Mały Powstaniec, Warsaw

Mały Powstaniec is a memorial sculpture set against the Old Town fortifications on Podwale, honoring children and teenagers involved in the Warsaw Uprising. The child’s helmet overwhelms his head and the gun hangs from him; this is an image of childhood pressed into war, rather than a likeness of any particular young insurgent. The equipment recalls German weapons and helmets seized during the fighting, then used against the occupiers.

Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz created the design in nineteen forty-six, while he was studying sculpture and helping clear Warsaw’s ruins. For years, many families knew the work through miniature versions before it was made into this public monument. Warsaw scouts collected the money to cast and install it, and it was dedicated on the first of October nineteen eighty-three.

Its unveiling was performed by Jerzy Świderski, a doctor who had been a teenage Home Army courier during the uprising. The sandstone plaque in the wall beside the figure bears a scout emblem and lines from a well-known insurgent song. Together, the child, the wall, and the plaque make this a compact memorial with a heavy charge of memory.