Warsaw Uprising
On 31 July, Deputy Head of Mission Brendan Farrell attended ceremonies to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising which commenced on 1 August 1944. We remember their courage, their suffering and their sacrifice.
The Embassy also separately paid tribute to women of the uprising by laying flowers at the monument "Kobietom Powstania Warszawskiego". One such heroic participant was Irish-Polish woman Eileen Frances Short-Garlińska, whose involvement in the uprising is remembered in a plaque at the Field Cathedral of the Polish Army in Warsaw.
Eileen Short was born to an Irish family in Liverpool in 1912. She moved to Warsaw in 1935 to teach English, and married Józef Garliński in September 1939. Eileen and her husband joined the Home Army and worked to resist the Nazi German occupation of Poland.
When the Warsaw Uprising broke out, Eileen became a nurse in the Kryska Group operating in Czerniaków. Afterwards she escaped to Britain, where she worked as a translator for the Polish Government-in-Exile. She was awarded the Knight’s Cross of Polonia Restituta by the Government-in-Exile in 1986. She died on 26 March 1990.