In a year filled with commemorative 50th year observances and ceremonies marking painful and heroic events of World War II, an exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center has quietly been pulling in larger than normal audiences.
That heartens the Polish-American businessman who organized it to try to ensure that the Warsaw Uprising, the exhibit’s subject, will not become just a historical footnote for a younger generation he fears knows little about the war or Poland’s devastation from it.
The exhibit is a photographic and video depiction of an ill-fated insurrection by Polish resistance fighters against Germany’s occupying army in 1944. More than 200,000 Poles died in the two-month fight, and an enraged Adolf Hitler ordered his soldiers to evacuate Warsaw, a city of a million people, and level it with dynamite and flame throwers.
In barely a year, Warsaw had become the scene of two of the century’s most massive, abominable criminal acts.
In May 1943, the Nazi army turned the city’s Jewish ghetto into dust, killing or deporting 56,000 Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp. The German high command ordered the destruction of the ghetto after Jewish fighters a month earlier had attacked soldiers assembling people to be shipped off to gas chambers.
Most of the rest of the city was razed the next year, after the Polish uprising, which is commemorated by the Cultural Center exhibit.
The exhibit was organized by Mitchell Kobelinski, a Chicago businessman who is chairman of the Chicago-Warsaw Sister City program.
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The exhibit opened Aug. 1, to coincide with the day Polish underground fighters first attacked German troops in 1944. It closes Sunday, to coincide with the same day in 1944 when the last vestiges of the revolt were crushed and Hitler’s punitive destruction of the city began.
The exhibit will be shifted, however, to the State of Illinois building at Randolph and Clark Streets for a four-day run Oct. 4-7. It then will move to the Copernicus Cultural and Civic Center, 5216 W. Lawrence Ave., until the end of October.
“Chicago and Warsaw are sister cities, and with the large Polish population here, the exhibit just seemed to be the appropriate thing to do to mark the 50th anniversary of the uprising,” Kobelinski said.
“A lot of young people today have very little knowledge of the war and what happened, and I thought this part of the war was an important story to be remembered.”
The 1944 uprising was ordered by Poland’s government-in-exile in London just as the Soviet Union’s army had arrived at the outskirts of Warsaw. The Soviets had encouraged the Polish underground to rise up against the Germans in Warsaw, promising help to the outmanned and outgunned Poles.
“With the Soviets on their side,” Kobelinski said, “Polish resistance thought they could rid the city of Germans in five days or so. But the Soviets just stood by and watched the Nazis slaughter the resistance, eliminating Polish leadership that might have opposed the Soviets’ own plans for Poland after the war.”
The subsequent destruction of the city, known before the war as the Paris of eastern Europe, erased whole neighborhoods of elegant 17th and 18th Century architecture.
The exhibit begins with an extensive collection of pre-war photos of Warsaw streets and boulevards, graced with exquisite Italianate and French Baroque and Neo-Classical shops, museums and apartment buildings.
It goes on to show scenes of the uprising, with men and women opposing tanks and artillery with stolen German rifles, holding out behind street barricades and in sewers for two months. A 20-minute video, assembled from Nazi movies after the war, shows Germans carrying out Hitler’s orders to reduce Warsaw to rubble.
The exhibit is the largest commemorative effort of the uprising in this country this year, Kobelinski said. He assembled it from photos and film footage borrowed from museums in Poland, with assistance from historian John Kulczycki of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and from exhibits designer Theodore Swigon.