“W hour”: the day when all of Poland stops for a minute

For all Europeans, 1st August is the day the holidays begin. For Warsaw it is the day of the "W hour", the moment when Poland freezes and then catches fire. All to remember a desperate rebellion of almost a century ago, the "Warsaw Uprising" which began on 1 August 1944.

I found myself in the middle of the event by pure chance: arrived at the station after a peaceful holiday in the small and colorful Wroclaw, Warsaw welcomes me with aoverheated atmosphere. There is a crazed army of people bouncing from street to street; towering skyscrapers entirely decorated with Polish flags; on street corners, boys with megaphones and armbands; stalls scattered along the streets selling gadgets, flags, pins and all sorts of patriotic objects. It feels like a da call to arms. And we got close.

The event looks promising: I decide to follow the crowd. And I find myself in a huge square, a few meters from the station, with suitcases, reflex camera in hand and more or less one hundred thousand people poured out along the streets of Warsaw.
A guy, noticing my spoken by wlochy (Italians in Poland are called that), he warns me in English: "at 5 the sirens will sound. It is an important moment, we remember it all over Poland". Laconic explanation, but which increases curiosity.

I have just arrived in the city, I have behind me eight hours by train, delays and breakdowns on the line. Fatigue knocks on the door, but I let myself be carried away by the enthusiasm of an entire population in fibrillation for celebrate an insurrection.

And there they are, the sirens all chorus a terrible and shrill sound.
A black shiver rises along the spine, thinking of the times when the "siren song" announced the arrival of new bombs, ready to grind the last rubble of the city with the same wickedness with which a person crushes and dismembers an insect already died.

But there is one thing that does not come back to me: where do the alarms come from?
Warsaw was little more than a pile of dust after World War II and all the buildings around the Central Station have only been built for a few years.

It means that the anti-aircraft alarm systems are still present throughout the city. And they are hidden who knows where, among the shining glass of the skyscrapers.

All ready to report an attack also in 2019.

The shiver down my spine becomes more intense.

I look around: there is a boy of about twenty who does not hold back tears while the alarms sound. He has long hair, arms full of tattoos and is still wearing the uniform of a Piekarnia (a bakery) in the area: probably not even his parents were born in 1944, but his tears seem those of an old man reliving the terrible memories of his childhood.
A little further on there is a father who hugs his son, while the child plays with the flag of resistance in his hands. And again, behind me two strangers instinctively shake hands: one is dressed as a military man, the other is a fat gentleman, with a t-shirt so short it makes his belly appear. In that minute Warsaw became one person.

The silence is broken only by a scream in that incomprehensible language spoken by the Poles. A comes on red smoke bomb in the distance, then another, then another. There is a circle of fire around me.
Then I discover that almost everyone has a red or white smoke bomb in their hands. And they light it in a cloud of red and white smoke worthy of a toxic fire.

Meanwhile, amid the dust and smoke, everyone is singing songs of the resistance at the top of their lungs, the so-called "prohibited songsWhich animated the Warsaw insurgents during their desperate attempt to free what was left of the city from German occupation.

An operation that, as the story goes, it ended with more than 15,000 dead and a humiliating surrender after two months of battles. Yet another bloodbath that anticipated the arrival of the Russians in the city, that they were no more lenient than the Germans to the Polish people.

But in 2019 the demonstration to remember the spirit of Poland that led to fighting even against one certain defeat against two giant enemies: the supreme demonstration of courage and love for one's freedom. The desire not to yield, again, to the bullies of history.

Finished the event and extinguished the smoke bombs, everyone returns to lovable strangers busy with their daily lives. August begins and even Warsaw can finally think about the holiday.

On the ground there is not a piece of paper, a bottle or, as might have been foreseen, a residue of those hundreds of smoke bombs used during the commemoration. Nobody dared to soil a city which lays its foundations in a ground made of rubble, bone and blood.