Pamięci Żołnierzy AK Powstańców Mokotowa, Warsaw

Here is the Baszta Soldiers Memorial, a concrete obelisk in Eye of the Sea Park beside Dworkowa Street. It honours around 140 Warsaw Uprising insurgents, predominantly Home Army soldiers from the Baszta Regiment Group, killed here by the Order Police on the twenty-seventh of September nineteen forty-four. They had tried to leave Mokotów through the sewers for the city centre, but German officers discovered them and compelled them to emerge at Dworkowa Street.

The sewer manhole beside the memorial marks that dreadful route; another, symbolic cover is set into the stone-paved pedestal. Notice the painted footprints connecting the nearby manhole to this monument: they turn an escape route into a visible line of remembrance. The structure rises about six metres, its three uneven concrete shafts gathered beneath a hexagonal slab.

Its surfaces carry emblems of military courage, the Baszta unit, and the Polish Underground State. Eugeniusz Ajewski designed the memorial, unveiled on the fortieth anniversary of the killings. Aleksander Kowalewski, a Baszta soldier who survived, lit its inaugural grave candle.