Plac Zamkowy1945
WARSAW UPRISING
Before WW2, there were two Baptist churches that were destroyed during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Let me give you a few details that led to this tragic event: After the fall of Stalingrad in 1943 the Red army forced the German army to a gradual retreat from Soviet Russia. In the summer of 1944, the Red army reached Warsaw but stopped at the Vistula river. At this point the Polish Underground army, encouraged by the Soviets, launched an Uprising against the Germans in the hope that this would save the city of Warsaw from further destruction suffered already at the beginning of the campaigne in Sept.1939. However, instead of continuing its march, Stalin decided to hold the front under the pretext of regrouping his armies.
On August 1, 1944 the Polish Underground, in a surprise attack, liberated whole sections of Warsaw and secured some strategic points of the City while the Soviet army stood idly by on the other shore of the Vistula and watched. The Polish Underground forces could not hold their positions for long without outside help. Hitler's forces at first retreated but regained their upper hand when the German air force was used. Whole sections of the city of Warsaw were wiped out.
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Plac Zamkowy1945 |
Bombed and destroyed, thousands of
civilians and fighting men lost their lives and the remaining population was
marched out of the City and taken to forced labor camps or concentration camps.
Hitler vowed to 'wipe Warsaw off the map of the world.' In the midst of all
this destruction both Baptist churches were lost. Warsaw was left in ruins when
the war ended in May of 1945.
After the loss of many of her citizens, Warsaw slowly
began to replace her ruins with new buildings and tried to return to a normal
way of life.
But the 35 years that followed proved to be anything but normal. The government followed the dictates of the Moscow regime and became more and more oppressive politically while the economy was gradually falling apart. In 1980, a ray of hope for change came to Poland in the form of Solidarity which, despite of being supressed by force and declared illegal in 1982, led to a quiet revolution and an eventual change to a democratic government in 1989.