When ‘on mission’ I like to get up early and jog around wherever I happen to be, so this morning I jogged around a 7.5 kilometre circuit helpfully mapped out by the hotel. The route took me alongside the Vistula for several kilometres and I couldn’t help but think about what we had seen at the Uprising Museum the previous evening. By 10 September (the uprising had begun on 1 August 1944), the Soviet troops occupied much of the east bank of the river, opposite the city. Maybe the morning mist made the river, with its shoals and sandbanks, seem a little narrower, but the Soviet troops must have been literally within shouting distance of the city, and yet they stood by until, on 2 October, the Poles, by now without food or water, announced a ceasefire and then surrendered. Stalin was guilty of very many ignominious acts of commission but this must surely rank among his greatest ignominious acts of omission. In the end, an estimated 150,000 Poles had died and over eighty per cent of the city had been destroyed. It is difficult not to feel a sense of history in such a place.