Photo Pest: Warsaw Rising

I'll just say it: if the Polish Home Army, more commonly known as the resistance, had been more helpful to their Jewish brethren in Poland during World War II, I would be a little less cynical about the exhaustive museum dedicated to a failed uprising by that army to help defeat the Nazis.

The building that houses the Warsaw Rising Museum used to be a power station that supplied electricity to the city's extensive and highly efficient tram network. Seniors ride for free!

No expense has been spared to document the uprising. Galleries include an actual B-24 Liberator, which seems a bit ironic given the Allies provided no support to the resistance for fear of alienating the Soviets by getting involved with land disputes dating back Poland's partition in the 18th century.

The uprising lasted about a month in the summer of 1944 as the Red Army advanced on the Nazis. Poland's exiled government wanted to secure Poland's pre-war borders prior to their arrival.

Like most insurgents, they had more pluck than war material.

A basement gallery even recreates a Warsaw sewer. The underground water lines afforded some protection for Home Army soldiers and gave their attacks an element of surprise.

But the uprising failed miserably and angry Nazis demanded payback for the death of more than 15,000 Germans. They killed more than 200,000 Poles, mostly civilians. Many members of the resistance--including those outside Warsaw who participated in what the exiled government called "Operation Tempest"--were shot or hanged after the battle.

Given the near total destruction of the city by vengeful Nazi bombing grave markers were crude.

The museum does a terrific job of memorializing the resistance. Sketches of soldiers comprise one display.

Color photographs, enlarged to poster size, emphasize their humanity.

Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, a 23-year-old asthmatic poet and artist, fought in the uprising. Although baptized and raised Catholic, he had a Jewish uncle on his mother's side who escaped the Warsaw ghetto but was killed by the Nazis in 1943.

Baczyński published "Elegy" that same year, 17 months before he, too, was killed.

They kept you, little son, from dreams like trembling butterflies, they wove you, little son, in dark red blood two mournful eyes, they painted landscapes with the yellow stitch of conflagrations, they decorated all with hangmen's trees the flowing oceans.

They taught you, little son, to know by heart your land of birth as you were carving out with tears of iron its many paths.

They reared you in the darkness and fed you on terror's bread; you traveled gropingly that shamefulest of human roads.

And then you left, my lovely son, with your black gun at midnight, and felt the evil prickling in the sound of each new minute.

Before you fell, over the land you raised your hand in blessing.

Was it a bullet killed you, son, or was it your heart bursting?

His story resonated more than anything else I saw in the museum even though it failed to note his Jewish heritage.

"Still Life With Fruit"

"The Fawn"

An interactive kiosk scanned visitor's faces and ran them against people in a photographic data base who had participated in the uprising. It matched me with what appeared to be a Polish housewife. Perhaps artificial intelligence is smarter than I thought.

Another section of the museum explores the oppression of Poles during the Soviet era, sending the message that Poland's history would have been quite different if the Home Army had succeeded. The fact remains, however, that it didn't. Poland's subsequent absorption into the Eastern block also made it impossible for decades to honor the men whose expedient goal had been to ensure Poland's future autonomy.

This section would have provided an opportunity to address the continued ethnic cleansing of Jews under the Soviet regime, including post-war programs in Kielce and Krakow, as well as the forced migration of 13,000 "Zionists" because of protests against the government in 1968. The latter event ended Jewish life in Poland until the fall of communism.

There's also a children's museum which weirdly uses dolls to portray some of the war's major figures although I could identify only the one on the left.

A small but beautiful chapel gives Christian visitors a place of reflection.

As an American who entered the museum with more awareness of the Jewish uprising that occurred in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, I left in a state of confusion. Subsequent reading of Mila 18 by Leon Uris and seeing Our Class, a play about Polish complicity in Holocaust, has led me to conclude that Warsaw Rising primarily reflects a nation's much delayed opportunity for myth making entirely distinct from the Jewish experience.

The Home Army's uprising may have been the single largest rebellion fought by any Nazi-occupied country during World War II and no doubt tens of thousands of honorable Poles died as a result, but their heroism is hardly the entire story given that the Poles did little to prevent the extermination of nearly three million Jewish citizens. Now that capitalism finally has taken root in Warsaw, the increasing number of skyscrapers perhaps provide a better economic metaphor for a city on the rise than a museum devoted to a nation's dubious past.