memoir.
For Walter is a Holocaust survivor who spent his best boyhood  years in various Nazi German controlled places - starting with this ancestral home in Cieszyn, Poland, through a shtetl & ghetto in Gross (German added post 1939) Strzemieszyce, then Auschwitz III, then the 12 day death-march, then Gross Rossen, then the death-train, then Buchenwald and then the escape into the woods(amidst fighting between the American forces and German defenders) from anther forced march to the final liberty brought to him and his friend Coco by the American Army.

I am not a novice to the genre of Holocaust memoirs and recollections, but it has been some time since I read one of those - nota bene it was Byłam sekretarką Rumkowskiego: dzienniki Etki Daum edited by Elzbieta Cherezinska(2008 ed), about the Litzmannstadt [Lodz] ghetto daily live by the secretary to Chaim M. Rumkowski, the infamous (not only in my opinion) commander-in-chief of the ghetto.
So when I read the cover description and skimmed some first pages into the book, including Eli Wiesel recommendation-introduction, I thought that this was  one rather late memoir, after all  this author was 77 years old in 2004, sort of another late bloomer to the now revered Jewish past but with much established Holocaust industry, but when started reading the book I could not put it down.

And it is mostly because it is about this Polish-Jewish boy success, about the spectacular survival against all odds and about tons of Good Fortune in the world gone German Nazi pitiless, and to the core. Not a small part was played by the fact that Walter had been educating himself all that horrible days, months, and years, not only in the art of survival but also in art history and various aspects of fine art - drawing, photography, sculpture, painting etc

So if you think you have it bad and are in need of motivational or inspiration, do read this book.

Walter does his storytelling with such an ease and poise  as with a stroke of a pen, pencil or brush - one might say: after all his trade has been fine arts.
He does not stop and writes about intimate aspects of his own life and lives of others, so the memoirs is much more personal and very coming of age at the same time.
 They (museums, galleries etc) write about him that the Communists at the Buchenwald KL saved him, but he had had to come to them first, and to do so he crossed, at the peril of immediate death, the gate between the death and political camps there, putting all his life and the lie of his friend Coco in the hands of good Fortune. It apparently worked. He made good his promise to record the Hell by his pencil etc - eg this one.
There are very personalized pictures as well - some etching and drawings by Walter, his own family and boyhood pictures, there is one of smiling beautiful Pola (you need to read the book to find out what role this photo played), then the American soldiers and unpublished photos from Buchenwald KL. 

nota bene good reader tell US Holocaust Museum to get some money to translate this book into English pronto.

There is a video about Walter, where he talks in his own English about this life and art, and there is also his Facebook page. So you can explore away about this little Polish boy from Cieszyn who made it alive and kicking from the German death machinery.

There are few horses that appear in his book too - one is a picture of their defunct stable with dusty horse tack at his home ground floor before the World War II, then 1938 and  the Polish army cavalry and officer marching into Czechoslovakia to take Zaolzie; then 5 years later during the infamous death-march from Blachhammer to Gross-Rossen  Walter drew a big cart horse (in his estimation it was a loot from some French or Belgian farm) in some snowed-in German village farm, the sketch  he did for the German farmer in exchange for some bread and margarine given to him upon inspection and final approval by the farmer.
Finally there is a wild joyride within the American-occupied zone, when he was lent a saddled cavalry horse to ride across the woods and mountains. The horse was Hungarian like its owner, they are being part of the Hungarian Cavalry division awaiting return to Hungary after the Nazi Germany capitulation.  Walter did not knw how to ride but he did it anyway. Sweet ignorance and dexterity displayed by many a boy then, albeit this boy was special, he just survived the Hell and came back.
I strongly recommend this book, oh, I do!