Category Archives: Poland

Arts, Books, History, Poland

Book Review: The Volunteer

WITOLD PILECKI

Intro: He swore to God to serve the Polish nation – and agreed to be captured and imprisoned in Auschwitz

IN 1940, who in their rightful mind would have volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz? Witold Pilecki, the extraordinary hero of this most amazing book, did exactly that. “You must be nuts!” a fellow prisoner told him. But contrary to initial thoughts that he must have been mad or stupid, he was just exceptionally brave.

When Germany invaded Poland, Pilecki – a gentleman farmer – did his patriotic duty and volunteered as a soldier. The German forces routed the Poles in weeks, so Pilecki made his way to Warsaw, reduced to ruins by German bombing. There, in a Baroque church, he knelt with others and “swore to serve God, the Polish nation, and each other”. The resistance movement had begun.

In early 1940, Auschwitz was established as a camp for Polish political prisoners. The resistance needed eyes and ears in the camp, so Pilecki agreed to be captured by the Germans and sent there.

He was immediately aware of being in a hellish place when a man was beaten to death before his eyes. The SS were in charge, but the day-to-day running of the camp was in the hands of the kapos, a body of inmates who were given power over their fellow prisoners. A despicable method used by one of these men, named Ernst Krankemann, was to harness a group of men to a giant roller used for road construction. He beat them as they pulled it; if any fell, they were flattened beneath the roller. In 1941, after several hundred Soviet POWs were beaten to death in a gravel pit by kapos with shovels, Pilecki realised that simply surviving long enough in Auschwitz to get word back to Warsaw would be difficult.

Then, as plans were made to turn Auschwitz into “the central hub of the Final Solution”, trainloads of people began to arrive. Children and the elderly were gassed immediately; the young and healthy were worked to death in nearby gulag labour camps. Pilecki worked sorting goods taken from the dead, at one-point processing hair shorn from the corpses of Jewish women for use as mattress stuffing. He was close to despair. He had sent many messages to the Polish resistance about the staggering and heinous crimes he was witnessing, but had they got through?

By 1943, Pilecki began to think of breaking out, but of 173 escape attempts the previous year, only about a dozen had worked. Then one day he and two others ran from a bakery to which they had been sent to work, taking with them cured tobacco to scatter on their trail to throw pursuit dogs off their scent and potassium cyanide tablets if all went wrong.

It didn’t. They got away. Pilecki found to his horror his despatches from the hell of Auschwitz had been disbelieved by resistance leaders. Some thought he was a German agent.

It would be good to know there was a happy ending to Witold Pilecki’s story. Sadly, there wasn’t. After the war, he was found guilty of treason by the new Communist regime. On May 25, 1948, he was executed in a Warsaw prison by a single shot to the back of the head.

In post-communist Poland, Witold Pilecki is a national hero. Jack Fairweather’s remarkable book shows why his courageous efforts to alert the world to what was happening in Auschwitz deserve to be remembered everywhere.

– The Volunteer is published by W.H. Allen, 528pp

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Arts, History, Poland, Scotland, Second World War

Scotland: Tribute to Polish war hero

EDINBURGH

This is how the memorial to General Stanislaw Maczek will look. It will be located on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile and in close-proximity to the Stone of Remembrance.

WINSTON CHURCHILL appointed him to protect Scotland’s east coast from invasion.

Now Polish war hero General Stanislaw Maczek is set to get a fitting memorial on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, where a permanent home for it has been found.

He fought tirelessly in the Second World War, playing a key role in the Battle of Normandy, and helping to liberate parts of France, Belgium and Holland from German forces.

But when the war ended Poland was absorbed by the Soviet Union as part of an Allied agreement, and the ex-commander of the 1st Polish Armoured Division was unable to return to his birthplace.

Instead, he made Edinburgh his home and after being refused a war pension, took a job as a barman at a city hotel.

Campaigners have been pushing for a permanent memorial to him since 1994, when he died aged 102. Now, they have a site for a life-sized bronze statue of him outside City of Edinburgh Council Chambers.

The General Stanislaw Maczek Memorial Trust has raised £50,000 towards the project, but it needs a further £35,000.

Trust spokesperson Katie Fraser, whose father the late Lord Fraser of Carmyllie launched the project, said: “We have been so grateful to all those who have supported this project thus far. In recognition of that support, we want to ensure that all funds go directly to the memorial and also wish to see it established during the lifetime of some of those men to whom it is intended to honour.

“We are very pleased to announce that the memorial will be on the Royal Mile at the heart of our capital city.

“Located within a few yards of the Stone of Remembrance, where wreath-laying takes place every November, we think the setting is not only appropriate by suitably prestigious.”

Lord Provost Frank Ross said: “We are delighted this fitting tribute to General Maczek and his men is to be placed in such close-proximity to the war memorial at the City Chambers.

“Many people will pass by and have the opportunity to reflect on the general’s heroics and the many other war heroes who risked their lives.”

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Europe, European Union, Germany, Government, History, Poland, Society

The billions that Poland is demanding from Germany in wartime reparations 

ESSAY

Poland

The devastation and destruction of Warsaw in 1945 following the Nazi occupation of Poland.

FOR many in Britain, World War II is a story of unparalleled heroism, and there are many stirring films such as the new blockbuster Dunkirk. For the people of Poland, however, the war was a nightmare so black and so bloodstained, that no film could even remotely capture the depths of its horror.

Consider the incident in a German town called Gleiwitz close to the Polish border. On the night of August 31, 1939, a small group of Nazi intelligence agents, dressed in Polish uniforms, burst into a radio station. They then broadcast anti-German messages in Polish before dumping the bodies of prisoners they had just hauled out of the Dachau concentration camp, who had been made to resemble Polish saboteurs then shot and mutilated to make identification impossible.

A few hours later, Adolf Hitler rose in the Reichstag and proclaimed that the Gleiwitz incident was the final straw. He deceitfully blamed the incident on anti-German saboteurs.

By the summer of 1945, some six million Polish citizens, one in five of the pre-war population, had been killed. The great cities of Warsaw, Krakow and Lublin were in smoking ruins. Millions of books had been ruined; hundreds of libraries, schools, museums and laboratories had been destroyed.

In effect, the Germans had done their best to eradicate an entire nation, erasing its culture, murdering its middle-classes and reducing the rest to slavery. And though the Nazis were defeated, the Polish people’s ordeal was far from over. Following Hitler’s tyranny, Poland was then occupied by Stalin’s Red Army, who turned it into a brutalised Soviet satellite.

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