On August 1, 1944, at 5 p.m., “W-hour” began in Warsaw, Poland. Taken from the Polish word wybuch, meaning “explosion,” W-hour was the start of the Warsaw Uprising, an underground resistance’s attempt to expel Nazi forces from the city.
Horrific spoiler: despite its meticulous planning and herculean effort, the Warsaw Uprising was doomed before it began and ultimately resulted in the Nazi massacre of an estimated 200,000 Polish civilians. The Soviet Army, positioned on the eastern banks of the Vistula River, abruptly halted their promised offensive, per order of Stalin, leaving the outgunned Polish resistance at the mercy of the Nazis who decimated Warsaw over the next several months. Heinrich Himmler, better known for designing and executing the Holocaust, had declared that the city must disappear completely from the earth: “No stone left standing.”
Nazi troops went house-to-house, indiscriminately machine-gunning entire crowds of men, women, and children. Several historical accounts report that pregnant women were drawn and quartered while their other children were cut down by machine guns or slaughtered with knives and swords.
Nazi engineers razed the city. Not most of the city. The city. After the Nazis finally abandoned Warsaw, less than fifteen percent of the city’s buildings remained standing. In January of 1945, Soviet tanks rolled into a ghost town, and the Iron Curtain descended across Poland and Eastern Europe.
However, this piece isn’t about the hapless heroism of the Warsaw Uprising.
It’s not about the Soviet Army’s ghastly betrayal or the Nazis’ brazen cruelty.
It’s not even about Warsaw’s triumphant reemergence, a city literally rebuilt stone by stone to original design from paintings and photographs and memories.
Rather, it’s about kotwica, the two-letter symbol wrought by a woman whose stoic resilience brought me strength and solace as I journeyed through my own ill-fated resistance.
* * *
There is, of course, a literary and rehabilitative danger in juxtaposing the incomparable, the insultingly tone-deaf proximity of personal to historical tragedy. As the saying goes, invoking Hitler or the Holocaust during a discussion fatally undermines your credibility and perspective. Moreover, psychologists warn that searching social networks, neighborhoods, and nations for trauma that eclipses your own may lead to resentment and emotional suppression, not comfort or recalibration.
Comparison may be the thief of joy, but it can also be the saboteur of recovery, an absolute assassin.
And yet, when we link the personally horrible to the profoundly horrific, a causeway appears, a spice route offering us a chance to openly smuggle wisdom and inspiration across historical and cultural borders. Misappropriation notwithstanding, it is entirely possible for affliction to seek solace in atrocity.
In fact, given that subsequent generations inherit any number of national traumas–people privately grappling with public agonies–perhaps it is fitting that the two nestle side-by-side on the mantle of recovery.
Though my Polish ancestors suffered the Nazi invasion, I’ve never endured anything approaching the genocidal suppression of the Warsaw Uprising. And yet, after my police department wrongfully terminated me for reporting sexual misconduct, including rape committed by officers, I nonetheless clung to the legacy of Anna Smoleńska.
* * *
Injustice borne from betrayal festers with a special cruelty, widening an already gaping wound any bayonet would admire. What gives betrayal its unequaled evisceration is that you cannot betray an enemy, only an ally. The unexpected violation of trust and faith can be debilitatingly concussive, as any Pole looking warily east to Russia will tell you.
At the time, ten years into my law enforcement career, I did not understand that an institution’s support can be ominously conditional, that in general, an institution protects members so long as members safeguard and fortify the institution. Moreover, an institution’s support of its members is not based on truth or performance, only the most recent and most performative loyalty. Any dissent is a fissure that must be swiftly patched.
During a national search for our agency’s new police chief, I sent an email to the mayor outlining a subculture of sexual misconduct within our department. I’d heard that some of our police officers were sexually harassing—and in some cases, raping—other police officers. Victims refused to report incidents because they were afraid of retaliation from other officers or the department. The few reported incidents were “investigated” and shelved, accused officers put back on the street and left in positions of power, including supervising the department’s special victims unit. It didn’t help that the department’s legal advisor referred to alleged incidents of misconduct as “urban legends.”
In my email to the mayor, I asked that the next police chief address the sexual misconduct problems. In that instant, I became a fissure, a blemish, a threat…and a target.
Months of retaliation followed. The newly appointed chief told me that my idea to research the issue of sexual misconduct at our department was a “fishing expedition” and “an insult to every male officer.” False information was inserted into my performance review. My duties were changed. I was transferred out of the chief’s unit and sent back to patrol. Then one evening, the chief sent a captain and sergeant to my home during dinner to suspend me in front of family and neighbors. For weeks I languished, not knowing what would happen.
My suspension was somehow leaked to the media, and the chief went on the offensive, speaking publicly about my suspension despite the city’s policy to the contrary and claiming that I was a dishonest police officer. Nearly six weeks later, the chief terminated me with the crucifying words: “I can’t trust you anymore.”
I fell out of the sky and could not seem to land; deeper and darker went the descent. Every time I felt for the impact, I fell further. My sleep and my appetite abandoned me. Losing weight, I felt sunken and misshapen. I wore coats and hats whenever I left home, desperate to avoid being recognized. It didn’t matter. The city was small and my last name distinct, leaving people to squint at me. Aren’t you that cop who…
I began avoiding the gun safe, unwilling to risk temptation.
The anguish of a betrayal by an institution sworn to justice became a sore that would not heal, an abscessed tooth that could not be pulled. One feverish night, months after my termination, I did something brilliant and foolish. I tried to place this injustice in the constellation of wrongs suffered by my family, tracing grievances backwards across the decades, only to arrive via my mother’s lineage at the Warsaw Uprising, humbled and chastened.
For here is where I discovered Anna Smoleńska, an art student turned paramilitary scout turned Auschwitz prisoner. Smoleńska never finished her art studies. After Germany invaded, she served in the underground Polish resistance, passing messages and parcels between prisoners and their families.
During World War II, the Polish Army held a contest to emblemize their battle cry, “Polska walcząca.” Notably, this phrase (sometimes abbreviated to PW) can be translated to either “Fighting Poland,” or the more concisely resolute, “Poland Fights.”
The former is what you might chant during a parade; the latter is what you growl when injustice chokes you with the chain of despair. Polska walcząca was shouted and snarled at every opportunity during the ill-fated Warsaw Uprising.
Smoleńska’s design won the contest, a simple, defiant two-letter combination forming the shape of a kotwica, meaning anchor:
A few months later, the Gestapo arrested Smoleńska and her family. At Auschwitz, she was tortured relentlessly for information about other members of the Polish resistance.
She did not yield.
In 1943, Smoleńska died of typhus in Auschwitz. She was twenty-three years old. One of her subordinates wrote that she was, “…strict and demanding toward herself…friendly but taciturn. [I]n her words and movements, [she was] always calm and balanced.” It was here that my affliction found solace in atrocity–if Smoleńska could remain disciplined and calm and balanced and defiant in the face of genocide, so, too, could I amidst an incomparably less ghastly struggle.
Notably, early in WWII, Smoleńska participated in the “Minor Sabotage,” which sought to disrupt German operations. Although the actual sabotage was minor (hence the name), its larger purpose was to undermine German morale by tearing down Nazi propaganda, but more importantly, fortify Polish resolve through defiant displays that communicated that Poland’s people and history would not be erased.
Nazis be damned, Poland would tell its story.
In reading about the Minor Sabotage, I began incubating a story whose meaning I didn’t yet fully understand, a tale whose reverberations echoed anew with each contemplation.
* * *
Some time after I’d been terminated, my children asked me if I’d been fired from the police department.
Previously, I’d told them that I was looking for a different career than law enforcement, that I needed a change from policing. However, the media had publicized the chief’s statements about my termination, and my children’s schoolmates were eager to peddle the local gossip.
So one night, I explained what I’d reported to the mayor and why I was no longer a police officer. A rockslide of questions followed, pinning down the conversation with uncertainty and fear: would we have to move? Would they change schools? Would we be homeless? Or hungry?
I answered with unconvincing reassurance.
And then, instead of platitudes, I decided to explain how we would recover, how we would journey through and beyond this wasteland of injustice. That story which had been hibernating in my mind for weeks finally woke. It was a story that emerged effortlessly, which meant that it was not my own creation, that it had been given to me, that it should pass through me, assume its own form, and remain subject to ongoing introspection:
Once upon a time, there were three princesses–identical triplets. They lived with the royal family in a kingdom that had never known war, rebellion, plague, or famine. However, on the triplets’ eighteenth birthday, a tyrant seized power and killed every member of the royal family…except the three princesses.
But this exception was no act of mercy. Ever the sadist, the tyrant exiled the princesses, believing that being banished with horrific memories was worse than death. Thus, one cold, rainy morning, soldiers unlocked the prison cells, unchained the princesses, and marched them through the mud to the front gate. But as they neared the gate, the tyrant appeared and invited each princess to take one object from the kingdom as a cruel memento on their journey.
The first princess immediately ran to the nearest soldier and ripped away his spear. She departed the kingdom at full sprint, the spear dragging on the ground behind her. Her burst carried her only a short distance away, where she began building a castle and raising an army. Every month, she used her castle to launch an assault on the tyrant’s ill-gotten kingdom. And every month, she failed. Her castle grew stronger, her army more powerful, and her desire for revenge burned hotter, but she still could not overcome the tyrant. She spent the rest of her days amassing an ever-increasing army and planning progressively more complicated attacks that ultimately always failed. She died young, her spear in her hand and her gaze fixed on what was once her family’s kingdom.
As the second princess was being banished, she chose the book containing the history of the kingdom. She ventured far beyond the tyrant’s border, across mountain ranges and rivers which had never been mapped. So far, in fact, that no one had ever heard of her, her family, or the tyrant’s evil deeds. After finding a suitable settlement, she burned the book, built a new castle, and established a new kingdom. But no one ever knew the history of the kingdom, and the princess forbade anyone from learning how the kingdom had arisen. In time, her kingdom shrunk to the confines of the tall castle walls, and few people left. Even fewer visited. The princess spent the rest of her days silencing those who asked about their people’s origin.
As the third princess was being banished, she wept bitterly, walking behind her two sisters in the frigid rain. But before she left the kingdom, never to return, she walked to a memorial commemorating the kingdom’s first voyage. Taking a rock, she chipped off the tip of the rusting iron anchor and placed it in her cloak.
The third princess strode beyond the castle walls and just past the borderlands until she stopped weeping. Then, stooping down, she placed that small bit of anchor in the ground and began building a new castle. The weather was fickle in that part of the land; on some days, she could see her old kingdom, while on other days, she could not.
Regardless of the weather and the views it offered, she began constructing a new castle and a new kingdom. Her efforts took much longer than her two sisters, but gradually, her castle grew into a colossus, a massive center of activity that connected kingdoms far and wide. Eventually, she raised an army, but when her general asked if they should prepare to attack the tyrant, she said no, that her army’s purpose was to defend, not attack.
Her kingdom’s prosperity attracted the attention of the tyrant, who shamelessly attempted to establish diplomatic and economic ties. The princess acknowledged but refused the tyrant’s request. Without her aid, the tyrant’s power withered. He spent the rest of his days watching his kingdom decay until one fateful night, rebellion poured through the castle gates and consumed him.
Every year, the third princess told her people the story of how their kingdom came to be, sparing no detail. The small bit of anchor, formerly of the kingdom from which she was cruelly banished, was now the cornerstone of her new and mighty empire. Instead of attempting to destroy or silence the past, her kingdom recognized its painful origin, acknowledging how anguish and resilience were two sides of the same reluctant coin that purchased their mighty nation.
One day, an elderly queen from a distant realm visited the third princess. The younger royal spared no expense and honored the queen with an evening ball. Everyone from the kingdom was invited. After the banquet, as musicians played and dancing began, the queen turned to the princess.
Amidst the merriment, the queen quietly relayed how a similar tyrant had murdered her family and seized her kingdom decades before. The queen explained how tyrants had decimated realm after realm over countless centuries. When she finished, the queen smiled kindly at the princess’s stunned expression. Taking her hand without any trace of condescension, she said, “Dear heart, did you think you were the only one?”
The princess permitted and acknowledged the tears in her eyes, as was her people’s custom. “No,” she said, “it just always felt that way.”
The queen asked to be taken to the highest point in the castle. The princess took her to the tallest spire from which the castle lights of numerous neighboring realms could be seen.
The queen gazed upon the horizon. “Every castle holds an aftermath,” she told the princess, “and every aftermath holds a castle.”
* * *
That fable brooded within me for what felt like years until I finally and begrudgingly acknowledged the brutal lessons learned by the three princesses. I contemplated the story over several weeks and months, mining various nuggets of introspection. I shared some bits with my children when I told them the fable; others will remain hidden until they’re older.
Although we need not silently suffer injustice or any other wound, it is useless to wage war on the past, as the first princess did. Revenge is a self-seeding poison, depriving us of healing’s peace and satisfaction. When we’ve been hurt, injured, or devastated, the best revenge is a recovery independent of–yet also built upon–the damage inflicted by others.
It is also equally useless to neglect or burn the past, as the second princess did. Our lives are a story, and we cannot write our future without first transcribing the past. Telling the story promotes ownership of the story; ownership returns power; and returned power sustains us through the journey.
Finally, recovery is fickle, as the third princess could tell you. Some days, the pain is distant, even hard to make out in the fog. Other days, the pain rips through us as if that moment had never ended. Traumatic memories may continue to call out to us, trying to draw us back in, much like how the parasitic tyrant tried to exploit the third princess.
However, we can acknowledge and even converse with past grievances without being overwhelmed, consumed, or conquered. Our goal is not to vanquish trauma, wounds, or injustice, but to grow beyond their reach and allow them to die the tyrant’s death—left withering, watching us thrive.
* * *
Resistance is not simply the desire to fight, or even the act of fighting, much the way that a journey is not merely about exertion. Perspiration must be grounded in purpose.
I do not believe it is a coincidence that the P and W in Anna Smoleńska’s design formed an anchor. Nor do I believe it’s a coincidence that in the fable which passed through me, the tip of an anchor became the cornerstone of the third princess’s castle. The people of the Warsaw Uprising–indeed, all those who have stared down murderous tyranny–understood that resistance is not the same as rebelling or lashing out. True resistance anchors itself in the principles of truth and self-sacrifice, and in doing so, becomes an endurance that transcends death.
The deeper I traced my family’s hardships and injustices, the more I realized that the nature and magnitude of our hardship or injustice is strangely secondary. Regardless of circumstance, our anchor can be our grievance or our growth. One will hold us down. The other will hold us fast.
I know I’m still journeying through the wasteland, still navigating that spiritual desert. And it does not matter that my injustice and struggles cannot compare to my ancestors’. Pain is not an invitation for competition, only an opportunity for collaboration. And inspiration. Affliction can seek solace in atrocity, hefting stories of resilience as a princess might loft bricks to build a castle.
Polska walcząca. Poland fights.
Anyone embarking upon a journey must fight. Not rashly or recklessly, as Anna Smoleńska might tell us, but with the calm and balanced weight of purpose.
Kotwica.
Photo by Maria Lysenko on Unsplash
