Monument of Warsaw Insurgents (Powstańców Warszawy Square)
On August 1st 1944, at Napoleon’s Square (today’s Warsaw Insurgent Square), insurgents’ shots were fired just before “W- hour”. About 4 p.m. a patrol of the battalion of the Home Army Battalion “Kiliński” came across German gendarmes. A commander of the squad, captain Henryk Leliwa-Roycewicz, fearing that his opponent would close the street with a strong fire, decided to launch a raid. In the first hours of the Warsaw Uprising, the battalion “Kiliński” rebounded from the Germans a Prudential building. Jan Frymus pseudonym “Garbaty” – a boy with a pulmonary disease with several other insurgents climbed the stairs to the top of a 16 storey building and hung a red and white flag on the roof.
The statue consists of a commemorative plaque and 54 loosely-distributed reinforced concrete blocks that symbolize the barricade was unveiled in 1979. It commemorates battles of the battalion “Kiliński” during the Warsaw Uprising.
The Warsaw Uprising was the largest military action of the underground in the Nazi-occupied Europe. Its military goal was to liberate the capital from the brutal five-year German occupancy. After 63 days of fighting, on October 2nd 1944, the act of surrender was signed. Warsaw was almost completely destroyed. During the fighting in Warsaw about 18 thousand insurgents died, and 25 thousand was injured. We should remember about soldiers from the Kosciuszko Division (about 3,500 killed). Losses among civilians were huge and were 180 thousand killed. The remaining 500,000 inhabitants of Warsaw were expelled from the city, which after the Uprising was almost razed to the ground by the Germans.