Remembering the Women and Girls Who Were Raped

The text below is dedicated to the girls and women imprisoned in the camp at Zieleniak (5–19 August 1944), victims of bestial rapes about whom history remains silent. It seeks to save from oblivion the memory of the women and girls at Zieleniak, which was a place where women were stripped of their human dignity. A descent into hell.

– Rape. A word erased from the history of wars. Almost absent from the macho cult of warfare. All the more so from the mythology of the Warsaw Uprising. In that mythology, after all, there are only bayonets on weapons and a bright dawn. No one bowed over the raped women. They had to push the event as deeply as possible into their memories, as if it were their shame, their stigma. We must remove the shame from this word. We must recognize the victims of wartime rape as heroines. Because it was heroism – to go on living and remain silent – appeals Elżbieta Podleśna, initiator of the community vigils at Zieleniak.

The First Testimony

At about 10 a.m. on 4 August 1944, the RONA SS brigade regiment (Russian National Liberation Army), under the command of Colonel Bronisław Kamiński, entered Ochota. It was an SS-controlled formation established in 1941, made up of Russians, largely collaborators, deserters and Soviet prisoners of war who had decided to fight on the German side. The units sent to Warsaw consisted exclusively of unmarried men, most of them with criminal records. According to von dem Bach, Kamiński was a political adventurer who delivered propaganda speeches to his men about a great fascist Russia, of which he wanted to be the leader and Führer. Women and alcohol were the substance of his life. Before the war, the area of Zieleniak at 95 Grójecka Street was occupied by one of the largest marketplaces in Warsaw. The stalls stretched across an area comparable to a football field… During the uprising, this area became a makeshift concentration camp and another site of terror. Rape was simply the way of life of the men of RONA, who treated Warsaw women as a kind of reward they had earned through years of service to the Germans. Zieleniak was the most convenient place to commit this crime because thousands of women were imprisoned there, providing them with a selection. From the first night, soldiers walked around, illuminating with flashlights the people crouched on the ground. Terrible, luminous circles stopped on terrified faces – girls and women were simply dragged away somewhere else. They were often raped in a cordoned-off area or behind the wall, but they could be taken anywhere, including the market toilets.

Alexandra Richie – Warsaw 1944. The Tragic Uprising. The Fate of Ochota

The Second Testimony

– At that “Zieleniak,” were you afraid that the RONA men might come, kill or rape you?
– They raped women. I didn’t have to be afraid, because every girl had to go through it. No one was spared there.
– Were there any boys who tried to defend you?
– There were boys. They supported us greatly, but there was no question of defending us at all. They were completely unable to defend us. I even had one very close male friend, and another. The boys were very helpful. They were powerless against it.

Irena Suryn, code-named Stefania, Oral History Archive

The Third Testimony

Irena Obraniak’s friend had two daughters, aged eight and eleven. “One of the RONA soldiers wanted to take one of them, but my friend offered herself in exchange. We could hear her screams and crying all night, and at dawn she was shot anyway. Her husband lost his mind.” Honorata Wolska saw one of the men take a twelve-year-old girl and kill her mother, who had offered herself in exchange for the child. He raped the girl right beside her mother’s body… On the second night in the camp, Eugenia Wilczyńska hid while Kamiński’s soldiers, running in pairs around the marketplace, took away pretty young girls. “The next day, the bodies of those girls were seen in a ditch. The parents had fits of madness. They screamed. They were shot at. The people next to them, wanting to save them, pressed their hands firmly over their mouths so that the screams would not reach the RONA men’s ears. Ryszard Lemiszewski recalled that some women were taken more than once: ‘those who returned were hysterical and unable to speak.

Wiesława Chmielewska saw a RONA soldier pulling a woman out of the group. “She begged the people around her for help, but no one dared do anything. Then she stood up, faced the soldier and struck him very hard in the face. He drew a pistol and shot her…

Zofia Piotrowska remembers RONA soldiers taking a young woman away from her husband and child; the husband began to shout, and the soldiers told him they would kill him if he did not stop. She returned after some time. She had been beaten, her clothes were torn, and she was sobbing convulsively. Nine RONA men raped her. Zofia also saw an eleven-year-old girl lying beneath the wall who had been raped and beaten by Kamiński’s men. Her mother knelt and held her in her arms. The girl died that night…

The women learned to hide under disguises in order to survive this prison hell somehow… Maria Piekarz smeared mud and dirt all over her face and put a pillow under her dress. One of the husbands cut himself until he bled, soaked bandages and rags in the blood, and then wrapped the woman’s head and hands with them so that she would look ill and wounded… At night, families desperately tried to hide the girls and women. Halina Szczepanik, who had seen many women and girls being pulled from the crowd by soldiers on the way to Zieleniak, was covered with a dirty blanket, with her four younger siblings lying on top of her.

Marta Piekarz, who was imprisoned at Zieleniak for several weeks, avoided rape because she was covered with rags. Five of her sister’s children and other family members lay on top of her. Irena Obraniak also avoided rape because her family slept on top of her; at dawn, they had to massage and pat her skin to restore blood circulation… The father of nineteen-year-old Genowefa Lange dug a hole in the ground in the middle of the marketplace, and she lay in the dirty pit. Someone was always sitting on her…

Alexandra Richie – Warsaw 1944. The Tragic Uprising. The Fate of Ochota

The Fourth Testimony

I still remember how we slept. We slept on the pavement like this: I lay on my mother.
The point was that my mother was young and attractive, and (…) they walked around and picked out the prettiest
girls at night, so I lay on my mother and covered her. It was very uncomfortable.”

Irena Chajęcka, MPW Oral History Archive

The Fifth Testimony

You know the name Zieleniak because vegetables and fruit are still sold there today, and the name appears on a green neon sign. At that time, Zieleniak was an empty square, enclosed by a wall and equipped with several hydrants. A crowd was driven there at gunpoint, gradually filling the entire square more tightly. People brought their wounded, children and helpless old people with them. Together, we found ourselves in the hands of a special auxiliary Wehrmacht unit made up of former prisoners of war, Soviet soldiers. People in a terrifying condition. I saw some of them up close as they rummaged through our crowd, pulling women and girls from it, raping and killing them on the spot. The crowd did not dare defend them (I remember that one cannot rely on a crowd!). My mother defended me, shouting something in Russian that evidently reached the soldier’s clouded consciousness. When night fell, rockets with plumes of fire flew over Zieleniak, aimed at the city and the houses already burning. Lying on the ground, I saw them clearly because they flew slowly. I remember that ominous slowness. When, after several days of the “Uprising of Ordinary People,” we were driven onto the road to the West Railway Station, numerous bodies remained at Zieleniak, with nothing to cover them. Did anyone bury these neighbors, and who? Today, beside the calmly trading gathering of Zieleniak’s peaceful users, stands a plaque bearing the names of the victims.
In my opinion, the anniversary of the “Uprising of Ordinary People” is not suitable for foreign guests. Just in case, I would like to teach many of them that WAR IS A MISFORTUNE. This fact may still not have reached these young people. But can it reach them now, when vegetable stalls are calmly operating in the square of mourning? Then too, toward evening, grasshoppers chirped loudly in the gardens behind the wall. Ordinary people and their uprising. Experiences buried beneath layers of other experiences. Those from the special auxiliary unit, recruited in a prisoner-of-war camp worse than Zieleniak, with no prospect of a future and no chance of returning to ordinary life somewhere far away, from wherever the war had driven them. What happened to them? Did the war consume them forever? Did it also consume the creators and commanders of the auxiliary unit? If any of the murderers survived – for example, in Canada or the USA – perhaps he still parades the achievement of “fighting communism”? The front flickers. Who carries death to whom, from where and to where. I ask for a day of mourning to commemorate these events. One can certainly buy flowers at Zieleniak.

Halina Bortnowska