Poland declares new holiday honouring WW2 underground resistance Home Army

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Poland has established a new national holiday honouring the Home Army (AK), its underground resistance force during the German and Soviet occupations in World War Two.

The Home Army, which worked in unison with the London-based Polish government-in-exile, is believed by many historians to have been the largest underground force in occupied Europe, with estimates of its maximum size ranging between 200,000 and 600,000.

While Poland annually commemorates the anniversary of the Home Army’s formation on 14 February, it has not been an official holiday. That has now changed after President Andrzej Duda signed into law a bill earlier passed unanimously by parliament.

The new holiday, called National Day of Remembrance of the Soldiers of the Home Army, will, however, not be a statutory day off work.

This is “a holiday that should have existed for a long time”, said Duda during a ceremony on Thursday to sign the bill into law, attended by surviving veterans of the Home Army.

“Thank you for your service to the homeland not only in those dark times, when Poland was not on the map, when you fought, risking your lives, but also later, when you bore witness, showing with your attitude what it means to be a true Pole, a patriot, what it means to love the homeland,” said the president.

Duda said that the Home Army was not only “certainly the largest underground armed formation in German-occupied Europe”, but “also probably the largest underground armed formation in the history of the world”.

The president thanked members of Civic Coalition (KO), Poland’s main ruling group, for initiating the legislation. Normally, Duda – who is aligned with the conservative opposition – is at odds with the more liberal KO-led governing coalition.

Last month, both houses of parliament unanimously approved the bill, after which it passed to the president for his signature.

One of those who led work on the legislation, KO MP Piotr Adamowicz, noted that, whereas many other historical military formations, such as the so-called “Cursed Soldiers”, who fought against the postwar establishment of communism in Poland, are honoured with holidays, the Home Army is not.

The bill aims to “fill this gap” and to pay “tribute to the several hundred thousand Polish women and men who fought for the independence of our country in the underground army during World War Two and were persecuted by the communist authorities after its end”.

Unlike many other countries occupied by Germany during the war, Poland never had a collaborationist government. After the German and Soviet invasions of September 1939, a range of Polish resistance groups emerged, while a government-in-exile was established first in France, later moving to London.

Initially, the main resistance group was the Union of Armed Struggle (ZWZ), formed in November 1939. On 14 February 1942, it was renamed as the Home Army on the orders of Władysław Sikorski, the prime minister of the government-in-exile. Both the ZWZ and the AK progressively absorbed other, smaller underground groups.

The Home Army functioned as part of a broader underground state created in occupied Poland. It held allegiance and was, in theory, subordinate to the government-in-exile though, in practice, it often functioned independently.

In his history of Poland, God’s Playground, Norman Davies wrote that the AK “could fairly claim to be the largest European resistance formation”.

However, given the nature of such underground activity, precise estimates of size are difficult. The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands and France also had large resistance forces.

The largest operation mounted by the AK – and indeed the largest single military effort undertaken by any European resistance movement during the war – was the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, which saw tens of thousands of fighters unsuccessfully seek to liberate the city from German occupation.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Juliusz Bogdan Deczkowski/Wikimedia Commons (under public domain)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.