Eastory Eyes ENG

Tadeusz served with his father in the Home Army. He started his service with the partisans of the legendary Major Dobrzański ‘Hubal’. After the war he fled to the United States where he was drafted into the army, despite the fact that he was not an American citizen. He refused to serve which led to a high profile trial.

On 1 September 1939, Tadeusz was to continue his education in high school, but the outbreak of the war interrupted his plans. Two months into the war Major Dobrzański ‘Hubal’ appeared in the area where Tadeusz lived. On 28 October, Tadeusz’s father, Jozef, took him to meet Major ‘Hubal’. Tadeusz also met Captain Kalenkiewicz that day. He was the one of the minds behind the Cichociemni (the silent unseen), a elite unit within the Polish resistance. On that day, Captain Kalenkiewicz said to the young Tadeusz: “A nice boy, but he bites [his] nails”. To erase the bad impression, ‘Hubal’ said to Tadeusz: “You will be my youngest soldier, and because today you are having your name day, we will call our first military post Tadeusz”.

At the end of the war, as an officer of the Home Army, he was arrested by the Soviets. He managed to escape from prison and shortly thereafter emigrated with his father to the West. He ended up in the United States as a political refugee. In 1950, he was called up to the U.S. Army. Since he was not an American citizen, he refused military service. As a conscientious objector, his story went to the press and then to the court. After the case was discontinued, he left America and returned to Europe.

He graduated from the Sorbonne and became a historian and writer in exile. He died in 2010.

When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Ryszard Książyński was only 15 years old. Ryszard was a boyscout and loved sailing. He had picked up this hobby at a scout camp a year earlier. As for millions of his age, the Second World War interrupted his youthful dreams.

Ryszard Książyński joined the Home Army, Poland’s largest resistance movement, in 1943. He completed his training and became a corporal. As soon as he became an adult he was directed to the front line. In 1944 his unit was mobilized in Operation Tempest. The aim of the Home Army was to fight against German troops and to support the entering Red Army. On September 26, the Battle of Radków took place. The German forces had tanks, planes and artillery support. However, the soldiers of the Home Army including Książyński defended themselves. Książyński was injured and, as it turned out, lost his hearing in his left ear forever.

After the war he decided to return to his youthful dreams. He participated in numerous courses, and gained his sailing skills by sailing with famous captains of Polish shipping, such as Olympian rower Henryk Fronczak and Włodzimierz Jacewicz who organized polar expeditions. Ryszard co-organized the Yacht Club of the Academic Sports Association in Krakow. He was a publicist. In the press, he inspired successive generations with his love for sailing and  building model ships. As captain of ‘Leonid Teliga’, he participated in the Atlantic Operation Sail ’76 during the celebration of the 200^th anniversary of the United States of America. He was the first to lead such a large yacht from New York through the Great Lakes via the Mississippi to New Orleans. He was granted honorary citizenship of New York, Buffalo, Baton Rouge, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and New Orleans.

Jerzy Krusenstern came from aristocratic European families. Before the war, he was a boyscout which helped to prepare him for service in the Polish resistance during the Second World War. He joined the resistance at the age of fifteen and fought against the invading Soviet forces as well as against the Nazis.

In September 1939 Jerzy was in Grodno, which was then a Polish city. There weren’t many soldiers in the town but many civilians volunteered to defend it in case of an enemy attack. Many of them were still young; scouts and students, both boys and girls.

On 20 September 1939, the Soviet Red Army sent in tanks to help capture Grodno. They were conviced that the city would fall quickly. Jerzy filled Molotov cocktails for his older colleagues to take out the tanks. The frustrated attackers resorted to tying the children to the tanks, using them as human shields. The defense, however, continued, but with no chance of victory. After the battle, the Soviets shot many civilians that had defended the city.

Jerzy fled from the territories occupied by the Soviet Union to the territories occupied by the Third Reich. He joined the Home Army, the largest Polish resistance organisation, and took part in many sabotage and subversive actions. At the end of the war, he had fought in many battles, including Kałużówka in August 1944, which was one of the largest partisan battles in southern Poland. He was wounded in during this battle. Many years after the war, Jerzy recalled the artillery fire which had devastated his unit, and after it ended, he raised his head and smelt only the sweet smell of blood floating in the forest clearing.

He did not return to the fight anymore, and after the war he was arrested and persecuted for many years by the communist authorities.

Jan Karski was a soldier of the Home Army who witnessed the terrible events of the Holocaust. On the orders of the commanders of the Polish Underground State, he prepared a report on the crimes committed in occupied Poland and, as an emissary, informed the western world about it.

In 1939, Jan Karski joined the Polish resistance. He became a courier traveling from occupied Poland to France. During one trip he was arrested in Slovakia. Jan was afraid that during torture he might reveal important information, therefore he tried to commit suicide, but he was saved. The Polish resistance freed him from the hospital, and Jan returned to service.

He went to the ghetto in Warsaw, and managed to enter the Izbica concentration camp in disguise. He saw the Nazi crimes with his own eyes. In 1942, Jan Karski made his way to London where he showed the Polish government in exile the microfilms of his report. In December, the Polish government issued an official diplomatic note, which was the first appeal of one of the Allied countries calling for the defense of Jews and informing about the Holocaust.

During the following years of the war, Jan met with world leaders to talk about the fate of Jews and Poles under the German occupation. He was hosted by Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House. Unfortunately, he was met with disbelief many times. In order for the world to learn about the Holocaust and the struggle of the Polish Underground State, he published the book “Secret State” in 1944, which became a bestseller in the United States.

The memory of Jan Karski and his achievements returned in the 1980s. In 1982 he was awarded the title of “Righteous Among the Nations”.

Elżbieta Zawacka was a courier and emissary of the commander of the Polish Home Army, the most important resistance organisation in occupied Poland. She became a symbol of women’s involvement in combat during World War II. After the war she worked to ensure that the role played by women in service would not be forgotten.

Elżbieta Zawacka was part of the department of foreign communications of the Polish Home Army. She set up routes to the west for couriers of the Polish resistance and worked as a courrier herself as well. She crossed the Polish pre-war border over a hundred times during the war while carrying money, reports and news. In February 1943, as the emissary of General Stefan ‘Grot’ Rowecki, she travelled across Germany, France, Andorra, Spain and Gibraltar to reach London where she spoke to the staff of Władysław Sikorski, the prime minister of the Polish government in exile. She had two tasks: to improve the courier service and – at the explicit request of General Rowecki – to ask for the women in the Home Army to receive the same rights as their male colleagues.

Elżbieta was given parachute training and was one of the few emissaries to come back to Poland. In doing so, she became the only woman in the elite group called the cichociemni (the silent unseen).

From March 1944 she served in the directorate of the Women’s Army Service that operated within the Home Army headquarters. She fought in the Warsaw Uprising, a large operation by the Home Army to liberate their capital from Nazi occupation.

After the war she joined the anti-communist movement. In September 1951 she was arrested by the Security Service and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. After being released she worked at the University of Gdańsk and at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. She was one of the founders of the World Association of Home Army Soldiers and the initiator of the “Pomeranian Home Army Archive” Foundation in Toruń. In 2006 she was promoted to the rank of brigadier general in the Polish Army to honour her achievements. Elżbieta Zawacka died in 2009.

She attracted attention by her attitude, her colourful costumes and by a programme that alternated Russian and Chinese dances with illustrations of contemporary fashion. Her characteristic dances and her strange beauty made her famous. Today, a Stolperstein in front of the Renaissance Theater in Berlin-Charlottenburg commemorates dancing artist and Holocaust victim Tatjana Barbakoff.

Tatjana Barbakoff was born as Cilly Edelberg in Latvia in August 1899. She came from a Jewish family with Russian-Chinese roots. From a very early age, Barbakoff began to dance. Her heritage and her preferred styles became part of her later ascribed exotic aura.

During the First World War, Tatjana met German officer Georg Waldmann. In 1918, Tatjana followed him back to Germany and eventually married him. In the following years, they became known as an artistic couple, under the names of Tatjana Barbakoff and Marcel Boissier. Together they travelled through Germany and performed in cities, such as Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and Berlin. In 1925 the couple settled in Berlin. Tatjana had her final breakthrough with the so-called ‘Berliner Tanzabend’. She broke up with Boissier and met artist Gert Wollheim, who became her new partner.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Gert’s art was labelled as ‘degenerate’. The couple moved to France where Wollheim established the Freie Deutsche Künstlerverband (Liberal German Artist Foundation) and Tatjana continued her dancing career. For a time they were free and safe but after Nazi Germany invaded France in 1940, both Gert and Tatjana were arrested.

After some time Gert and Tatjana were released. The couple fled to Nice hoping to avoid further arrest but this turned out to be in vain. In January 1944, Tatjana was arrested by the Gestapo and transferred to a camp in Drancy. In February, she was deported to Auschwitz where she was sent to the gas chambers upon arrival.

“Throughout my life at the front there has not been an instant when I have not longed to be in battle. I want to be where the fighting is fiercest. I want to be there with the soldiers.” These words were written by Roza Shanina, a female sniper serving in the Red Army.

Roza Shanina was born in April 1924 in Arkhangelsk Oblast. After one of her brothers fell during the Siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in December 1941, Shanina volunteered for military service.

Unlike in the Western Allied armies, women were allowed to serve in frontline units in the Soviet Union. Shanina applied to become a sniper and was allowed to enrol in the Central Women’s Sniper Training School in June 1943. Just under a year later, she joined the female sniper platoon within the 184^th Rifle Division. That same month, she killed her first German soldier. At the end of May 1944, Shanina became the first servicewoman of the 3^rd Belorussian Front to receive the Order of Glory 3^rd class. At the time, she had scored over 20 kills. Shanina reported in her diary that she became increasingly indifferent to death, cold blooded and saw the meaning of her existence in her profession.

In June 1944, it was decided by the Soviet military to withdraw female snipers from the front. Shanina refused the order and continued to support the advancing Red Army together with other sisters-in-arms. She became a celebrity as propaganda pamphlets featured her deeds and was among the first female snipers to receive the Medal for Courage.

In January 1945, Shanina took part in the Red Army’s East Prussian Offensive. On 27 January, she was severely wounded by a shell fragment. She died of her wounds a day later at the age of 20. Her body was buried under a pear tree at the shore of the Lava river and later re-interred in the small town of Wehlau.

In 1950, Australian writer Paul Brickhill published “The Great Escape”. The book was based on a mass escape of 76 Allied prisoners from the German Stalag Luft III prison camp. One of the masterminds behind the escape plan was Squadron Leader Roger Bushell.

Bushell was born in August 1910 in South Africa. He joined the British Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1932 and became Squadron Leader of No. 92 Squadron in October 1939. During his first war deployment at the Battle of Dunkirk, Bushell was shot down and crash-landed his Spitfire in German occupied territory. He was captured and became a prisoner of war (POW).

In the years that followed Bushell troubled his captors by making several escape attempts. Trying to escape was in line with the idea of military honour and regarded as legal by the Geneva Convention.

After several failed escape attempts Bushell arrived at the Stalag Luft III prison camp in October 1942. He quickly took over organizing the escape operations in the camp. He became known as the mastermind and was called ‘Big X’ by his comrades. The POWs simultaneously built three escape tunnels, which they dubbed ‘Harry’, ‘Tom’ and ‘Dick’. The most radical part of this plan was not the sheer scale of the construction, but the number of 200 men that Bushell planned to get through the tunnel. Only 76 eventually made it through ‘Harry’ during the night of 24 to 25 March 1944. Bushell and his partner Bernard Scheihauer successfully caught a train at Sagan. However, they were recaptured one day later near Saarbrücken in Germany.

Of the 76 men that escaped, three made it back to England. Others were not so lucky. After the escape, Hitler issued the infamous Sagan-order, which ordered that fifty of the escapees that had been recaptured should be shot. Bushell was among the fifty that were murdered and was killed on 29 March 1944. He was buried at Poznan Old Garrison Cemetery in Poland.

Irma Grese was a female concentration camp guard (Aufseherin). She was only 18 years old when she began her service at the women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück in July 1942. She became infamous for her extreme brutality towards prisoners and for being executed as one of the youngest war criminals at the age of 22.

Irma Grese was born in the town of Wrechen in 1923. She left primary school when she was 14 years old. She worked on a farm and later as a saleswoman at a dairy shop. She repeatedly applied for a training position at the SS-sanatorium at Hohenlychen but was not accepted. Eventually she started working there as an untrained assistant nurse.

In the summer of 1942 Grese became a guard at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. From here she would quickly rise through the ranks of the concentration camp system. In March 1943, Grese was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Here she became second in command among the female camp staff. She worked in camp section ‘C’ where she oversaw 20,000 to 30,000 female prisoners. While at the camp she also took part in the ‘selection process’. This meant that when new prisoners arrived to the camp, Grese would decide who was considered fit to work and who was to be sent directly to the gas chambers. In March 1945, Grese was sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she worked as command leader until British troops liberated the camp in April 1945.

Grese was arrested during the liberation of the camp and charged at the Belsen trial in Lüneburg. She was found guilty of her crimes, sentenced to death, and eventually hanged in November 1945. Grese’s behaviour at the trial as well as her farewell letter to her sister revealed that she remained loyal to her ideological position and showed no signs of remorse nor recognition of her wrongdoings.