Communist and anti-communist resistance...

[Lancer44]

I think that part of this memoir from WWII is well worth reading.


Excerpt #4: A Memoir

Surviving the Polish Communist Underground

Boguslaw Nowakowski was a resistance fighter with the Armia Krajowa, the Polish underground organization loyal to the London based Polish Government in Exile. Here he describes his encounter with a Communist underground unit, one of many which began to gain strength in 1944 and 1945 due to the support of the Soviet Union and began to turn their attention away from the Germans to their capitalist Polish rivals.

Boguslaw Nowakowski: I Survived my Execution

Despite being glorified in song and legend, life with the partisans was primitive, dirty, louse infested, and in general, very very harsh. Except when we were on sabotage or reprisal raids, we were always on the alert to escape the Germans who were constantly hunting us. We obtained our weapons from the enemy, or waited, sometimes for weeks, for airdrops from England.

I had been wounded in a raid on a German bank in January 1944. We needed the money to buy food, bribe officials, and buy weapons. But the most dramatic incident in my life as a partisan occurred on April 13 and 14 of that same year.

Five of us, soldiers of the Armia Krajowa, were returning from Ostrow Swietokrzyski, our hometown. We had spent the Easter holiday there. We were Marian Blazejewski (code name "Mania"), Jerzy Skwarek ("Lux"), Jozef Mazur ("Elephant"), Czeslaw Kedziora (whose pseudonym I cannot remember) and I, Boguslaw Nowakowski ("student'). My colleagues called me "student" because I preferred to carry books in my pack rather than grenades. Other than me, a seventeen-year-old, the rest were older and experienced partisans, and in their twenties and early thirties.

Late that night we stopped in the village of Denkowek. There was a small store there, and during the occupation the owner ran a modest restaurant.

After sitting there a while, we heard a knock on the door. Standing outside were partisans whom we recognized as members of the Peoples' Army, a Communist sponsored group. They said they wanted something to eat. There was no cooperation between our groups, but we were not fighting each other either, so we suspected nothing evil and let them in.

Their group numbered between twenty-five and thirty people, and it became very crowded inside the restaurant. After a short and amiable chat with us, they took away our weapons. Their task was easy. They had managed to separate us and we were each surrounded by a number of them.

Along with our weapons they took our money from us, of which we had quite a bit. During our "furlough," we had managed to rob the cash office of an agricultural cooperative run by the Germans.

When we protested, their leader, Stefan Szymanski ("Wasp"), announced that we were under arrest for having taken part in a raid against a Communist partisan unit, and we were to be taken to their base for interrogation. This satisfied me, as I had never heard about any attack on the Communists, and thought that there must have been some kind of mistake.

Wasp then ordered for us to be tied up in pairs. I had a glass of tea in my hands, and being the odd one out, had my hands bound behind my back, instead of being tied to somebody else. We were marched down the country roads and were taken to a forest, and apparently not for an interrogation. They had a heavy escort on us, and I was at the end of the column with Wasp.

The Communist unit had a number of Russians with it. They had either escaped from nearby POW camps, or had been parachuted in by the Soviets. I heard Wasp give orders to three of the Russians with burp guns to shoot us. Something snapped in my head. I did not want to die. The stupid thing was that it would be at the hands of my countrymen, and not at the hands of the occupier. I thought of how funny the bad luck was that my fate should be sealed, though I was a man, but I had never yet sampled the "delights of love," and never would.

I had no hope, and despite internal revolts against my fate, I prayed. This calmed me down. My entire short life flashed before my eyes, as if it were a movie.

We were led to a small clearing and Wasp, in a most sarcastic manner, informed us that because of anti-communist action, we were sentenced to death. My friends shouted in protest that these were lies, but a series of bursts from the Russians' burp guns silenced them.

The muzzle flashes were two to three meters in front of me, and I felt the gun blasts and smelled gunpowder. I fell, figuring that this was the end. I was surprised that my leaving this world was so painless. As I lay motionless, I heard my friends groaning and Wasp's orders to strip us to our underwear and dig graves and cover them up with pine boughs so nobody would ever find us. He then called to one of the Russians to see if anybody needed to be "finished off."

During these horrifying seconds, or fractions of seconds, it came to me that I had not even been wounded. My instinct for self-preservation awoke, along with my consciousness of fear. I began to think that I might save myself.

At this point they started to undress me. To take off my coat and jacket they had to cut the rope binding my hands. They then pulled off my boots, and began dragging me a few meters towards the woods by my legs.

I realized that this was my last chance. The Russian was distracted. I was light without the ballast of my overcoat, uniform and boots, and my hands were free. I sprang up like a rabbit and dashed into the nearby shrubs.

The surprise was complete, and there was no reaction for a few seconds. I then heard somebody shouting, "Shoot the son-of-a-bitch, he's getting away!" I heard shooting and the buzz of bullets all around me. The night was very dark, and they fired into the blackness, not hitting me. I managed to run into some very thick brush. I stopped to catch my breath, and to thank God for saving me.

After a few kilometers, I managed to get to a friend's house in Denkow. I frightened everyone very badly. A knock on the door before daybreak in those times never meant anything good. They calmed down a little when they saw that it was not the Gestapo at their door, but they were horrified at the sight of me. I looked like a ghoul. I was barefoot, and covered with mud and blood, with pieces of rope hanging from my wrists. They gave me first aid and clothing.

I contacted the Armia Krajowa in Ostrow, which gave me an armed escort back to my unit. My commander was Eugene Kaszynski ("Current"). I must point out that this unit was organized in 1943 by the famous partisan and hero of the Kielce region, Jan Piwnik ("Gloomy"), who had parachuted into Poland from England.

When I got to my unit, I wrote a comprehensive report of the entire incident. This report was sealed in the Armia Krajowa archives, and was to be used to bring those guilty of this atrocity to justice after the war.

Fearing liberation by the Communists, and people like Wasp coming to power, I assumed the name Wiktor Wozniak. The greatest irony is that to escape my would-be executioner, I volunteered to go to Germany as a laborer.

Many years have gone by, and the guilty have not only escaped justice, but for years after the war they were still arresting whomever they could from Gloomy's unit. Our soldiers were persecuted by the Polish Peoples' Republic, and in numerous show trials they were given sentences that varied from five years' imprisonment to death.

And Stefan Szymanski, in this sea of lies and hypocrisy, reveled in the promotions and decorations awarded by the Communist Secret Police. How much blood he has on his hands, besides that of my friends, only he knows.

Many more here: Re-invasion

[Jim O]

This really was a sickening story that is well worth reading.

Thanks also for the link. Very good stuff in the other snippets too.