BY JACK KOMPERDA AND STACY ST. CLAIR
PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRIAN HILL

Wood Dale resident Zbigniew Krzyzewski waves to members of the Chicago delegation as he walks in a procession of Warsaw Uprising veterans in front of Poland's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

WARSAW - The young boy banged on the front door at 10 a.m. with an urgent message for Zbigniew Krzyzewski.

He had to report to an apartment complex on Electoralnej Street immediately.

The insurrection was about to begin.

Krzyzewski presented himself for duty, a decision that both changed his life and reflected his homeland's historic pursuit of freedom.

Until that moment, he had been a 21-year-old bookkeeper working for a pharmaceutical company in a Jewish quarter. He watched the Nazis roll into Warsaw four years earlier and erect walls to corral the Jews in the neighborhood.

Krzyzewski, who was raised Catholic, continued to go to work each day, using a special pass to move in and out of the Jewish ghetto. He saw the starvation, the death and the torture on a daily basis.

He heard the gunfire erupt in 1943 when a small group of Jewish men decided to risk their lives for freedom. The Ghetto Uprising, as it came to be known, failed, but the idea of battling the German oppressors took root across Warsaw.

Girl Scouts Vivien Lowvodzinski of Los Angeles, Katherine Dabrowski of Lombard and Eva Kamieniak of Des Plaines stand on the graves of three Uprising soldiers as sirens wail to mark the 60th anniversary of the rebellion's start.

A few months later, Krzyzewski's best friend asked him if he'd be willing to fight. By day's end, he had joined Poland's underground army.

The soldiers held secret meetings in homes during the first half of 1944. They learned to use weapons, planned battle tactics and dreamed of a liberated Warsaw.

When their marching orders came on Aug. 1, Krzyzewski and 200 others crammed into three buildings on Electoralnej Street. The underground soldiers, some of them as young as 12 years old, wore red-and-white arm bands to differentiate themselves from civilians.

At 5 p.m., the first shots were fired. Krzyzewski, a corporal in the poorly equipped army, marched into war without a uniform - or a gun.

The Warsaw Uprising, an impossible firefight between Polish youth and Hitler's army, lasted 63 days and embodied Poland's history of improbable battles against oppressors.

The insurgents lost and the few surviving soldiers were sent to German prison camps. Their heroic battle became a little-discussed historical postscript.

Years later, the Communist-run schools in Poland described the fighters as silly kids who died in vain. Western history books glossed over the event because Allied forces largely ignored it.

Sixty years later, Zbigniew Krzyzewski, traveled 4,600 miles to join 2,000 of his fellow veterans. They arrived in late July, determined to teach younger generations a significant lesson about sacrifice and patriotism.

The temperature has soared into the mid-90s on this unseasonably warm summer day in Warsaw's Old Town. The sweat drips from Zbigniew Krzyzewski's brow, but he refuses to remove his Navy blue blazer or loosen his tie.

His clothes, along with a red-and-white armband, are his uniform. They identify the retired draftsman from Wood Dale as a member of Armia Krajowa, the Polish Home Army.

As he walks through the Old Town, people smile and nod in Krzyzewski's direction. He is receiving a hero's homecoming 60 years after the fact.

"Everybody thinks we're like big heroes. I don't feel like a hero. We were young kids," Krzyzewski, now 82, says. "We treated it as a game. We didn't think about getting killed."

Freedom was the only thing Warsaw residents could think about in the months before the Uprising. They wanted to reclaim their city, a once-vibrant cultural center that withered under German oppression.

Before the occupation, the city boasted artists, businessmen and scholars. It presented itself as a colorful tapestry, successfully weaving together different religions, politics and ethnic backgrounds.

The 1939 German invasion shredded Warsaw's fabric. The Nazis condemned 450,000 Jews to the ghetto. They banned education and rationed utilities. Food became scarce.

Krzyzewski was only 17 when the occupation began. With the university shuttered, he attended clandestine classes at professors' homes.

The majority of the Uprising's 2,000 living veterans attended 60th anniversary events, including this one at the Plac Powstancow. Warsaw's mayor apologized at this ceremony for not honoring the Uprising's heroes sooner.

He also worked as a bookkeeper, using his paycheck to care for his widowed mother. Each day, his resentment toward the Nazis grew deeper.

When his best friend, Zbigniew Wagner, asked him to join the underground army, the decision was easy.

The friends' army battalion huddled in secret for eight months. Missing just one meeting meant certain expulsion.

Krzyzewski and the others abided by the "rule of four," which precluded the men from knowing the names of more than four men in the battalion. The directive made it impossible for soldiers to give up names if they were captured.

The soldiers were known by number and nickname. Krzyzewski, No. 7980, chose Dewajtis after the title of a book he had just read.

The soldiers in his company were young, like all of the roughly 45,000 underground fighters. More than 9,000 children and teenagers - 20 percent of the insurgents - participated in the rebellion.

Polish Boy and Girl Scouts, dubbed the Gray Ranks because of their uniforms, took key roles. The boys fought alongside the men, while the girls administered first aid and worked as messengers.

In honor of their history, 2,000 Polish scouts from around the world have returned to Warsaw for the 60th anniversary. They spend their days visiting historical sites and serving as honor guards at various events.

They walk through Old Town in gray and khaki uniforms, licking ice cream cones and playing keep away with their berets. They laugh and sing campfire songs as they sit in the town square.

Six-year-old Grzegorz Bogulak of Wroclaw, Poland, waves a flag during a wreath-laying ceremony at Warsaw's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. "He was born a soldier," said his father Dariusz Bogulak, who brought the boy to the country's capital to commemorate the Uprising's 60th anniversary.

The veterans stare at them as if they are ghosts. The scouts seemingly haunt the city during the week, reminding Warsaw of the promise lost in 63 days.

The scouts gather at Warsaw's military cemetery on Aug. 1. The graveyard, the final resting place for most of the Uprising's dead, is filled with Poles marking the anniversary.

Red and white gladioluses blanket the gravesites. Znicze, colorful candles traditionally placed on Polish graves, flicker along the crammed walkways.

The scouts take turns standing over the gravesites. When the sirens sound at 5 p.m. to trumpet the Uprising's start time, two suburban scouts are among those on watch.

Katherine Dabrowski of Lombard and Eva Kamieniak of Des Plaines stare straight ahead as the sirens blare and the visitors stand motionless. Dabrowski's lips quiver as she thinks about the man buried beneath her.

Barely 20 years old, he died a few weeks into the Uprising.

"You think a lot about how young they all were," says Dabrowski, the 15-year-old daughter of Polish immigrants.

Three months later, the suburban scouts will participate in an Uprising re-enactment in Yorkville. As they act out battles, their imaginary fights will be spurred by a real recognition.

"It's hard for young people to understand today," says 21-year-old troop leader Szymon Leja of Schiller Park. "They weren't just fighting for their country. They were fighting for freedom."

Freedom, at the time of the Uprising, had eluded Poland for centuries. The country's borders have been erased and redrawn many times throughout its 1,000-year history.

It ceased to exist between 1795 and 1918, when Russia, Prussia and Austria divided it among themselves. Poles struggled to keep their identity until fighting among the three empires during World War I resulted in Poland's sovereignty.

Though Russia had a long record of oppressing Poland, the Poles trusted their neighbors in 1944 to help them fight the Nazis. They could see Stalin's Red army on the other side of the Vistula River and believed it would come to their aid.

The Home Army, led by Poland's exiled government in London, had enough ammunition to last for three days. By week's end, they calculated, the Russians would arrive and finish off the Germans.

Wood Dale resident Zbigniew Krzyzewski scans the Uprising memorial in search of names of fallen soldiers he once knew.

They didn't know the United States and Great Britain already had promised Poland to Stalin. The Russians viewed the Uprising as a chance to let the Germans do their dirty work and annihilate rebellious Poles.

The Russians sat by the river bank as 200,000 Polish soldiers and civilians lost their lives and the Nazis reduced Warsaw to rubble. The death toll is roughly equivalent to enduring a Sept. 11-like attack every day for 63 consecutive days.

The insurgents, only one-third of whom had guns, did not surrender easily. They stunned the Nazis and reclaimed much of the city within the Uprising's first week. They hoisted a Polish flag atop the Prudential, then Warsaw's tallest building, for the first time in five years.

With downtown back in Polish hands, Krzyzewski and his battalion moved to Old Town. They originally planned to take back the Royal Castle, but the goal proved impossible.

The Poles settled for controlling three streets just outside the palace square. Krzyzewski served as a lookout, peering through holes in the castle walls for four-hour stretches.

He hadn't showered or changed clothes since the Uprising began. It surprised him how little the dirt and body odor bothered him.

"You stop thinking about it," he says. "When you're fighting to stay alive, you don't worry about a bath."

The soldiers did begin to worry about food. Rations ran dangerously low and the civilians no longer had the resources to feed them.

Having realized the Russians were forsaking them, the Poles now prayed the British and Americans would help. They'd learned the Allies liberated France and dreamed of the same rescue.

U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill refused to send help in an effort to appease Stalin. With the exception of a few humanitarian airdrops - some of which accidentally blew into Nazi hands - the Home Army was on its own.

Two weeks into the rebellion, the insurgents confiscated an abandoned German tank and rolled it in front of army headquarters. Poles naively celebrated the capture until a time bomb attached to the modern-day Trojan horse exploded.

Krzyewski was ordered outside to clear the remains.

He pushed a cart through Kilinski Street, picking up severed hands and legs. He tried to peel off bodies that had been plastered to the wall during the explosion.

The trap took 300 lives.

Krzyzewski walks past the building 60 years later and pauses. It's an Audi dealership now and, with the exception of a small placard near the sidewalk, nothing hints of the horrific event that occurred here.

Memories of severed limbs and headless bodies instantly return. The phantom stench of blood mixed with smoke leaves him nauseous.

"I still can smell the smell," he says. "All those people dead in just one second."

More than 5,000 Polish women, depicted here during a Uprising re-enactment in Yorkville, took part in the rebellion. The female freedom fighters, 20 percent of the underground army, primarily served as medics and messengers in the war zone.

By month's end, food supplies and ammunition were exhausted. Much of Old Town had been leveled and it was clear the Poles would not win.

Krzyzewski and his battalion retreated downtown through the city's sewer system.

In the unlit tunnels, the soldiers slogged for more than two miles through chest-high waters filled with human waste and garbage.

When they emerged from the sewers, they found downtown still intact. The insurgents ransacked homes looking for food, but there wasn't much left to steal. On the brink of starvation, they began hunting stray dogs and cats.

"In they end, you couldn't find a dog or a cat," Krzyzewski says. "They were all eaten."

The Home Army surrendered on Oct. 2. Hitler ordered the 500-year-old city razed.

Only 15 percent of Warsaw buildings emerged intact.

The soldiers turned themselves in at checkpoints throughout the city. Krzyzewski, like most insurgents, was sent to a German prison camp.

He and Wagner spent the three months in Bad Harzburg chopping wood, hard work that seemed a welcome respite after two months of fighting.

When the war ended, Wagner received a letter from his father saying the Communist government was arresting Uprising veterans. He warned the same fate awaited the friends if they returned to Poland.

Both men sought and received asylum in the United States. Krzyzewski went to Buffalo, N.Y., a city he didn't like and where he knew few Poles.

He had friends in Chicago who played for a local soccer club. They offered to buy him a train ticket if he would be their new forward.

Krzyzewski agreed and began a new life in the Midwest. He became a draftsman and lived in Chicago until he retired.

He moved to Wood Dale, where he now lives in a comfortable two-bedroom condominium. His home is decorated with Uprising memorabilia and photos of Wagner's family.

Krzyzewski has not been to Warsaw in 10 years but felt compelled to return for the celebration. Though one of 80 Uprising veterans in the Chicago area, he is largely alone. Wagner, his best friend in the army and in life, died in 1994, nearly a half-century after immigrating to New York.

The Wood Dale man spends his week in Warsaw attending receptions, dedications and Catholic Masses honoring the soldiers. At each event, the Warsaw mayor apologizes for not honoring the veterans sooner but tells them it was impossible under Soviet rule.

Post-Communist Poland has embraced the Uprising and its tales of self-sacrifice. The city government recently paid for the construction of an Uprising monument and a $12 million museum, both of which opened during the celebration.

Polish citizens leave znicze in front of statues and historical buildings, including the Audi dealership where the German tank exploded.

They crane their necks to see such dignitaries as Polish Prime Minister Marek Belka and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. They hear U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell call the Uprising veterans heroes and friends of freedom.

Polish historians hope the anniversary celebrations and new museum will teach Poles about a valiant moment in history.

It will be an arduous task, given 53 percent of citizens can't name the date it started and nearly 30 percent believe it wasn't worth the cost.

Members of an Addison-based Polish Boy Scout troop pay their respects in front of a Warsaw memorial honoring the scouts who died in the Uprising.

"We have a lot of educating to do," says Lena Cichocka, a co-founder of the Uprising Museum. "For nearly 50 years, it wasn't talked about. People are just starting to learn."

In between official events, Krzyzewski makes a private visit to the new Uprising memorial. The monument, black marble plates modeled after the Vietnam Wall, has names of 18,000 underground soldiers who died in the rebellion.

Krzyzewski searches for the name of his childhood friend Rafal, who died on the Uprising's third day. Because of the intense secrecy surrounding the Home Army, Krzyzewski didn't know his friend was a soldier until he was dead.

His fingers trace "Rafal Sekel" twice before he can no longer see the name through his tears. He steps away from the monument to regain his composure and returns to touch it again.

"That's him," he says. "That's him."

He leaves the monument and heads toward the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Organizers have selected Krzyzewski to represent America at a wreath-laying ceremony.

He marches up to the tomb, keeping cadence with a somber snare drum. As a Polish soldier lays the flowers in front of the memorial, Krzyzewski raises his arm in a slow salute.

He hasn't saluted since he was a 22-year-old corporal hungering for both food and freedom. He stands in front of the tomb as an old man satisfied with how his life turned out and the contributions he made during it.

"We were so young," he says. "Maybe we were playing soldiers. But maybe we were heroes, too."