Crushed Anti-Communist Underground : Polish Monument Honors ‘Heroes’ of Postwar Strife

In a gesture underlining the deep divisions between the Polish state and its people, the Communist authorities unveiled a 60-ton bronze monument Saturday honoring the internal security forces and party activists who died in suppressing the anti-Communist underground after World War II.

Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the premier and party leader, and President Henryk Jablonski led dignitaries at the unveiling of the monument, a 30-foot-tall cluster of figures commemorating the 22,000 policemen, security service officers and party activists who died in civil strife between Communist and anti-Communist forces from 1944 to 1948. Neither Jaruzelski nor Jablonski spoke at the ceremony.

As the officials stood under a warm summer sun in a small park near the city center, a military honor guard fired gun salutes, and a band played the Polish national anthem and the Internationale, anthem of world Marxism.

‘Defense of People’s Poland’

Friends and relatives of those killed on the Communist side in the fighting joined the interior and defense ministers in laying wreaths at the foot of the monument, which bears the inscription “To those who fell in the service and defense of People’s Poland.”

The unveiling of a monument to the security services comes at a time when public resentment toward the police remains high, after the murder last fall of Father Jerzy Popieluszko, a popular and outspoken critic of the regime, by three security service officers. Fewer than 100 onlookers gathered near metal crowd-control barriers to watch the ceremony.

Several hundred guests watched from inside the barriers as the mayor of Warsaw, Mieczyslaw Debicki, said that the memorial symbolizes Poland’s commitment to “socialist legality” and the victory of communism.

Debicki made no reference to reconciliation between the opposing sides in the 1940s fighting, or to losses on the anti-Communist side. He said instead that the monument would stand as a reminder that “civil war is behind us, and we will never allow its return. We will not step down from the road we chose 41 years ago.”

The memorial to the widely despised security services also serves as a reminder that the Polish authorities have yet to erect a memorial dedicated specifically to the tragic Warsaw uprising of 1944, in which 250,000 civilians and fighters in the non-Communist underground Home Army died during 63 days of savage combat with German troops, while Soviet forces--now officially hailed as Poland’s liberators--stood watching on the other side of the Vistula River, at some points no more than a mile away.

Survivors Fought Communists

Suriving elements of the Home Army later joined in the four-year guerrilla war against the Communist authorities, implanted in power as a result of the Red Army’s advance through Poland near the end of World War II. The conflict largely ended in the spring of 1947, under an amnesty in which more than 55,000 members of anti-Communist groups abandoned further resistance.

In 1980, when the independent trade union Solidarity was in its ascendency, a popular movement led to the creation of a fund-raising committee for a monument to the Warsaw uprising. The committee was disbanded after martial law was imposed in 1981, and its funds were turned over to a new, government-approved committee that now proposes to build a more ambiguous memorial to the “heroes of Warsaw,” presumably including the Communists.