Officials have urged Poles to commemorate the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising ahead of Wednesday's 74th anniversary of the start of the WWII insurgency against Nazi Germany.

Polish flag with the symbol of Poland's WWII Underground State and Home Army. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Polish President Andrzej Duda took to Twitter to say that “we cannot allow for the Warsaw insurgents' actions to be forgotten”.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said he was grateful to those who worked to protect the graves of insurgents.

He met with scouts on Tuesday to clean the graves of some of the fallen soldiers in southern Warsaw.

He also said that Poland would introduce new laws to protect the burial sites of Warsaw insurgents.

Jan Ołdakowski, the head of the Warsaw Rising Museum, said he hoped the new laws would allow the sites “to be treated as war graves, which means they will not be allowed to be abolished”.

Meanwhile, Warsaw City Council held a special session at the Royal Castle to commemorate the anniversary.

On Tuesday evening, a roll call of Polish fighters who died in the uprising was to be held before a concert entitled August Love, which recounts the stories of the young insurgents who got married during the uprising.

Also in honour of the anniversary, a Polish flag featuring the emblem of Poland's WWII underground state was to be hoisted up a giant mast in Warsaw’s centre, and bouquets of yellow and red flowers – the colours of the city – were to be laid at numerous locations which saw fighting 74 years ago.

The Warsaw Uprising started at 5 pm on August 1, 1944.

The bloody insurgency resulted in the death of as many as 18,000 fighters and up to 180,000 civilians, according to Poland's Institute of National Remembrance.

The insurgency lasted 63 days before being put down by better equipped and more numerous German forces.

The uprising was the largest military operation by any resistance movement in Europe against the continent's Nazi German occupiers during World War II.

At 5 pm on Wednesday, many cars and pedestrians in Warsaw will traditionally come to a standstill, and many drivers were expected to blast their horns in a moving minute-long salute to the fallen fighters.

(vb/pk)

Source: IAR, PAP