75th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw uprising
The uprising lasted 63 days. The fighters included elite athletes.
The Warsaw uprising was launched on 1 August 1944 at 17:00 (W hour where W stands for the Polish wybuch which means outbreak). Among the insurgents were Polish Olympic athletes including Maria Kwaśniewska, the bronze medallist in javelin throw at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. During the uprising she served as a nurse. She recalled the first day of the fighting as follows:
When W hour was announced on August 1st, we all joined the uprising. We couldn’t imagine remaining idle at the moment when all the young people in the capital were taking up arms. As I found out later, all my colleagues from the Olympic team in the city at that time, a total of about thirty people, joined the uprising. So it was nearly a platoon of soldiers! Probably no army in the world has had an “Olympians’ platoon. The fight was our civic duty. After the 1936 Olympics in Berlin the newspapers wrote that we were a role model for Polish youth. We couldn’t stay home at the moment of trial[1]“.
On the 75th anniversary of those events, Minister of Sport and Tourism Witold Bańka, Undersecretary of State Jan Widera and Director General Dariusz Rogowski laid flowers under the plaque commemorating Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński. The poet and Home Army soldier was killed on 4 August 1944 in the Blanka Palace (the current office of the Ministry of Sport and Tourism) by a German sniper who most likely fired the fatal bullet from the edifice of Teatr Wielki (the Grand Theatre).
[1] Z. Chmielewski, Sportowcy w Powstaniu Warszawskim [Athletes in the Warsaw uprising]
