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

Warszawa 1944 - via Tadeusz Gajcy (1922-44)

 Salvete Omnes,

Pacem Aeternam 

Warszawa 1944 - tragedia miasta, tragedia kultury i sztuki, tragedia ludzka. 

Vae Victis

Tadeusz Gajcy (8.02.1922- 08.1944) - poeta

Masakra na Kilinskiego -

 

architekt Powstania

Zbrodniarze

Powstanie - Wiki Commons ...

Valete

Warsaw Rising 1944-2019

Salvete Omnes,
this year we commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising 1944 -

in 2013 I posted a short entry that combined 1939 invasion of Poland  and the Wola genocide'44 perpetrated by the Germans during the Warsaw Rising.

I have had the privilege to meet quite a few soldiers who fought during the Uprising.
When I lived in Brooklyn I was honored to befriend a young 80something years old Mr. Jan who was a Home Army soldier, and who along with his father, participated in the uprising on the right bank of the Vistula River, the Warsaw's Praga district. He was wounded during the fighting, taken prisoner and eventually ended up in the German camp, eventually to have been liberated by the American Army in 1945. He emigrated to the US and there he married,  fathered three children and lived to have many grandchildren. In 2004 Polish Republic founded his trip to Warsaw, to commemorate the 60th anniversary with the other surviving participants.



He had no regrets and was one of the most cheerful people I have ever met.

In my family, who lived just 60 miles to the south-west of the capital of Poland, the Uprising figured very deeply in the psyche of all who lived through and survived the war. Both my father, who was a a young boy then, and my grandmother remembered the glow of the burning Warsaw illuminating the summer and early fall nights of 1944. And the blackened skies and clouds of smoke coming from the direction of the fighting Warsaw. The glow and smoke would persist well into the fall of 1944, as the Germans were systematically burning and dynamiting  the left bank Warsaw.

My paternal grandfather was a Home Army soldier and that summer marched off with his unit to the fight the Germans during the so called Akcja Burza (Operation Tempest). Many years later he told me ''We failed to cross the Kampinos  Forest into Warsaw and to help the Home Army fighting there, we failed our  Warsaw and her citizens.'' 

My maternal grand-uncle, also a Home Army soldier,  fought during the entire 63 days of the Uprising, marched off into the German captivity and then returned to Poland to live in the Communist Respublica under the Soviet yoke - thanks to all the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam Conferences our Western Allies made with butcher Stalin and his henchmen.
I have never met him, he died before I was old enough to have a meaningful talk about his war exploits.
I have been a student of the US Cavalry and Army in general during the Indian Wars, and one thing one notices in studding these little wars on the Plains, that the US military almost always held inquiries into the actions of the officers and NCOs when there had been a defeat or perceived lack of success. Court martial proceedings were not infrequent and documentary evidence remains plentiful  and meaningful. Consequently, I wish there would have been a trial of the commanders who stood behind the order to call the Uprising  -   in order to examine the alleged evidence of any wrongdoing and malfeasance. The Uprising was the outright 'gift' into the scheming hands of Stalin who was planing already his post-war Poland, while the Germans used this opportunity to go into the unspeakable levels of mayhem and deliberate killing and raping of civilian Poles, and into planned rapine, robbery, theft and destruction of the largest city in Poland. 

Vae victis...and  Hail to the Heroes

this afternoon I did this pen sketch  - perhaps a future project


and the first concept sketch
 
Valete!