Memorial Stone of the Battalion “Gozdawa” (Miodowa Street, the corner of Senatorska Street)
The battalion “Gozdawa” was a squad of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), created in October 1939. Underground squads were set up in the military hospital of the former Sanitary Training Centre and in Praga district. The name of the battalion comes from Captain Lucjan Giżyński’s pseudonym, who took over his command in the spring of 1943. After the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising, the battalion fought in the Old Town and from September – in the city centre. At first there was a monument – a boulder with a plaque here. At present, there is a memory board which remembers about the actions of the soldiers “Gozdawa”, placed on the building which was built on this place. There is a poem of one of the soldiers:
“When everything around the cracks, crumbles and collapses,
When the enemy in the New Town, ‘’Rybaki” in the cathedral,
Steadfast under the torrent of fire, rubble, steel,
Proud that neither the enemy stepped in here,
Living rampart embracing the threshold of Old Warsaw,
Thirty two days Gozdawa’s Reduta fights.
Andrzej Sieczkowski “Chrabak”, September 1st 1944. “