Everything they fought for.
- Mar 1
- 2 min read
On August 1, 1944, the underground resistance in Warsaw began what became known as the Warsaw Uprising. Imagine if you will, the five year reign of terror since the Nazis had taken Poland and now an all-out military effort to retake the city and reestablish Polish independence. Twenty-five hundred patriots would take on 25,000 German soldiers equipped with tanks, artillery, and heavy weaponry, and only one quarter of the partisans had weapons of any kind! Foolishness? Perhaps, but also bravery and patriotism on an unimaginable scale.
The end result? These intrepid freedom fighters held out for 63 days before ultimately being crushed. The retaliation was brutal, of course – eleven hundred brave partisans were captured and deported. Warsaw was razed to the ground and 180,000 civilians were murdered.
Now imagine that in the midst of this chaos was a tiny girl, a little eight-year-old, named Roza. Her father had been killed by the Gestapo the year before, and she had been forced to flee her burning home as the Uprising began. She found herself in the basement of a building, where a makeshift field hospital had been set up. Within these ravaged remains, in the midst of constant bombing and gunfire, Roza became something quite remarkable… the youngest nurse in the Polish Resistance. She worked every day with a constant stream of the gravely wounded, providing sips of water and encouraging her patients with smiles and good cheer. She represented everything they were fighting for – the precious innocence of childhood, unquestioning loyalty, and really, life itself. Her grateful patients nicknamed her "Little Rose".
Roza would survive the war, graduate from college, and later move to France, where she died in 1989. Resistance photographer, Eugeniusz Lokajski, snapped this iconic photo in 1944, capturing for all time the image of a brave little rose.
