Throughout the sixty-three days of the rising, Hosenfeld had stuck to the official terminology, calling the insurgents ‘bandits’, describing the young female prisoners he wanted to save as misguided, and explaining all civilian support as coerced. Now that the German command had finally recognised them as a legitimate force to be accorded prisoner-of-war status, Hosenfeld felt free to express his full admiration: ‘What national spirit is and in what true spontaneous form it can express itself, when a people has endured five years of undeserved suffering, that one could experience here.
