PM commends Warsaw Uprising anniversary

Poland's prime minister on Monday paid tribute to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against the Germans, whose 78th anniversary fells on August 1.

Speaking in front of a symbolic shrine to the uprising's victims, Mateusz Morawiecki said: "The bloody sacrifice of the Warsaw insurgents is a great obligation for us all to carry the truth about those events into the future."

"The uprising that took place in Warsaw was not only Warsaw's uprising, it belongs to all of Poland... and is a part of European and world history," he added.

Recalling that the Germans retaliated for the insurgency by levelling the city to the ground and slaughtering around 200,000 of its civilian population, Morawiecki said these events "have to be remembered, we cannot pretend they didn't happen."

In this context, he also referred to Polish voices demanding war compensation from Germany, and said there can be no squaring of accounts with Germany over World War Two without adequate German indemnity for the destruction suffered by Poland during the war.