Rising '44 The Battle for Warsaw, by Norman Davies Warsaw rose twice against the Nazis during World War 2. The first rising in 1943 was confined to the Jewish ghetto. Its story is told in Marek Edelman's superb little book The Ghetto Fights which is available from Bookmarks.
Norman Davies' book is a much more detailed account of the Warsaw Rising in 1944 which, even though it was much larger and ended in the destruction of much of the city, is less well known outside Poland.
Davies has a passionate interest in Polish history and has made much information available to the non-specialist reader in English for the first time.
This is one of the strengths of the book. He is also adept at interweaving the broad historical sweep with little vignettes from a wide variety of people who participated in the Rising.
No reader will fail to be astounded at the immeasurable heroism of the insurgents or bewildered by the intimate, close up brutality and sadism of which the Nazi army was capable.
Any rebellion against an army of occupation will be a gamble. Although they were poorly armed and expected to hold out for only a few days, circumstances seemed to favour the Poles in August 1944.
The British and Americans were advancing steadily from the west. Stalin's Red Army was advancing rapidly from the east and was almost at the River Vistula.
Warsaw was on the far bank. It seemed certain that they would rise up and Soviet radio stations were encouraging the citizens to do just that.
Stalin held the Red Army back and allowed the citizens of Warsaw to fight an improvised battle against the Nazis.
They held out for more than sixty days but without the support of the Red Army the result was inevitable. (above) Last march of the Proud Poles. (Top left) Stalin ordered the Red Army to wait before liberating Warsaw, much of which was reduced to ruins (left)
Yet the suffering of Warsovians didn't end when the Red Army did eventually arrive. Davies provides an unsettling description of how the post-war Stalinist bureaucracy in Poland made a special point of persecuting any non-Stalinist who had fought the Nazis.
He is also an ardent exponent of the now fashionable view that there wasn't much of a difference between Hitler and Stalin and that Stalin learned everything he knew from Lenin.
The recent Channel 4 biography of Stalin had this as a recurrent motif too. This intellectual glibness is the book's great weakness.
However Davies is to be commended for the service he has done in restoring to the reading public this forgotten epic of how Warsaw's youth (and it was mainly the youth who fought defied death and humbled Nazism.