Polish hero's ashes are buried in Warsaw
He died in exile from his country.
WARSAW, Poland (AP) -- The remains of the revered leader of a doomed 1944 revolt against Poland's Nazi occupiers were finally laid to rest Friday in Warsaw, brought from the United States for a ceremonial funeral as part of 60th anniversary observances of the uprising.
Antoni Chrusciel was chief of the Home Army resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Warsaw and commanded the thousands of largely teenage insurgents who rose up against the Germans on Aug. 1, 1944.
Led fighting
He led 63 days of fighting, until the resistance gave way to the better-armed enemy. Some 200,000 Poles, including 20,000 insurgents, died in the uprising, and the city was turned to rubble.
"He was -- and remains -- one of our national heroes," Warsaw Mayor Lech Kaczynski said as Chrusciel's remains were interred at the city's Powazki military cemetery.
Chrusciel was captured and held in prison camps in Germany until being liberated by U.S. troops.
Instead of returning to communist Poland after the war, he chose to live in exile in Britain and moved to the United States in 1956, settling in Washington, D.C. He died there in 1960 at age 65.
"World War II expelled him from his own country," Kaczynski told a crowd of more than 1,000 people, including family members and war veterans, gathered in the wooded cemetery.
Zbigniew Scibor-Rylski, head of the Warsaw Insurgents' Union, a veterans association, said the 1989 fall of communism and rebirth of democracy in Poland were Chrusciel's dream, one he never got to see.
"The ideals you struggled for have become reality," he said at the funeral. "Poland is free from foreign domination."
Ten Polish army soldiers fired three volleys in salute as the remains of Chrusciel and his wife, Waleria, were lowered into the ground.
Chrusciel's two daughters -- Wanda and Jadwiga -- brought their parents' ashes to Warsaw on Wednesday.
"This burial is a symbol of good hope for Poland," Jadwiga Chrusciel said after the ceremony.
"Our father always had hope that something would change in Poland and he would be able to return."
The funeral was preceded by a Roman Catholic Mass at the garrison church in the Old Town, the scene of most of the fighting during the uprising.
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