Filming the Warsaw Uprising: The Secret Camera Crew of a City at War

kadr_z_filmu_powstanie_warszawskie_2014_fot_materialy_prasowe.jpg, default, Still from the film Warsaw Uprising, photo: Warsaw Rising Museum / Next Film

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Almost every image the world has seen of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising was shot by the same small group of people: a clandestine film unit trained in secret flats and photographic studios under German occupation, who spent the 63 days of the fighting filming from barricades, carrying exposed reels through the sewers, and cutting newsreels fast enough to screen them in a city that was still burning. Over those nine weeks they recorded hundreds of shots documenting the fighting in the capital. Only a few hours of their footage survives today.

Who were they? Where did they find cameras and film stock in occupied Warsaw? How did thousands of people come to sit in cinemas, mid-uprising, to watch what they had shot? Why did the newsreels become an embarrassment to the communist authorities after the war – and how did some of that footage end up in a Hollywood film?

If you have seen the 1944 uprising on screen – the insurgents on the barricades, the crowds outside the cinema, the ruined colonnades of Krakowskie Przedmieście – you have almost certainly been watching this unit’s work. It is their material that the Warsaw Rising Museum (also known in English as the Warsaw Uprising Museum) colourised and set to sound for Warsaw Uprising (2014), directed by Jan Komasa and built entirely from the original newsreels – images from them can be seen at the Monument to the Memory of the Filmmakers in Freedom Park outside the museum, which functions as an insurgent fotoplasticon, a historic peep-show viewing device. Much earlier, their footage also reached 3,000 cinemas across the United States and Western Europe in Last Days of Warsaw (1952), an American production whose credits never mentioned them. The men who shot it have remained, for 80 years, the anonymous ‘cameramen of the Bureau of Information and Propaganda’. These are their names.

In hiding: how the Home Army trained its cameramen in secret

Their story began in the summer of 1942, when the Propaganda Division of the Home Army High Command’s Bureau of Information and Propaganda was established. The film section was headed first by Stanisław Adamiecki, and later by Antoni Bohdziewicz, an experienced radio man and film critic who had been artistically trained at the prestigious École Technique de Photographie et de Cinématographie in Paris. A Home Army soldier since 1939 under the pseudonym ‘Wiktor’, he worked with his comrades to organise a network of filmmakers tasked with documenting the crimes committed by the Nazi German occupiers.

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Film "Powstanie Warszawskie" - zwiastun | "Warsaw Rising" film - trailer

This was no easy task. When the Germans occupied Warsaw in 1939, they immediately seized the entire film infrastructure. Cinemas became venues for spreading Nazi propaganda, and the city’s most modern film laboratory, Falanga, was seized and used to produce films glorifying the master race as bearers of civilisational progress. Responsible for their production were not only Germans but also Polish filmmakers – often marginalised by the pre-war film industry – who, in this new situation, chose to collaborate with the occupier (a subject covered in Krzysztof Trojanowski's excellent book Świnie w Kinie: Film w Okupowanej Polsce (Pigs at the Cinema: Film in Occupied Poland).

What’s more, in October 1940 Hans Frank issued a decree on the seizure of film equipment, requiring Warsaw’s residents to register all cameras, lamps and film stock. Registered equipment was confiscated and handed over for German propaganda purposes, while concealing such materials or equipment carried the risk of imprisonment or a heavy fine.

Bohdziewicz and his colleagues – mostly experienced pre-war filmmakers – took on near-espionage tasks to obtain supplies of celluloid film. They also lacked people capable of operating film equipment, so Bohdziewicz decided they would have to train their own, and organised courses in film knowledge. The six-month training sessions began in late 1942, with the final ‘intake’ closing in spring 1945. Courses were held in a photography studio that served as a hideout for the Polish underground, as well as in Bohdziewicz’s flat at 8 Szpitalna Street. Both theory and practice were taught there, with instructors including directors Jerzy Zarzycki and Janina Cękalska, who had radio experience, and the respected pre-war cameraman Leonard Zawisławski. For security reasons, the names of the 17 course participants were unknown even to their instructors, and everyone addressed each other by pseudonym.

1 August 1944: filming from the barricades

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Stefan Bagiński, nom de guerre 'Stefan', during the Warsaw Uprising, photo: Unknown / Public Domain

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On 1 August 1944 at 5pm, so-called ‘W-Hour’, the Warsaw Uprising began, and all the camerapeople found themselves on the city’s streets. Their equipment included spring-driven cameras as well as older, hand-cranked models. To increase their supply of film stock, they requisitioned it from German shops and from film studios seized by the insurgents. The 30,000 metres of negative gathered this way allowed the filming work to continue.

In the seized pre-war Falanga studio building at 6 Leszczyńska Street, an editing suite was set up, where over the following weeks Bohdziewicz and his collaborator Wacław Kaźmierczak worked at breakneck speed to produce successive instalments of the uprising newsreel.

Armed with cameras, the filmmakers recorded the most important events of the uprising: the capture of the German police headquarters and the Church of the Holy Cross on Krakowskie Przedmieście, German assaults on insurgent positions, the clash between the Kiliński battalion and German tanks, and finally the capture of the PAST building, one of the most strategically important sites of the uprising’s battles.

Before the fighting even began, they divided the city’s districts among themselves – no cameraperson was allowed to work in the district where they normally lived. Should any of them be captured, this was meant to make it harder for the Germans to establish their identity, since local residents could not be used to identify anyone.

While documenting the fighting, the newsreel operators had to look after both their own safety and their equipment. Working conditions were unkind to cameras – especially to lenses. They became coated in dust, and the grime that settled in the grooves made changing them difficult or even impossible. Simply moving around the city was a challenge in itself, as recalled by Stefan Bagiński, a cameraman who, in the last days of August, made his way through the sewers from the city centre to the Old Town. To keep his camera and film from getting wet, he placed them on an inner tube from a car, which he then hung around his neck.

Near misses: filming under tank fire

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Andrzej Ancuta, 1944, photo: Wikipedia

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They brushed up against death more than once. In the very first days of the Warsaw Uprising, Antoni Bohdziewicz nearly lost his life while filming with a cameraman, hidden on the balcony of his flat on Szpitalna Street. Spotting a plane flying over the city, he was convinced it was a British aircraft and began signalling towards it. The plane turned out to be a German fighter, which moments later opened fire on the filmmakers’ secret hideout. Bohdziewicz and his colleague miraculously survived with their lives and equipment intact.

Two other filmmakers earned particular fame: Jerzy Zarzycki and the young Andrzej Ancuta, who displayed heroic daring while working on the barricades. In September 1944, hidden on the balcony of Staszic Palace, they were filming Krakowskie Przedmieście. German tanks were stationed nearby, but Zarzycki and Ancuta seemed to pay them little mind. But at one point, they were spotted, and one of the tanks took aim at their position. At the last moment, Zarzycki pulled Ancuta – who, absorbed in his viewfinder, hadn’t noticed the danger – back inside. Seconds later, a shell tore through sections of the building’s wall and colonnade.

The filmmakers’ work also produced its share of amusing anecdotes. Stefan Bagiński recalled after the war:

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I had an unusual adventure on the corner of Ciepła and Grzybowska. I was walking along with my camera, and the lads stationed there took it for some kind of modern weapon. They thought the attack was already starting and followed me towards the police riding school on Ciepła Street. The Germans got frightened and abandoned their post almost without a fight.

The uprising newsreels: cinema in a burning city

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Antoni Bohdziewicz, 1960, photo: CAF / PAP

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The uprising newsreels were made in an atmosphere of feverish urgency. Bohdziewicz and his military superiors wanted the material to reach the screen as quickly as possible. It was meant to lift the spirits and build the morale of soldiers and civilians alike. Jerzy Zarzycki later recalled that ‘the films were developed and copied within 12 hours of shooting [...] even as the city burned and bombs fell from the sky’.

Camerapeople working in various districts brought their footage to the laboratory on Leszczyńska Street, where Kaźmierczak and Bohdziewicz hastily edited the finished newsreel, which then had to pass through military censors before its premiere. This is how the first instalment of the newsreel series was born – running just under 11 minutes – which soon drew thousands of viewers to the capital’s Palladium cinema.

The first screening took place as early as 13 August 1944, intended for representatives of 30 press titles. The journalists received the film with enthusiasm, and thanks to them, a few days later Warsaw’s civilians were also gathering outside the Palladium in search of hope for victory on the cinema screen.

Three further screenings took place between 15 and 28 August, each watched by a full house. The Palladium’s hall was decorated with patriotic motifs, and although the newsreels were, of course, silent, Bohdziewicz supplemented them with his own live commentary while music played from records on a gramophone placed on the balcony. Screenings of the next two instalments generated equal enthusiasm. The second episode in particular brought comfort, as Bohdziewicz and Kaźmierczak included footage of the insurgents capturing the PAST building – filmed just one day before the cinema screening.

The newsreels soon stopped being shown publicly, and the third instalment turned out to be the last one completed in full. First, on 25 August, German shelling destroyed the laboratory on Leszczyńska Street, forcing Bohdziewicz to suspend editing work. Shortly afterwards, the Palladium cinema was also damaged. This did not, however, mean the end of the chroniclers’ filming work. They continued heading out onto the streets of Warsaw to document the uprising – and soon, too, its sorrowful end.

Lost, buried & stolen: what happened to the footage

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Still from the film Warsaw Uprising, photo: Warsaw Rising Museum / Next Film

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Not all the material they shot survives today – some was irretrievably destroyed during the fighting. Among the lost footage was material the filmmakers were forced to abandon at the children’s hospital at 136 Leszno Street. They had been using the building’s X-ray darkroom to transfer film from their cameras into metal cassettes. During one such operation, the hospital was surrounded by Russian units collaborating with the Germans, and the filmmakers had to abandon the material and flee to save themselves. Although Jerzy Zarzycki later learned that the material had been hidden in Warsaw’s Stawki district, it was never found.

Other lost material, however, did resurface. In 1946, a group of children at play discovered cassettes of film buried in the ground, which turned out to be fragments of the newsreels. That same year they were conserved, but this was not the end of their turbulent history. After being edited by Wacław Kaźmierczak, the material disappeared into the archives, only to be rediscovered in 1956 – cut into pieces and spliced back together in a completely random order, bearing no resemblance to the film Kaźmierczak had created. It was not reconstructed until the 1980s, reaching cinema screens in 1989 as the documentary Warszawa Walczy! (Warsaw Fights!).

No less dramatic was the fate of other newsreel material. Fragments filmed after the uprising’s fall by Jerzy Gabryelski and Seweryn Kruszyński left Poland in the years that followed – Gabryelski entrusted insurgent reels to the American embassy in Warsaw in 1946, to save them from destruction – and made their way to the United States. What was given up for safekeeping, however, did not stay in safe keeping. The material was passed on without the filmmakers’ agreement to Wincenty Bejtman, a Polish producer who had been in the USA since the war, and appeared in his 1952 film Last Days of Warsaw, with a commentary written by the poet Jan Lechoń. It was screened in 3,000 cinemas across the USA and Western Europe. Jerzy Gabryelski fought unsuccessfully to have his authorship recognised.

For many decades, the uprising’s chroniclers, camerapeople and directors remained in the shadow of history, which so often went on to steer their lives and post-war careers. Some, like Seweryn Kruszyński, became involved in socialist-realist cinema, while others – Jerzy Gabryelski, Stanisław Bala and Wacław Kaźmierczak among them – devoted themselves to documentary film. Andrzej Ancuta and Antoni Bohdziewicz soon became legends of the Łódź Film School. Their achievements as chroniclers were only recognised many years later, and they gained their ‘fame’ posthumously, when the Warsaw Rising Museum decided to produce a film from colourised uprising newsreels. The documentary material shot by Bohdziewicz’s team lived again on screen – a memorial not only to the uprising itself, but to this extraordinary film crew.

Originally written in Polish, August 2025, translated into English by AZ, July 2026

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