July 31, 2004
At 8 p.m. tomorrow, Sunday, August 1, CNN Presents presents a program on the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.
— a heroic and tragic 63-day struggle to liberate World War II Warsaw from Nazi/German occupation. Undertaken by the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK), the Polish resistance group, at the time Allied troops were breaking through the Normandy defenses and the Red Army was standing at the line of the Vistula River.
Warsaw could have been the first European capital liberated; however, various military and political miscalculations, as well as global politics — played among Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) — turned the dice against it.
I was four years old at the time of the Warsaw Uprising. I was born and living in America, but I was brought up bi-lingual and proud to be Polish -- reminded, again and again, that Madame Sklodowska Curie was my grandmother's cousin, and Curie's father taught my very young grandmother how to read and write Polish in the school he ran in their home town of Sklody.
Fifteen years later, when I had to choose a topic for a college research paper, I chose the Warsaw Uprising. That research paper is long gone, but I remember the hours I spent in the New York State Library reading the stories of how the Polish Home Army fought for their country and for their Jewish countrymen. And how those who were supposed to be the "good guys" a the time -- America and Britain -- betrayed them all.
Tomorrow night I'll sit down with my mother and watch the story of valor and betrayal that is a part of my heritage. Poles have often been forced into being the scrappy underdogs -- not particularly eager to pick a fight, but never running away from one either. I guess it's in my genes.
And it's why I just about always think the underdog is the real hero.
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