Powerful advert remembers the Warsaw Uprising

A powerful full-page advert commemorating the 74th anniversary of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising has appeared in the New York Times.

In a moving tribute to the men, women and children who rose up against the Nazi German occupation of the Polish capital, Wiesław Włodarski, owner of Foodcare Group one of Poland’s largest FMCG business gives an honest and blunt account of the Uprising and events leading up to it. 

The ad says: “After five years of this brutal occupation of Poland, on August 1st 1944, the Polish Home Army, made up of 50,000 men, women and children, commanded by General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, organized a fight to eject this evil regime from the capital.”

The ad goes on to give a harrowing account of executions and mass murders carried out by Hitler’s troops, including the systematic slaughter of six million Polish citizens, three million Polish Jews and three million ethnic Poles. 

As the ad reminds its readers: “Poland saw the largest percentage loss of its pre-war population at the hand of the Nazi war machine of all the nations on the embattled European continent.”

By 1944, Nazi Germany was beginning to lose the war and as Soviet forces advanced towards Warsaw, the Polish Home Army saw this as an opportunity to take back control of the capital. 

In the single largest military effort ever undertaken by any European Resistance group during WWII, they launched their attack. But rather than come to their aid, Stalin ordered his troops to wait on the other side of the river Wisła, enabling the Germans to regroup, send reinforcements and mount a counter-offensive. 

After 63 days of bitter street fighting, with the Germans murdering civilians and POWs and bombarding the Polish defences with artillery and air attacks, General Bór-Komorowski and his men were forced to surrender. 

The German occupiers began deporting surviving fighters and innocent civilians to the infamous Nazi German concentration camps of Auschwitz and Mauthausen, before systematically razing 95 percent of the capital to the ground. 

Mr Włodarski’s Foodcare group, the slogan of which is ‘…because we care’ ends his advert with the heartfelt reminder ‘We must never forget.’

It reads: “We must never forget the courage and the sacrifice made in the face of this tragedy by the Polish freedom fighters in the Warsaw Uprising.”