(...) on behalf of President Bush and the American people, I am proud to join you in commemorating the Warsaw Uprising.

Together tonight, we honor the men, women and children who died here sixty years ago defending their freedom, and the freedom of future generations. The patriots young and old of the Polish Home Army who selflessly gave their lives here knew that their beloved Warsaw stood at the frontline of freedom.

And every citizen of Warsaw stood and fought on that frontline of freedom. They fought without hope for themselves, but with undying hope for their country. Here, in this place, in the grim face of death, defeat and destruction, there triumphed the God-given glory of the human spirit that no tyranny can ever extinguish. What courage, what determination, what sacrifice, as they fought a relentless enemy who showed no mercy.

I’m a military man, not a diplomat. I’m a soldier. I served in war and I have lost close friends in combat; and therefore I do not use the word hero lightly.

But I say to you tonight that everyone who fought during those dark 63 days was a hero; a hero for Poland, a hero for freedom. Their sacrifice sustained the hope of freedom through the horrors of Hitler and Stalin’s terror. From the heroic history of the Uprising, the people of Poland drew strength to resist decades of Soviet domination and communist dictatorship.

Our shared hero, Jan Nowak, is beloved by us all. He remembered his fallen countrymen of the Warsaw Uprising, with these prophetic words: He said, “Their sacrifice was not in vain. Our day of victory will also come. One day the sun will shine on crowds of singing and dancing people . . . in the streets of Warsaw. The free soul of Poland will survive until that day.” The free soul of Poland did survive. That joyful day did come. 

Warsaw has risen from the ashes to become, at last, the proud capital of an independent Poland-an independent Poland in a Europe that is whole, free and at peace. Today - for perhaps the first time in its history - is no longer the pawn of great powers or the prey of vast tyrannies. 

Poland is a sovereign country, embraced by the European union, secured by NATO, and reconciled in peace and partnership with its former enemies. All who cherish freedom owe the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising an eternal debt of gratitude. But our deep gratitude is not enough. Together, we must work to build a world of freedom for all of God’s children, for a world of freedom is a world of hope where tyrants and terrorists cannot thrive.

October the rebellion had been crushed. Fifteen thousand of the partisans had been killed, and between 200,000 and 250,000 civilians lay dead.

(…) the story of the Warsaw uprising really is the story of the destruction of Poland's "greatest generation." The uprising began when the leaders of Warsaw's underground army launched a rebellion against the Nazis who had brutally occupied their city for nearly five years. Hearing the Soviet Red Army guns to the East, knowing of D-Day and the American entry into the European war, they assumed the fighting would last just a few days, until the Allies joined and the city was freed.

But their assumption was incorrect. Stalin not only refused to send Red Army troops to help what he described as a "band of criminals," he also refused to allow British and American planes to refuel in the Soviet Union, making airlifts impossible. Neither the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, nor the American president, Franklin Roosevelt, thought it important enough to pressure the Soviet dictator. .

The scale of the catastrophe, the psychological, physical and economic damage, is almost unimaginable. (...)  As Norman Davies, the historian of the rising, points out, more civilians died every day for those 63 days than died on Sept. 11. Others escaped through the sewer system, walking 20 hours through raw human waste.

When the Red army did finally "liberate" Warsaw the following winter, there was almost nothing left. Soviet secret police officers rounded up and arrested the remaining underground leaders, on the grounds that anyone brave enough to fight Germans would probably fight against the Soviet Union too. Again, Roosevelt and Churchill did not object: They had already consigned Poland to the Soviet "sphere of influence" during their conference with Stalin at Yalta, and had washed their hands of the country's fate. (…)

The Warsaw uprising began at exactly five o'clock on a summer afternoon. (…) It was a moment of brilliant joy. The boys and girls of the underground Home Army knew little or nothing about combat; men of military age were mostly in exile or in prison camps, and many of these young fighters had been at school when the war began. Now they put on red-and-white armbands in the national colors and stormed one German-held building after another. Civilians poured out onto the streets, hugging and kissing their soldiers and tearing up the paving to raise barricades on every corner. The forbidden Polish flag floated from the roofs and windows. There were tears, songs, bonfires of celebration.

So began the greatest and most tragic urban insurrection in European history. Nobody on that August day could foresee that it would last for 63 terrible days and nights before the city surrendered, that it would cost something like 200,000 lives (the exact total will never be known), and that the whole of central Warsaw would be deliberately destroyed by the victorious Nazis. The Warsaw uprising failed. In the carnage of World War II, many people in the West were hardly aware of it. But for the Poles it left behind legends and lessons that mark Polish thinking to this day. (…)

For the Polish leaders in London or Warsaw, the last hope of saving their nation's independence was that Poland should free itself before the Red Army arrived. An attempt in July at a general uprising in eastern Poland failed. But there remained the chance that Warsaw could still liberate itself. Then the Russians would be met by a free and democratic Polish government already installed in its own capital.

There were some respectable excuses for this: a German counteroffensive had disrupted the Soviet advance. The fundamental reason, though, was that Stalin saw no reason to help what he considered an anti-Soviet uprising. For many weeks, he refused to let Allied aircraft use Soviet airfields to supply the besieged city. Though Poles fighting under Soviet command tried vainly to cross the Vistula and link up with the uprising, the Soviet divisions stayed on the other side of the river and watched Warsaw burn. The Nazis were doing Stalin's work for him. (…)

When Polish soldiers of the Red Army finally entered Warsaw in January 1945, they stepped in horrified silence through a desert of frozen ruins. (...)

The uprising filled Polish imagination in the years to come. Its failure taught the Poles that their tradition of romantic insurrection against foreign occupiers was over; after another such rising, there would be no Poland left. In 1956, when the Hungarians rose against Soviet tyranny, the Poles managed to restrain their instinct to do the same.

The Polish communist regime allowed only a censored version of the uprising, banning all mention of Stalin's betrayal. But in popular mythology the uprising became a 63-day moment of true freedom, a revelation of how nobly Poles could act and feel together if they were allowed to be themselves. The uprising, after all, had been not just a military action but a community of the people with its soldiers, a fighting republic with its own newspapers, songs, law-courts, radio stations, theatres and film units. Even children took part. The survivors still remember with love the laczniczki, the young girls who ran with messages under fire and died in their hundreds, and the "Grey Ranks" -- the boy scouts and girl guides who fought to the end.