Warsaw Letter: A knife, a bundle of maps, two revolvers and a gold airman's badge - these things survived when the Halifax bomber slammed into southern Poland in the small hours of August 5th, 1944.
They were dug up last month, along with the wreckage of the British aircraft and the remains of the young men who flew her: five from the Royal Canadian Air Force and two from the RAF, including Dublin-born Kenneth Ashmore.
The men's bones will be buried in Krakow, while their belongings will go on display at the Warsaw Uprising Museum, which commemorates the extraordinary struggle that led them to their deaths.
The crew was shot down by Poland's Nazi occupiers while flying a supply mission to Warsaw, where poorly equipped but ferociously determined fighters were trying to liberate their capital from the Germans.
It had begun on August 1st, when some 25,000 members of Poland's underground Home Army, many of them only teenagers, hurled themselves at Nazi positions around Warsaw, sure that the Allies would quickly rally to their cause.
In the early days of the struggle, the Home Army liberated swathes of the city, allowing some elements of Poland's underground "secret state" to emerge into the light.
Schools reopened, dozens of Polish newspapers appeared, plays and concerts were performed, and Mass was said at makeshift churches and chapels, all while the Home Army fought the Germans house by house for control of the city.
For 63 days, the Poles resisted a renewed Nazi onslaught, but substantial Allied help for the Home Army never arrived. Stalin reportedly told his army to halt its advance in the suburbs of Warsaw and to stand idle as Germany crushed fighters that could later oppose his Soviet takeover of Poland.
Moscow also forbade Allied planes carrying arms and supplies for the Polish army to land at airfields under Soviet control, forcing them to fly to Warsaw from Brindisi in southern Italy.
The RAF suffered heavy losses on those long and perilous flights, and it was on one of such foray that the Halifax of Sgt Ashmore and his comrades perished.
The Polish Home Army finally surrendered on October 2nd, ending a struggle that Heinrich Himmler, the commander of the SS and Gestapo, compared in intensity to the Battle of Stalingrad.
When Hitler was told about the uprising, he ordered Himmler to annihilate Warsaw and liquidate its one million inhabitants. Ultimately, about 250,000 Polish civilians died under the Luftwaffe's bombs and at the hands of SS death squads, some 500,000 people were deported and most of the city was razed. In just one district of Warsaw, Wola, German soldiers executed 40,000 civilians, burning or burying their bodies in huge pits.
It is in Wola that the Warsaw Uprising Museum stands, serving as the most striking monument to President Lech Kaczynski's 2002-5 stint as mayor of Warsaw.
Lech Kaczynski and his twin brother Jaroslaw, the current prime minister, were raised in a ruined Warsaw by parents who had served in the Home Army, and who steeped them in tales of a struggle that many Poles believe is central to understanding the 20th century and Poland's place in Europe.
"The common Anglo-Saxon view of the second World War is that Britain and the United States allied with the Soviet Union to defeat fascism," says Dariusz Gawin, deputy director of the Warsaw Uprising Museum.
"In Poland, the view is that the western democracies allied with one totalitarian system to defeat another, and Poland paid the price. We were the price the West paid for its alliance with Stalin."
Gawin is one of a group of young right-wing thinkers who regularly meet President Kaczynski at his country residence to discuss Poland's past, present and future.
"Poland's problem now is that it is caught between a post-modern Germany and a Russia that is pre-modern, or neo-Stalinist," he says, explaining that most Poles feel like they have been "on the right side" in the "moral struggle" of history.
"The Germans' problem is that with Hitler they stood on the wrong side and cannot be proud of that, so instead they say that for any nation to talk with pride about its history can lead to despotism, and is dangerous - and that really irritates Poles."
Many Poles think the world needs reminding about history and that the Kaczynskis - as champions of the Warsaw Uprising Museum - are the men to do it.
"The communists kept silent about the uprising after the war, and the Polish people had to wait so long for such a museum," says Ryszard Borenski, who as a 16-year-old fought to free Warsaw under the codename "Lynx".
"But now we have the Kaczynskis, and they are patriots," he says. "The West calls the Kaczynskis nationalists - but for us Poles they are fine."