17. A Beautiful Sad City

The Warsaw Uprising was a catastrophic event for every man, woman and child living in the city. This tragedy capped five years of Nazi brutality that included the deportation and murder of 400,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to death camps. By the time the Home Army surrendered in October 1944, the cumulative toll of the Nazi occupation, the Jewish ghetto liquidation, and the uprising had reached a staggering 700,000 lives—more than half of Warsaw's pre-war population. Every surviving citizen of this once beautiful city, except for a handful hiding in the ruins, was displaced. Exiled.

Despite the provisions of the Warsaw capitulation treaty and the protections afforded to the Home Army as prisoners of war under international law, the actual treatment of both civilians and resistance insurgents was far from humane.

Shortly after I began compiling my father's stories, I filled out several online forms for information from the Arolsen Archives—the International Center on Nazi Persecution, formerly the International Tracing Service, which is currently digitizing the records of millions of Nazi victims. I sent requests for all my relatives, and that's how I found out what happened to my paternal grandparents.

Julianna and Piotr Switocz were among the citizens sent to the transit camp at Pruszków even before the Home Army capitulated. They were taken to Pruszków on September 6, 1944, a full month before the end of the Warsaw Uprising, as the Germans rounded up civilians on the streets. They were deemed well enough to exploit for forced labour, otherwise they would have been executed on the spot. The Nazis would not have bothered to send them on to the transit camp.

In Pruszków they were separated. The Germans shipped my grandmother in an overcrowded cattle car to the Ravensbrück concentration camp north of Berlin and my grandfather to Gross-Rosen, a concentration camp located in the German Province of Lower Silesia.

Gross-Rosen was notorious for its brutal conditions. Initially a forced labour camp for a nearby granite quarry, it grew into a vast complex with nearly 100 subcamps. Prisoners faced exhausting work, severe malnutrition, and rampant disease. An estimated 40,000 out of 125,000 prisoners perished there, victims of the camp's "extermination through work" policy.

My grandmother’s journey would have taken an entire day in a cattle car that finally stopped at Fürstenberg, the town closest to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The prisoners then walked the last four kilometres. Ravensbrück, primarily for women, held over 132,000 people from across Europe, with up to 90,000 perishing there. From 1939 to 1945, prisoners endured forced labour, torture, starvation, illness, and random executions. In the war's final months, Ravensbrück became a killing facility, with five to six thousand dying in hastily built gas chambers.

By the summer of 1944, the camp was overflowing, the infrastructure was crumbling, and there wasn't enough staff to process the new arrivals. Then, the Warsaw Uprising influx began, and the camp bureaucracy collapsed.

Between August and October 1944, more than 12,000 women and children from Warsaw arrived in Ravensbrück, including my grandmother. With no one to register them and nowhere to place them in the overflowing camp, they were kept outside the camp gates for days. A mass of hungry, exhausted, and sick women sat or lay on the ground, which soon became a field of mud, excrement, personal possessions, and debris.

When my grandmother was finally registered, she faced unimaginable horrors. First-hand accounts describe how prisoners were stripped of clothing and possessions, their heads shaved bare, before being forcibly herded into icy-cold showers. Adding to this degradation, they were given ill-fitting garments from deceased prisoners, as the camp had long exhausted its supply of striped uniforms.

After one month of suffering in Ravensbrück, according to the documents provided by the Arolsen Archives, Julianna was transferred to the notorious Sachsenhausen concentration camp, located fifty-four kilometres to the south. The thought of her undergoing a second arduous journey on foot and then in a cramped railcar intended for cattle is unfathomable.

At fifty-two years of age, she had lived through the First World War and now five years of German occupation and existence on ration cards and fear, but nothing would have prepared her for Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen. The uncertainty of not knowing whether her husband of twenty-six years was still alive and what happened to her beloved children, about whom she must have worried every single day of the war, must have been unbearable.

The last trace of Julianna was on January 25, 1945. On that day, she was transferred back to Ravensbrück. She is identified as a political prisoner on the list of the women being transferred. This distinction was given to anyone coming from Warsaw during and after the uprising. No trace of her remains after that day.

On April 30, 1945, fewer than 3,500 malnourished and sickly prisoners were discovered alive at Ravensbrück when it was liberated by the Red Army. The remaining survivors, an estimated 20,000 prisoners, were being force-marched a few kilometres away and were liberated in the following hours by another Red Army unit.

Julianna may have died of typhus or in the gas chambers. Piotr may also have died of typhus. It’s a horrific disease that was spread by lice. It ravaged the vulnerable, malnourished prisoners living in barracks designed for a fraction of their number. I know he died within a few weeks of arriving at Gross-Rosen because a letter my father wrote to him from the POW camp where he was sent was returned in December 1944.

Edward’s sister, Jadzia, who had been a courier running messages between the various squads of the Home Army during the uprising, escaped to the small town of Morąg in the Polish countryside. She remained in this provincial town for the rest of her life, keeping a low profile because of her work as a courier with the Home Army and her brother’s resistance activities. They had both fought for a free and democratic Poland and, as such, were considered enemies of the post-war Soviet regime. As I learned more about the war, I finally understood the complexity of my aunt’s situation and why she had been afraid to return to Warsaw after the war.

In retaliation for the uprising, Hitler ordered Warsaw's complete destruction. Trains and trucks carted off everything from dismantled factories and their inventories to precious works of art. The Nazis then systematically destroyed the remaining monuments and buildings, either blowing them up or burning them down. By the time the Red Army entered Warsaw on January 17, 1945, this once-beautiful city had been reduced to silent, sad, smouldering rubble.

The Soviets were now in power, and Poland's subjugation would last another forty-four years. I would never meet my grandparents.