The term Robinson Crusoes of Warsaw, or the "Warsaw Robinsons", refers to Poles (including Jews) who, after the end of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and the subsequent planned destruction of Warsaw by Nazi Germany, decided to stay and hide in the ruins of the German-occupied city. The period of hiding spanned as long as three and a half months, from the day of the capitulation of the uprising, October 2, 1944, until the entry of the Red Army on January 17, 1945. The hideaways lived in the ruins of houses, basements, and bunkers which had been prepared ahead of time. They lived in extremely dire circumstances, while the city was being destroyed around them. Some managed to escape Warsaw, many were captured and killed by the Germans, while others survived until the withdrawal of German troops.
The estimates of the number of hideaways vary from several hundred to approximately two thousand. Even though the majority of the Robinsons perished during the war, most of the information about their circumstances comes from those who survived. The largest group of hideaways consisted of around 36 individuals who were led by two medical doctors. The Robinsons also included a group of Jewish Combat Organization (, ) Warsaw ghetto fighters, who managed to leave the ruined city in mid-November.
The terms "Robinson Crusoes" or "Robinsons" for the hideaways appeared almost immediately, and were popularized in many contemporary and later works, including memoirs, newspaper reports, and films, by both writers and the "Robinsons" themselves, the most famous of whom was the composer Władysław Szpilman, whose story was the subject of the films, The Warsaw Robinson (1950), and The Pianist (2002).
Background
The Warsaw Uprising, which began on August 1, 1944, was an attempt by the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK) to liberate the capital of Poland from Nazi occupation in advance of approaching Soviet forces. The insurrectionists hoped for Soviet and Allied support, but in early August Joseph Stalin halted the Red Army on the right bank of the Vistula and denied British and American planes, which carried aid to the uprising, landing rights in Soviet controlled territory. Despite the fact that in September the Soviets captured the Praga suburb and allowed a few limited landings by Allied planes, the insurrection became more and more isolated and pushed into an ever shrinking area within the city. By early September, without Soviet aid, the uprising was doomed. While capitulation talks were already in progress, the Germans took the suburb of Żoliborz on September 30. The final surrender agreement was concluded on October 2, by the commander of the Home Army in Warsaw, Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, and the German general in charge of suppressing the uprising, Erich von dem Bach.
The provisions of the capitulation agreement stipulated that the Home Army soldiers were to be accorded full combatant status and treated as prisoners of war. The civilian population of Warsaw was to evacuate the city, be transferred to holding camps and then released. From the date of the surrender all civilians and soldiers had three days to leave the capital.
Another portion of the agreement, point #10, stated that the German command would ensure the preservation of remaining public and private property as well as the evacuation or protection of objects and buildings of "artistic, cultural or sacred value". However, soon after the fighting was over at a conference held on October 9, 1944, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, ordered the total destruction of the city. Himmler stated: "The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation." The task of carrying out the destruction was assigned to SS-Brigadeführer Paul Otto Geibel.After the war, Geibel was sentenced to five years imprisonment by Czech authorities, and subsequently to life imprisonment by Polish ones, for crimes against civilians committed during the uprising. In 1956, for unknown reasons, he was released for good behavior. Intervention by Polish veterans and survivors of the uprising resulted in his re-incarceration. He committed suicide in 1966 while serving out the rest of his life sentence. Subsequently, the buildings of the city were systematically reduced to ruin, one by one.
Origins and usage of the term
About two weeks after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising, on October 17, 1944, the commander of the German 9th Army stationed in Warsaw, Smilo von Lüttwitz, issued an order in which he informed his soldiers that there was a large number of "sneaky Poles" still hiding in the ruins of Warsaw. According to Smilo, they "posed a threat to the German forces". Von Lüttwitz ordered a large scale łapanka (police action/round-up) to "cleanse the city" of them. The order also sanctioned immediate execution of any individuals found hiding in the ruins. In some rare cases, those found were placed in a specially created concentration camp, and used as manual labor as the German army looted the remnants of the city.
The phenomenon of the hideaways was noticed soon after the Red Army captured Warsaw. On January 26, 1945, a bulletin of the Żydowska Agencja Prasowa (Jewish News Agency) reported that 48 individuals had emerged from hiding and referred to them as jaskiniowcy, or "cavemen". The term "Robinsons" soon became common, a reference to the fictional castaway Robinson Crusoe in the Daniel Defoe novel. The Soviet writer and journalist Vasily Grossman, upon entering the ruined city, described finding four Jewish and six non-Jewish Poles who had just left their hideouts.
The term and the analogy with the castaway has often been made by Robinsons in their own memoirs, as well as by other writers. Dawid Fogelman had been imprisoned at the Gęsiówka concentration camp. After the camp was liberated by the Polish Home Army, he joined its ranks and fought in the uprising. At the end of the fighting, Fogelman became a Robinson, hiding in a bunker on Szczęśliwa Street, where he began writing a diary. He wrote: "We lived like Robinson Crusoe, with the one difference that he was free, could move about freely, while we lived in hiding." While Fogelman's diary survived, his ultimate fate is unknown.
In his memoirs, Władysław Szpilman also compared himself to Crusoe and, like Fogelman, emphasized the isolation and hopelessness which characterized the Warsaw Crusoes. Szpilman's memoir served as a basis for a screenplay, written as early as 1945 by the Polish writers Jerzy Andrzejewski and Czesław Miłosz,Miłosz, who had written scholarly works on Defoe's novel, was later awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. entitled Robinson of Warsaw. The movie that was eventually filmed, Miasto Nieujarzmione ("Unyoked city"), was heavily censored by the communist authorities, and its original theme changed to such an extentIn the movie the character of the Warsaw Robinson was changed into that of a Soviet parachutist. that Miłosz requested his name be removed from the film's credits. The experience with the film contributed to Miłosz's disillusionment with cinema as an artistic medium.
Wacław Gluth-Nowowiejski, a member of the Home Army who was wounded during the uprising and barely managed to escape the Wehrmacht's Marymont massacre of civilians and wounded soldiers, hid in the basement of a destroyed house from mid-September until mid-November. Gluth-Nowowiejski wrote several books about his experiences after the war, including Rzeczpospolita Gruzów ("The Commonwealth of Ruins") and Stolica jaskiń: z pamięci warszawskiego Robinsona ("The capital of caves: memoirs of a Warsaw Robinson").
Major Danuta Ślązak of the Home Army, hid out with a group of wounded patients whom she had saved from a hospital that had been set on fire by the Germans during the last days of the uprising. After the war she wrote a book about her experiences, Byłam Warszawskim Robinsonem (I was a Warsaw Robinson). A portion of her group left the hiding place after German troops called out for them to surrender and were immediately executed. The rest remained hidden and escaped detection. Eventually they used the corpses of their murdered companions to disguise the entry to their hiding place.After the war Ślązak married one of her fellow Robinsons that she had rescued.
The name "Robinsons" has also been used to refer to those Jews who hid out in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto in the aftermath of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Uri Orlev's (Jerzy Orlowski) children's book The Island on Bird Street (1981), adapted into a 1997 film, tells the story of an 11-year-old boy who hides out in the ruins of the ghetto. Orlev also draws analogies with Robinson Crusoe in this work; in fact one of the few things Alex, the story's protagonist, possesses is a copy of Defoe's novel.
Other memoirs by the Robinsons include Bunkier (The Bunker) by Chaim Goldstein, Byłem ochroniarzem Karskiego (Karski's Bodyguard) by Dawid Landau, Ukrywałem się w Warszawie : styczeń 1943 – styczeń 1945 (I Hid in Warsaw: January 1943 – January 1945) by Stefan Chaskielewicz, Moje szczęśliwe życie (My Fortunate Life) by Szymon Rogoźinski, and Aniołowie bez skrzydeł (Angels Without Wings) by Czesława Fater. Many other testimonies and recollections are contained in the archives of the Emmanuel Ringelblum Żydowski Instytut Historyczny (Jewish Historical Institute) in Warsaw and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
Reasons for staying
The capitulation agreement between the Home Army and German forces stipulated that insurgents were to be treated as regular prisoners of war. The city's civilians were to be transferred to transit camps and afterward released.
Although the agreement did not stipulate different treatment for Poles who were ethnically Jewish, many Jews feared that the agreement would not be honored in their case. In fact, the Nazis conducted a "medical examination" at the Pruszków internment camp, in order to "catch out" Jews from among Warsaw's refugees.The medical examination included a communal shower, which was used as a pretext to carry out an examination for circumcision. As a consequence, a large number of the Jews who were still in Warsaw at the time of the uprising, decided to remain in hiding rather than join the non-Jewish civilians leaving the city.By this time, the overwhelming majority of the city's Jewish population had been taken to death camps and killed. According to memoirs from the period, the choice often came down to whether a particular person "looked Aryan" and could pass for a non-Jewish Pole.
A significant number of non-Jewish Poles also did not trust the Germans and decided not to leave the city. Many wounded Home Army soldiers became stranded during the uprising and were simply not able to evacuate in time. For others, the choice to remain resulted from feelings of despair and hopelessness brought by the fall of the uprising; at least initially, they simply did not have the motivation to leave.
Number and demographics
Between the end of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (May 1943) and beginning of 1944, there were between 10,000 and 20,000 Jews hiding in the Ghetto ruins. The number of Robinsons after the Warsaw Uprising has been estimated at between several hundred and two thousand, spread across all the suburbs of Warsaw. Another source gives the number as between 400 and 1,000. Most of those hiding were Jewish, including some who had been in hiding since the fall of the ghetto uprising, though a significant number were non-Jewish Poles. Unlike Szpilman, whose case was somewhat unrepresentative, most of those in hiding remained in medium-sized to large groups, often of mixed ethnicities. The majority of the Robinsons were men.