However, both assessments are far from the historical truth. Let us therefore clarify (once and for all! – one would like to add, but, after all, the discussion of the Warsaw Uprising will probably never end): authorities of the Underground Poland did not give the order to fight, and the soldiers of the Home Army (Polish: Armia Krajowa, abbreviated AK) did not go into battle convinced that the battle would end in a bloody hecatomb. They did not want the vision of Warsaw dying in loneliness after the "betrayal of the West", but morally triumphant, to be a useful tool of pressure on the Allies of the time to support Polish independence aspirations in a sense of guilt for decades.
The leaders of the Polish Underground State simply recognised that the plan to capture the capital was risky, but not without a chance of success, and that in the perspective of the occupation of all Polish territories by Soviet forces, it represented the last hope (not a certainty!) of reversing the course of history and housing an independent Republic. The insurgents, on the other hand, went into battle, as soldiers always do – not to "die beautifully for the homeland", but to win and avenge the wrongs done by the enemy.
Let us remember – politics and war are not entirely calculable phenomena in which basic calculations of possibilities and chances always work. Sometimes it is decided by chance, coincidence, error or the genius of a politician or commander. In August 1914, 144 'soldiers without a homeland', led by Józef Pilsudski, set off for the fronts of the First World War, where armies of many millions were fighting. Four years later they rejoiced at the birth of Poland, another two years passed, and they became the conquerors of a Soviet power reaching from Europe to East Asia. Did this seem realistic on the eve of the First World War? In 1981, the communists imposed martial law in Poland and the Soviet Union was a global superpower. After a decade in Europe, an independent Third Republic emerged in the place of communist People's Poland, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Did any of the experts foresee this?
The Warsaw Uprising is not a symptom of insanity, but of an admirable determination to live at home – in a free country. A symptom of determination that we see today in Ukrainian soldiers on the frontlines of the fight against Russian imperial barbarism. Don't Ukrainians today hear from time to time that resistance to the power disparity between Moscow and Kiev must end in the defeat of their country? Didn't they learn in one of the Western European capitals that "after three days the war would be over"? The war that has been going on for ... more than five months. Are we going to convince them that, in the light of the casualties, losses and destruction this war is causing, their resistance is madness? Would we have convinced them on the first day of the war? And if so – would we be right...?
prof. dr hab.Przemysław Waingertner, historian, University of Lodz