That was not the way it was seen in the rest of Europe, where anything up to 7,000 Poles fled during or after the uprising. One of them was the composer Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49), who had left Warsaw just before the rebellion and was never to return. From Stuttgart he wrote helplessly to his father after the fall of Warsaw: ‘The enemy must have reached our home. The suburbs must have been stormed and burned . . . Oh, why could I not kill a single Muscovite!’
