It's our duty to remember Enduring Soldiers - dep PM Glinski
Poland owes its existence to the difficult choices made by the Enduring Soldiers; it is our duty to remember them, Deputy PM Piotr Glinski said on Monday at a ceremony to lay the cornerstone for a museum to the Enduring Soldiers in Ostroleka (northern Poland).
Glinski, the deputy PM and culture minister, said it was obvious for the Culture Ministry to take upon itself co-responsibility for building the museum.
"But one should ask why an independent Poland has only now got around to building its first museum to honour the Enduring Soldiers (see: NOTE 1)", the minister stressed.
"This is a museum commemorating the heroes of Polish history who had to make dramatic decisions. (...) Their choices were dramatic and terrible. Our generation does not have to face such dilemmas', the deputy PM said.
The official underscored that "owing to the choices made by the Enduring Soldiers and their predecessors, our community can go on". "Poland exists and it is our duty to remember them - also for future generations", Minister Glinski went on to say.
The museum will be housed in a former detention centre built in 1903 as a tsarist prison. It also served as a jail during World War II and after 1944.
The museum, financed by the Culture Ministry, will open next autumn.
"The Enduring Soldiers were on the right side in the most difficult moments and chose what was most important", Ostroleka Mayor Janusz Kotowski added. (PAP)
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NOTE 1: After the war, many Home Army (see: NOTE 2) soldiers refused to lay down their arms and continued fighting against Poland's Soviet-imposed communist regime, gaining the name "Enduring Soldiers". They are also sometimes called the "Cursed Soldiers" for being treated as outlaws and forced into oblivion by the communist state.
After WWII the so-called Enduring Soldiers made up numerous underground organisations fighting against the communist regime which seized power in 1944. The Enduring Soldiers battled the Soviet-imposed regime well into the 1950s. Until recently, the last known "enduring soldier" was Jozef Franczak, nom de guerre "Lalek", who died in an ambush as late as 1963.
However, on June 13, 2017, in the village of Poplawy-Rogale in southeastern Poland's Lublin province, teams from the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) unearthed remains belonging to Antoni Dolega, a member of the post-World War II anticommunist resistance said to have remained in hiding until his death in 1982.
NOTE 2: Founded in 1942, the Home Army (AK) was the largest underground resistance force in German-occupied Europe, with up to half a million soldiers fighting in its ranks. In his book 'God's Playground. A History of Poland', historian Norman Davies said that, "the Home Army could fairly claim to be the largest of European resistance [organisations]".
Along with various combat activities, the AK was also widely involved in rescuing fellow citizens of Jewish descent, among others through the famous 1942-founded Council to Aid Jews (Rada Pomocy Zydom) codenamed 'Zegota' - the only organisation in Europe and the world established to defend and provide help to Jewish people in ghettos and outside.
The culmination of the AK's armed struggle came with the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. The AK's wartime losses totalled about 100,000 soldiers killed in fighting or murdered, and about 50,000 taken to the Soviet Union and imprisoned.
After the insurgents surrendered and the remaining 500,000 residents were expelled from Warsaw, the Germans methodically burned down and blew up the capital city house by house. By January 1945, app. 90 percent of the city's buildings and infrastructure was destroyed.
NOTE 3: Witold Pilecki was a Polish soldier and rotamaster in the pre-war Polish cavalry. In German-occupied Poland he founded the Secret Polish Army resistance group in November 1939, subsequently joining the 1942-formed underground Home Army.
Pilecki, called "the bravest of the brave" was the author of the so-called Witold's Report, the first comprehensive account of proceedings in the Auschwitz concentration camp and the Holocaust.
During World War Two Pilecki volunteered for a resistance operation to get imprisoned in the Auschwitz death camp, where he planned to gather intelligence, help inmates and escape. At Auschwitz, Pilecki organized a resistance movement and, as early as 1941, informed the Western Allies about German Nazi atrocities in the camp. After escaping from Auschwitz in 1943, he took part in the Home Army-organised 1944 Warsaw Uprising (see: NOTE 1).
He remained loyal to the London-based Polish exile government after the communist takeover of Poland, and in 1947 was arrested on charges of working for "foreign imperialism". He was executed in 1948 after a show trial. His body is still to be found. Information about his activities and fate was suppressed by the Polish communist regime until 1989.
NOTE 4: August Emil Fieldorf, nom-de-guerre "Nil" (1895-1953) was one of the most merited Home Army soldiers and a major activist of the Polish World War Two resistance movement, considered by many to have been the largest of its kind and a model of war conspiracy.
At 19, Fieldorf joined the 1st Brigade of the Polish Legions and fought in the 1920 Polish-Bolshevik war. In the inter-war years he was an officer in the regular Polish army, with which he saw combat during Nazi Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland. After Poland fell, Fieldorf moved to France, and in 1940 to England.
Upon his return to German-occupied Poland, Fieldorf got involved in underground activity in the Union of Armed Struggle (ZWZ) and later in the Home Army, in which he rose to deputy commander after the failure of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising (October 1944 – January 1945).
After the war, Poland's communist authorities sentenced Fieldorf to death on feigned charges of collaborating with the Germans. The then Moscow-sponsored Polish President Boleslaw Bierut declined to pardon Nil. He was hanged on February 24, 1953, in the infamous Warsaw Mokotow prison. According to IPN, his body was localized but not yet identified as according to the NKVD's habit it had been dumped into an unmarked pit along with hundreds of others today being meticulously examined one by one.
Later findings showed that the direct cause for Nil's sentencing and execution was his determination in rejecting proposals of cooperation with communist authorities in spite of being subjected to intense torture.
The sentence was carried out, by hanging, on 24 February 1953 at 3:00 pm in the infamous Mokotów Prison in Warsaw.
In July 2006, then Polish President Lech Kaczynski posthumously decorated General Fieldorf with Poland's highest state distinction - the Order of the White Eagle - against protests by the distinction's awarding chapter that the decoration should not be awarded posthumously.
NOTE 5: Major Zygmunt Szendzielarz, nom de guerre Lupaszka, was born in Stryj on March 12, 1910. He was executed by Poland's communist authorities in 1951.
In 1931, Szendzielarz entered military school and completed his course the following year. He continued his training at another military school from which he graduated with the rank of second lieutenant and was assigned to the 4th Regiment of Niemen Uhlans, a cavalry unit, in which he fought in Poland's defensive war of 1939.
He received a 5th class Virtuti Militari Cross for his role in the campaign.
In late September 1939, he was taken prisoner by the Soviets but managed to escape after a few days in captivity. From early 1940, he was active in the underground under the nom de guerre Lupaszka.
From November 1943, Szendzielarz headed the Home Army 5th Vilnius Brigade, which he formed from soldiers who had survived a Soviet attack. His unit fought against German troops and Germany-collaborating Lithuanian units as well as hostile Soviet partisans.
On July 23, 1944, the brigade was partly disarmed by the Red Army, but some soldiers managed to escape and formed a new unit under Szendzielarz's command.
In November 1944, he was promoted to major. The reconstructed 5th Brigade that consisted of some 250 men, started operations in the spring of 1945 and fought against the Soviet and Polish communist police, secret police and internal security service. In September 1945, Szendzielarz was ordered by his superiors to disband the brigade.
He later joined an underground unit in northern Poland and in 1946 started subversive activities. In April, he recreated the 5th Wilno Brigade, comprising some 70 men, under his command.
In March 1947, he left the underground and went into hiding. On June 30, 1948, he was arrested by the communists in the southern-Polish village of Osielec.
During an investigation that lasted for two and a half years, he accepted full responsibility for the activities of the units under his command. On November 2, 1950, he was sentenced to death by a military court in Warsaw. The sentence was carried out in a Warsaw prison on February 8, 1951.
On his 55th death anniversary, the Polish Sejm (lower house of parliament) honoured Major Zygmunt Szendzielarz with a commemorative resolution, praising him as "a symbol of the unwavering struggle for Independent Poland".
Major Szendzielarz's burial site was unknown for years. His remains were found in 2013 at the so-called Laczka ("little meadow") at Warsaw's Powazki Military cemetery where around 300 anti-communist fighters were buried secretly after most of them had been shot in the head in a Warsaw prison between 1946 and 1955.
Posthumously promoted to the rank of colonel, Szendzielarz was buried in a military funeral ceremony in 2016.
NOTE 6: Hieronim Dekutowski (nom de guerre Zapora - Polish for 'Dam') was one of the most outstanding leaders of Poland's anti-communist underground. In tribute, the National Remembrance Institute (IPN) has made a film about him, entitled Zapora (Polish for firewall), which is being screened to schoolchildren, among other audiences.
Around 400 Communist soldiers and agents are said to have been killed in multiple attacks organized by Dekutowski against southeastern Poland's Communist outposts in 1945 and 1946.
In September 1947, after another attempt to escape to the West, "Zapora" was caught in southwestern Poland's city of Nysa. After a year of tortures and beating at the infamous Mokotow Prison in Warsaw, on November 3, 1948, a show trial of Dekutowski and his soldiers took place. In order to humiliate the accused, they were forced to stand before the judge dressed in Wehrmacht uniforms. On November 15, presiding judge Jozef Badecki, the same who had given Witold Pilecki a death penalty, sentenced Dekutowski to seven deaths. "Zapora" was executed on March 7, 1949 along with six other soldiers. Witnesses reported his last message to fellow prisoners being: "We shall never surrender!". Their remains were found as late as in the 2012, at the "little meadow" at the Powazki Military Cemetery in Warsaw, where on 27 September 2015, "Zapora" was solemnly interred in the Enduring Soldiers mausoleum.
NOTE 7: Colonel Lukasz Cieplinski (nom de guerre Plug - Polisg for 'Plough') was a member of the Freedom and Independence (WiN) anti-communist organisation and one of its seven national coordinators. On March 1, 1951, all seven were executed in the Rakowiecka Street prison. Prior to his execution, Cieplinski was heavily tortured during interrogations overseen by agents of the Soviet NKVD security agency, as a result of which he went deaf in one ear. He did not inform on his associates, notwithstanding. His body was never returned to his family, his burial place remains unknown to this day. (PAP)
