Warsaw – Warsaw Insurgents Cemetery

This is the Warsaw Insurgents Cemetery in the Wola district of the city, commemorating the lives of those who were killed in the Warsaw Uprising. There are something like 100,000 people buried here, but the exact number isn’t known as some bodies and cremation remains were brought in from other sites around the city.

The main monument known as ‘The Fallen Unconquerable’, unveiled on 20 September 1973.

The cemetery itself opened on 25 November 1945 and burials continued there until the early 1950s, such was the complexity in moving so many human remains. Unfortunately, the cemetery wasn’t given the attention that it could have been when under Soviet influence, something only corrected in the 1990s.

The figure has a shield, a deliberate reminder that the people of Warsaw were defending themselves from attack and weren’t the aggressors. The stones in front of the monument were taken from around Wola, to signify the blood of Poles which had flowed onto them.

A mass grave of victims.

The names of people who died in the Uprising, along with when they were born and where they lived.

The scale of the massacre is evident when looking at how many of these columns of names there are.

And they go on almost as far as the eye can see.