Podwale: The Little Insurgent and the Shoemaker with a Sabre

Why is it significant?

By the red brick city walls, find a small bronze boy in a helmet far too big for him, clutching a submachine gun almost as long as his arm. Children stop in front of him, and so do grandparents, and they rarely say much.

Key Facts

Open the walk

By the red brick city walls, find a small bronze boy in a helmet far too big for him, clutching a submachine gun almost as long as his arm. Children stop in front of him, and so do grandparents, and they rarely say much. This is the Little Insurgent, Mały Powstaniec, by the sculptor Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz, unveiled in 1983 in honour of the children and teenagers of the Uprising.

Some of them fought. Many more served as couriers, running orders through cellars whose walls had been knocked through from house to house, and across barricades under fire. Scouts ran their own field post, collecting and delivering letters across the insurgent-held city, with post boxes and, later, their own stamps. The letters said what letters say in war: I am alive, where are you, is the house still standing. The helmet on the bronze boy is German: insurgents fought in captured helmets and uniforms, and often the only thing that marked them was a white-and-red armband.

Now turn to the big bronze man nearby, coat flying, sabre raised. Jan Kiliński was a Warsaw master shoemaker who, in April 1794, during the Kościuszko Uprising, helped lead the townspeople in the street fighting that drove the Russian garrison out of the city. His statue, by Stanisław Jackowski, first stood on Plac Krasińskich, where you started. In February 1942 a young scout saboteur, Aleksy Dawidowski, known as Alek, removed a German plaque from the Copernicus monument. The Germans retaliated by taking Kiliński off his pedestal and locking him in the National Museum. Soon afterwards, the story goes, a message appeared on the museum wall, signed by Kiliński himself, telling the people of Warsaw where he was.

Alek belonged to the Grey Ranks, the underground scouts. With his friends Tadeusz Zawadzki, Zośka, and Jan Bytnar, Rudy, he painted the Kotwica on walls all over the city. When Rudy was arrested and tortured in March 1943, his friends ambushed the prison truck near the Arsenal on 26 March and freed him with about twenty others. Rudy and Alek both died within days. Aleksander Kamiński told their story in Stones for the Rampart, printed underground in 1943.

Around the corner, on Kilińskiego street, pieces of a tank track hang on a wall. On 13 August 1944 a captured German tracked vehicle, unknowingly carrying a large explosive charge, blew up in a crowd and killed around three hundred people. Now walk south along Podwale and out of the Old Town towards the wide square of Plac Teatralny.