Polish history 3D animation narrated by Game of Thrones star hits web
A short 3D film released online by Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) recounts Poland's unsung part in World War II and the country's 50-year-long path to independence.
Narrated by 'Lord of the ring' and 'Game of Thrones' star Sean Bean, the cleverly constructed 3D animation entitled "Unconquered", spanning 50 years of Poland's heroic history in roughly 4 minutes, takes us from 1939's the invasion of Poland on the part of the Germans and Soviets, through their oppressively devastating occupation of the country with the latter's robust resistance efforts, to the Polish army's impressive and unsung contributions in the Allies' campaign against the Third Reich, for which Poland rather than be rewarded, was 'sold' to the Soviet regime. The clip also depicts the aftermath of the WWII, which for Poland did not finish in 1945 as after having been secluded behind the Iron curtain, the Polish nation had to fight for full independence and freedom from the communist enslavement for another 45 years.
Below is the text of Sean Bean's commentary with footnotes by PAP explaining terms and context of events brought up in the clip:
"Nobody thought the war and its effects would last half a century for Poland. First, Germany attacks. Then, Soviet Russia (see: NOTE 1). We don't give up despite being left on our own. We create an Underground State (see: NOTE 2) complete with government, an army (see: NOTE 3), schools and courts. We suffer two occupations. The Germans murder millions of Polish civilians. The Soviets deport Poles in cattle cars to gulags in the east. They shoot over twenty thousand officers during the Katyn Massacre (see: NOTE 4), and hundreds of thousands of Poles are forced into slave labour in the inhuman lands of the Soviet Union.
Our army is reborn, moving west, where our soldiers are already fighting alongside the Allies. We conquer Monte Cassino (see: NOTE 5/6). Our fighters wreak havoc and fear by air too (see: NOTE 7). The Germans call us "black devils" as we crush their resistance.
Paratroopers (see: NOTE 8) make their way to occupied Poland to support the Underground State, while our counter-intelligence acquires secret plans of the enemy (see: NOTE 9). There are Poles who save Jews despite the threat of the death penalty. We create resistance movements, even within the German concentration camps. We are the first to alert the world about the Holocaust (see: NOTE 10), though politics appear to be more important than human lives, and nobody listens to us.
Polish Jews fight the Germans in the Warsaw Ghetto (see: NOTE 11) without even a chance for success. Our nation comes up from the Underground and fights in the Warsaw Uprising (see: NOTE 12). We break the German Enigma code (see: NOTE 9a), saving millions of lives. But in exchange for all that we do, we are betrayed. The free world distances itself from us, leaving us behind the Iron Curtain.
Despite our scars from the war, we still resist (see: NOTE 13). The Pope (see: NOTE 14) gives us strength. Worker strikes spread throughout Poland. The communists lose. The Iron Curtain falls. The war is over. We prevail. Because we do not beg for freedom. We fight for it".
NOTE 1:
On August 23, 1939, the foreign ministers of Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, respectively, signed a neutrality pact that, in fact, divided Poland and several other countries between the two powers.
The non-aggression pact, signed in Moscow, in the presence of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, contained a secret protocol.
This protocol laid down the German and Soviet spheres of influence, with regard to such countries as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and Romania.
The second point of the protocol referred specifically to Poland. It said the German and Soviet spheres of interest in Poland would be divided by the rivers Narew, Vistula and San.
The signatories also agreed to "determine amicably", in view of future political developments, whether Poland should remain as a independent country and in what shape.
The protocol was to remain strictly confidential, however, it turned out the only Ally to have been kept in ignorance about the secret protocol was Poland. Russia denied the existence of the pact's 'Poland-carving' stipulation until 1989.
NOTE 2:
The so-called Polish Underground State, which operated from 1939 to 1945 and by many was looked up to as a model of conspiracy administration, was subordinated to the Polish government-in-exile, which was first based in France and subsequently in Great Britain. In Poland, the government-in-exile had an impressively developed administration with secret courts and prosecutors, underground schools, universities, and publishing houses.
The armed wing of the Polish Underground State was the Home Army.
NOTE 3:
Founded in 1942 from the Union of Armed Struggle (ZWZ) organisation, 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.
After the war many Home Army soldiers refused to lay down their arms and continued fighting against Poland's Soviet-imposed communist regime, winning 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. Jozef Franczak, known as the last Enduring Soldier, was killed in an ambush as late as 1963.
However, on June 13, 2017, in the village Poplawy-Rogale in southeast Poland's Lublin province, the teams from the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) unearthed remains believed to belong to Antoni Dolega, a member of the post-World War II anticommunist resistance said to have remained in hiding until his death in 1982.
In 2011, the Polish parliament established March 1 as Enduring Soldiers National Remembrance Day upon a motion by the late President Lech Kaczynski.
NOTE 4:
The Katyn Massacre was a series of mass executions of Polish POWs, mainly military officers, policemen and members of intelligentsia, carried out by the Soviet security agency NKVD in April and May 1940. The killings took place at several locations but the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest in west Russia, where some of the mass graves of the victims were first discovered.
The massacre was initiated by NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria, who proposed to execute all captive members of the Polish officer corps. The victim count is estimated at about 22,000. The executions took place in Katyn Forest, the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons, and elsewhere. About 8,000 of the victims were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, the rest were Polish intellectuals, deemed by the Soviets to be intelligence agents and saboteurs.
In 1943 the government of Nazi Germany announced the discovery of mass graves in Katyn Forest. When the London-based Polish government-in-exile asked for an investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross, Stalin promptly severed diplomatic relations with the London-based cabinet. The Soviets claimed that the killings had been carried out by the Nazis in 1941 and denied responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when it officially acknowledged and condemned the perpetration of the massacre by the NKVD.
Soviet responsibility for the Katyn killings was confirmed by an investigation conducted by the office of the Prosecutors General of the Soviet Union (1990–1991) and the Russian Federation (1991–2004), however Russia refused to classify them as a war crime or genocide.
In November 2010, the Russian State Duma passed a declaration blaming Stalin and other Soviet officials for having personally ordained the massacre.
NOTE 5:
1944, Anders Army (see: NOTE 5) troops proved crucial in defeating the Germans in what was called "the biggest inland battle in Europe" - the famous Battle of Monte Cassino. This exceptionally hard-fought and fateful victory, which cost much Polish blood, allowed Allied forces to capture Rome and later the whole of southern Europe.
On May 18, 1944, a Polish 12th Podolian Cavalry Regiment patrol climbed to the top and raised a Polish flag over the ruins.
In all, 923 Polish soldiers were killed in the fighting, with 2,931 wounded and 345 reported missing.
NOTE 6:
Named after its commander, General Wladyslaw Anders, the Anders Army was formed on the strength of the 1942 Sikorski-Mayski Agreement between the Soviet Union and Poland, which stated the formation of a Polish force to aid the Soviet army and other Allied states in their struggle against the Third Reich.
Conscripts to the Anders Army were mainly recruited from Polish people incarcerated in Soviet prisons and labour camps, who were amnestied to enable them to join the force. On March 24, 1942, the Anders Army began its evacuation from the USSR, making its way through Iran to Palestine under a British-Soviet-Polish agreement. In Palestine the force passed under British command and formed the bulk of the Polish 2nd Corps, which fought in the Italian campaign.
The Anders Army also played a role in the formation of the state of Israel.
In Palestine the force's commanders became known for turning a blind eye to thousands of desertions by the army's Jewish-descended conscripts, who left Anders Army to join Jewish military organisations fighting for the independence of Israel. Among the soldiers granted an official release from the formation was Menachem Begin (born Mieczyslaw Biegun) - the founder of Israel's Likud party and the 6th Israeli prime minister.
In line with the policy of the Polish government-in-exile, when leaving the Soviet Union the Anders Army also helped civilians of Jewish descent, including soldier families, groups of (Polish-)Jewish children and war orphans, to escape Soviet repression and travel safely to Palestine against a British ban. Polish authorities circumvented the interdict by loading fellow citizens of Jewish descent onto ships and navigating them around the Arabian Peninsula. Jewish children, on the other hand, are said to have been clad in Catholic school uniforms and transported to Palestine through Iraqi deserts by trucks.
In 1944, Anders Army troops proved crucial in the famous Battle of Monte Cassino (see: NOTE 4).
Another Italian-theatre decisive battle fought by Anders Army's II Corps, actually becoming its only independent operation, was the Battle of Ancona, in which Polish troops took over a strategic Adriatic port. The operation contributed to the breaking of the Gothic Line and subsequent surrender of the Axis forces in Italy.
The Polish 2nd Corps under General Anders also partook in the famous battle of Bologna, which began on April 9, 1945, and ended on April 21. It was one of the Italian Campaign's last battles, whose aim was the liberation of Bologna - a decisive step in the Germans' ultimate defeat on the Italian territory. After the city's liberation a Polish rifle unit was the first to enter the city.
NOTE 7:
The Polish Tadeusz Kosciuszko Fighter Squadron No. 303 was one of the RAF's 16 Polish squadrons during the Second World War. It was the highest scoring Hurricane squadron during the Battle of Britain and had the highest enemy-hit to own-loss ratio.
Named after the Polish and US war hero General Tadeusz Kosciuszko and the Polish 7th Air Escadrille founded by Merian C. Cooper which fought for Poland in the 1919–1921 Polish-Soviet War, the squadron was formed in July 1940 in Blackpool, England, and was later deployed to RAF Northolt under an agreement between the Polish Government in Exile and the United Kingdom. It had a distinguished combat record and was disbanded in December 1946.
The Battle of Britain was a World War II military campaign in which the British Royal Air Force (RAF) successfully defended the United Kingdom against the German Luftwaffe between June and October 1940. Notable in the battle were several Polish flight squadrons formed from pilots who escaped Poland after its 1939 invasion by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Especially renowned was Flight Squadron 303, which accounted for more shoot-downs during the battle than any other single RAF squadron.
NOTE 8:
The first Polish so-called Silent and Dark Ones elite paratroopers (also dubbed the 'Silent Unseen') landed in Poland on the night of February 15, 1941 near Skoczow in southern Poland after a long flight from Great Britain over Germany.
Serving first in the Union for Armed Resistance (ZWZ) operating in German-occupied Poland and later in the Home Army (AK), The Silent and Dark Ones were the elite of the "Fighting Poland".
The Silent and Dark Ones - Polish soldiers trained in Great Britain for special operations (sabotage, intelligence, communication and underground operations) - were first sent to German-occupied Poland from Great Britain, and from the end of 1943 from Italy. All of them volunteered to join the force.
Their parachute missions to Poland were organised by the Polish section of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) together with the 6th Chapter of the General Staff of the Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Armed Forces responsible for contacts with the Chief Command of the Home Army.
The first drop, code-named Adolphus, took place on the night of February 15 and 16, 1941 near Skoczow in the Cieszyn Silesia region, in the Germany-annexed zone. A two-engine British Whitley bomber brought over Poland three paratroopers: captain Stanislaw Krzymowski (aka Kostka "Cube"), Jozef Zalbieski (aka Zbik "Wildcat") and courier Czeslaw Raczkowski (aka Wlodek).
The first flight to German-occupied Poland was organised as an experimental one but since the route over Germany was considered too dangerous, the entire operation was suspended for nine months. The mission was finally resumed with flights to Poland over Denmark or Sweden.
A flight to Poland and back took from 11 to 14 hours. Flights were organised only at night. First, paratroopers were taken to their occupied Homeland aboard Halifax planes, and later on board of American Liberators.
At the end of 1943, the Silent and Dark Ones' base was moved to Brindisi in Italy.
In all, 2,413 officers and soldiers of the Polish Armed Forces volunteered to join the elite unit. Only 606 successfully completed the rigorous training, 579 of whom qualified for the operation.
Three hundred and sixteen Silent and Dark Ones were dropped in Poland during 82 flights organised between February 15, 1941 and December 26, 1944. Out of 316 paratroopers flown to Poland nine were killed before their planes reached their destination (three were killed in an air crash near the Norwegian coast, three were shot down over Denmark, and three were killed in parachuting accidents).
Ninety-one took part in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, 13 of them were killed. In all, 103 Silent and Dark Ones were killed during World War Two. Nine were murdered by Poland's communist authorities after the war.
NOTE 9:
According to various experts, intelligence agents linked, among others, to Poland’s wartime Home Army (AK) played a key role in providing the Allies with information about German Nazi actions in occupied Europe.
Polish intelligence operated in every European country and ran one of the largest intelligence networks in Nazi Germany. Many Polish also served in other Allied intelligence services, including the much-lauded Krystyna Skarbek ("Christine Granville") in the United Kingdom's Special Operations Executive.
More than 40 percent of all reports received by the British secret services from continental Europe in 1939-1945 came from Polish sources.
Until 1942 most of Britain's intelligence from Germany came from Polish Home Army reports; until war’s end, the AK would remain Britain's main source of intelligence from Central and Eastern Europe.
Polish breakthrough intel on V-1 and V-2:
Polish Home Army intelligence provided the Allies with information not only on the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 rocket, but also on German concentration camps. As early as 1940, Polish agents (including "the bravest of the brave", volunteer to Auschwitz Witold Pilecki) penetrated German concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and informed the world about Nazi atrocities.
Polish Home Army intelligence was vital to locating and destroying (18 August 1943) the German rocket facility at Peenemünde and to gathering information about Germany's V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket, which towards the end of the war terrified London and other British cities with hundreds of hits, resulting in major infrastructure destruction and a high death toll among the civilians.
The Home Army delivered to the United Kingdom key V-2 parts after a rocket, fired on 30 May 1944, crashed near a German test facility at Sarnaki on the Bug River and was recovered by the Home Army with the help of local residents.
On the night of 25-26 July 1944, in an operation codenamed Most III (Bridge III) the crucial parts of the widely-feared weapon were flown from occupied Poland to the United Kingdom in an RAF plane, along with detailed drawings of parts too large to fit in the plane. Analysis of the German rocket became vital to improving Allied anti-V-2 defenses.
Another AK operation, codenamed Synteza (synthesis), enabled the location of a German fuel factory in Police (Germ. Hydrierwerke Pölitz), which manufactured synthetic fuel for the V-1 and V-2 rockets (as well as U-boats - PAP), and the depots in which it was stored. In effect the Allies successfully bombed the installations. Working with the French resistance movement, AK teams also helped locate 162 V-1 launching installation in France.
Polish-made Agency Africa and op 'Torch':
In July 1941, Mieczyslaw Slowikowski (using the codename "Rygor"—Polish for "Rigor") set up Agency Africa, one of World War II's most successful intelligence organizations. His Polish allies in these endeavors included Lt. Col. Gwido Langer and Major Maksymilian Ciężki. The information gathered by the Agency was used by the Americans and British in planning the amphibious November 1942 Operation Torch landings in North Africa. These were the first large-scale Allied landings of the war, and their success in turn paved the way for the Allies' Italian campaign.
Operation 'Overlord':
Roman Czerniawski (1910-1985) was a Polish army officer and air force pilot, who after the 1939 German invasion of Poland (which started World War II) and then France, began to serve in the allied intelligence service in German-occupied France.
Having been caught by the German Abwehr, he agreed to cooperate with them, only then to report to the Polish exile government in London, who decided to use him as a double agent.
Codenamed Brutus, Czerniawski supplied the Germans with false information about the planned Allied invasion of France (as part of the counterintelligence operation Fortitude). Thus he helped mislead the Abwehr as to the details of the Allied landings in Normandy (which were the first part of the operation Overlord).
Czerniawski's reports were highly regarded and considered credible, with Adolf Hitler's associates reading them out to the German leader himself.
Polish wartime 007:
Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek, OBE, GM, Croix de guerre (May 1 1908 - June 15 1952), also known as Christine Granville, was a Polish agent working for Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War II. She became best-known for her daring missions in Nazi-occupied Poland and France (see: NOTE).
She joined the British intelligence shortly before the SOE was founded in July 1940 and was among the longest-serving of all wartime female agents in Britain. In 1941 she switched to her nom de guerre Christine Granville, a name she legalised upon receiving British citizenship in 1946.
In 1944 Skarbek parachuted into Nazi-occupied France, where she masterminded the buyout of several resistance members arrested by the Gestapo. According to accounts Skarbek said the local Gestapo head that she was the niece of British general Bernard Montgomery, and claimed that freeing of the prisoners would ensure his life after the Allies entered France. The German supposedly fell for the story and even provided Skarbek with a pistol and a car to take them to the Allied side of the front.
After the war Skarbek had to struggle for her subsistence, working alternately as as a hotel maid, telephone operator, Harrods shop assistant and a ship stewardess.
At about that time she struck up a romantic relationship with Ian Fleming, later to win fame as author of the James Bond novels which inspired the known film series. Skarbek is said to have been the prototype of Fleming's character Vesper Lund from first James Bond novel Casino Royale, with some claiming she also inspired the creation of 007 himself.
While working as a ship stewardess Skarbek met her later killer Dennis Muldowney, who stabbed with a knife on June 14, 1952 after she rejected his marriage proposal. Skarbek died in hospital, Muldowney was apprehended and sentenced to death.
Skaberk's espionage exploits were described by Clare Mulley in her her book The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville.
8a: Enigma REAL codebreakers:
As of the early 1930s Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski of the famous Polish Cipher Bureau worked on cracking German coding machine Enigma, which they first did in 1932.
Five weeks before Germany's September 1939's invasion of Poland, due to looming war and construction adversities caused by financial shortages, Rejewski and his team, passed a decade worth of Enigma work to French and British intelligence on a meeting held July 25, 1939 at Polish codebreakers' hideout in Warsaw-Pyry, fully convinced it would soon come in handy for the Allies. In the history of military co-operation this unconditional and selfless act of sharing with other country's intelligence top secret data and elaborate know-how was unprecedented.
By July 1939, Polish mathematicians had already been breaking Enigma codes for over 6,5 years, with the Polish breakthrough cracking to have taken place as early as the end of 1932.
According to late Tony Sale, former MI5 engineer, historian and first Bletchley Park Museum curator, although the British were aware that Enigma had been adopted by the German Navy in 1926 and later by the rest of the German Forces, "unfortunately did not recognise, as the Poles did, that a cryptographic attack on Enigma traffic required a completely different approach to that with which the British had been so successful in the 1914-18 War. Then it had been linguists that had achieved the success with non-machine generated codes and ciphers. Now it was the turn of mathematicians and scientists".
It was not until "after the Polish revelations in 1939", Sale goes on, that "it was decided (by British authorities - PAP) to recruit mathematicians (...)", among others, Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman and John Jeffreys in order to work on Polish-delivered know-how and hardware, including wheel internal wirings with German machine replicas.
Also former British ambassador to Poland, Robin Barnett, during his 2014's address pointed out "Breaking the Enigma code undoubtedly saved thousands of lives and shortened the war. And the Polish contribution was crucial", adding that "In the UK, a man called Dilly Knox (present at the Pyry meeting and reported as being angry at Polish mathematicians' success - PAP) tried to break the cipher using traditional paper based methods (...) In France, Major Bertrand of the Deuxieme Bureau applied panache and arranged for someone to steal the code books. But it was Poland that realised that only mathematicians could break the code".
Barnett added "of course, it was a Polish team of mathematicians led by Marian Rajewski, who ultimately succeeded. This allowed Alan Turing to develop the ‘bombe’ which could crack the most complex codes". British ambassador went on to underline it was "yet another example of how Poland contributed so much to the allied victory in World War Two". "We will remember them", concluded Barnett.
Polish genius mathematicians were excluded from the cooperation with the British team, yet their achievements were widely applied by England's famous Bletchley Park centre to read encrypted messages throughout World War Two.
The intelligence the British gained from Polish Enigma decoders in July of 1939, enabled creation of what was later known as Ultra, and greatly contributed to defeating Germany in WWII.
According to experts, breaking Enigma codes might have shortened WW2 by 2-3 years, having saved dozens of thousands of lives.
Initially, however, for the lack of success at Bletchley Park, further meetings with Rejewski, Rozycki and Zygalski were necessary so that the British could learn how to effectively apply Polish methods of decoding Enigma. The proper rendez-vous took place in Paris in Jan, 1940, around the same time that Rejewski team decrypted first wartime (Luftwaffe) Enigma message at the Polish-French Bruno station. The momentous decryption was carried through by means of the so-called Zygalski-sheets, punched at Bletchley Park, basing on Polish intel.
The Polish genius did not, however, come out of thin air, yet was a result of years of hard work and dedication to the matter. While studying mathematics in Poznan in 1929, Rejewski underwent secret cryptology training at the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau, whose staff he joined in September 1932. The Bureau had been unsuccessful in decoding Enigma messages and delegated Rejewski to deal with the matter late that year; it took Rejewski no more than a few weeks to find the machine's secret internal wiring, due to which subsequently, he and his two colleagues developed a number of techniques for the decryption of Enigma. The same year, Rejewski constructed sight-unseen first replica of Enigma and until 1939 a few dozens of such devices were home-produced by Polish team, mostly in their base in Warsaw-Pyry.
Among Marian Rejewski's contributions include a cryptological catalogue derived from a cyclometer which also he had invented, and the so-called cryptologic bomb to later significantly influence Alan Turing in constructing his BOMBe.
Rozycki so-called "clock method" influenced the famous Bletchley Park's 'Banburismus' method, with Zygalski sheets having been crucial in the first wartime Enigma breaking.
All those independent ways of decrypting Enigma machine along with copies of the German Enigma were passed by the Polish side, as Tony Sale writes, "to the utter astonishment of the French and British", at a meeting in the Kabackie Woods near Pyry just outside Warsaw, on July 25, 1939.
Shortly after the outbreak of the war, Polish cryptologists were evacuated to France, where they continued decoding messages. Rejewski and his staff had to evacuate again after the June 1940 fall of France, in 1942, Rejewski and Zygalski fled to Britain through Spain, Portugal, and Gibraltar. There they enlisted in the Polish Armed Forces and were set to solving low-grade German ciphers.
After the war Rejewski worked as an accountant in Poland. Fearing retortions from Poland's communist government, he remained silent about his wartime work for 20 years, breaking the silence in 1967, when he gave his memoirs to the Polish Military Historical Institute.
Rejewski's cryptological work earned him numerous honours and distinctions. In 2000, Poland's then President Aleksander Kwasniewski posthumously awarded him and Zygalski with the Grand Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, Poland's highest civilian order. In 2005, Rejewski received the War Medal 1939–1945 from the British Chief of the Defence Staff, and in 2012, the U.S. Military Intelligence Corps Association awarded him with its Knowlton Award.
On 11 July 2012, a plaque dedicated to the work of Polish cryptologists was unveiled in Bletchley Park. It reads:
"This plaque commemorates the work of Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski, mathematicians of the Polish intelligence service, in first breaking the Enigma code. Their work greatly assisted the Bletchley Park code breakers and contributed to the Allied victory in World War II".
The same year two other identical commemorative plaques were placed. One in London in the entrance hall of the Polish Embassy (November 2002), and one in Warsaw at the Piludski square building where the three Polish mathematicians would work (18 September 2002).
On August 5, 2014 the American Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) distinguished Rejewski, Rozycki and Zygalski with its coveted Milestone award in recognition of world-changing achievement.
A bronze monument was dedicated to the three Polish mathematicians in 2007 in front of Poznan Castle in west Poland. Each of its three sides bears the name of one of the Enigma decrypters.
Rejewski and his colleagues were the heroes of the thriller movie Sekret Enigmy (The Enigma Secret), which recounted their wartime exploits. In late 1980 Polish TV also launched a series on the same theme called Tajemnice Enigmy (The Secrets of Enigma).
Despite all due commemoration acts the Polish mathematicians' unquestionable input into solving Enigma and, through this, defeating Hitler has been oftentimes omitted on big screen productions, in books, press publications or even misrepresented therein as in 2001's flick "Enigma" where the only Polish-born character works at Bletchley Park to leak intel to Germans. The release of the film triggered an immediate protest from Polish embassy in London, demanding a disclaimer to be aired before movie screenings.
A slightly more factual approach was presented in the 2014's Oscar-winning "Imitation game", telling the story of Alan Turing. Although the film indeed mentions the Polish trace in Enigma feat, it limits itself to passing references of an "old Polish machine" and "Polish intelligence", giving almost the whole credit of breaking Enigma solely to Turing and his Bletchley Park team.
In response to decades-long discussion on who had contributed most to Enigma decryption, Marian Rejewski himself would call the British input in the process as rather "quantitative, not qualitative", referring to a British vast financial and personnel capacity that Poland had lacked at that time.
In 1979, Rejewski wrote, commenting contents of the official British Intelligence in the Second World War, "we quickly found the [wirings] within the [new rotors], but [their] introduction [...] raised the number of possible sequences of drums from 6 to 60 [...] and hence also raised tenfold the work of finding the keys. Thus the change was not qualitative but quantitative. We would have had to markedly increase the personnel to operate the bombs, to produce the perforated sheets (60 series of 26 sheets each were now needed, whereas up to the meeting on July 25, 1939, we had only two such series ready) and to manipulate the sheets".
In the book British Intelligence in the Second World War, an English historian and cryptanalyst, Harry Hinsley, suggested that Polish mathematicians had decided to share their Enigma know-how and the equipment with the French and British in July 1939 since came across "insuperable technical difficulties".
"No, it was not [cryptologic] difficulties, [...] that prompted us to work with the British and French" retorted Rejewski, clarifying it was only the deteriorating political situation that . "If we had had no difficulties at all we would still, or even the more so, have shared our achievements with our allies as our contribution to the struggle against Germany".[
Also Alan Turing's fellow-cryptologist Irving John Good in his 1993's book "Codebreakers", commenting his Bletchley Park workmates' achievements, writes about "elaborations" of Polish methods (among others, the Rozycki's "clock method") rather than "inventions".
As the Polish input in breaking Enigma has from the very beginning been belittled, numerous controversies have over the decades arisen in regard to crediting with the decoding of Germany's Enigma cipher machine, which would have obviously been either impossible or at least come too late, had it not been for the work of Polish mathematicians Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski.
NOTE 10:
The first comprehensive report on the Holocaust was the so-called "Witold's Report", an account of the Germans' atrocities at the Auschwitz death camp in south Poland. Written by Witold Pilecki, a Polish resistance fighter and rotamaster in the pre-war Polish cavalry who let himself be imprisoned in the camp to gather data, Witold's Report is considered the most allround account of the workings of the Holocaust.
Called "the bravest of the brave" and considered one of the top five war heroes of all time, Pilecki later escaped from the camp and returned to the Polish underground, among others fighting in the 1944 e Warsaw Uprising against the Germans.
He remained loyal to the London-based Polish exile government after the communist takeover of Poland, and on May 8, 1947 was arrested on charges of working for "foreign imperialism" and after a show trial sentenced to death.
He was executed by a gunshot to the back of the head on 25 May 1948 in the basement of infamous Warsaw Mokotow prison. His body was most probably dumped into a nameless grave and has yet to be found. Information about his activities and fate was suppressed by the Polish communist regime until 1989.
Witold's Report was presented at the last International Book Fair in London, promoting Poland's "bravest of the brave" among both compatriots (with the support of the Polish Institute and the Polish Social and Cultural Centre) and foreign guests at the fair in Olympia.
Pilecki was posthumously awarded Poland's highest decoration the Order of the White Eagle by late President Lech Kaczynski, and posthumously promoted to the rank of Colonel.
Another Polish Holocaust rapporteur was Jan Karski, born Jan Kozielewski, a young Polish Roman Catholic diplomat, who in the early days of World War II witnessed the Germans' treatment of Jews in ghettos and concentration camps.
To learn the fate of Polish Jews, Karski was smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto by the Jewish underground and to the Belzec death camp in the disguise of a Ukrainian guard. He travelled across occupied Europe to England, and eventually to America. Karski personally reported to the Polish Prime Minister in London, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, Britain's Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, US President Franklin Roosevelt and many other prominent figures. His description of the systematic annihilation of European Jews was met with disbelief and passivity.
After having been given by Karski a recount of German death camp atrocities, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was quoted as asking the Polish messenger about "the situation in the Polish countryside", and how it was in Poland with... "the horses and cattle".
After the war, Karski remained in Washington D.C., became an American citizen and lectured at Georgetown University for nearly 40 years. Jan Karski, widely regarded as the "man who tried to stop the Holocaust", was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.
During the fateful ceremony (30 May, 2012 - PAP) Obama in his address, while referring to German death camps applied the term "Polish", for which a misnomer he later apologised profusely.
Earlier, the award was granted, among others, to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Poland's former president and Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, Marek Edelman (Warsaw Ghetto hero), Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, and posthumously to Boris Nemtsov.
NOTE 11:
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising broke out on April 19, 1943 in the final phase of the ghetto's liquidation launched by the Nazis few months earlier. The insurgency, that lasted until May 16, had been a symbolic act taking the small chances of success. In an uneven, almost one-month-long struggle, the poorly armed fighters of the Jewish Combat Organisation (ZOB) and the Jewish Military Union (ZZW) stood against SS and Wehrmacht soldiers, the Security Police and auxiliaries.
After a few weeks of uneven fight on May 8, 1943, the then commander of the uprising Mordechaj Anielewicz together with a group of ZOB soldiers committed suicide in a bunker at 18 Mila st. Just a handful of fighters managed to escape from the burning ghetto through the sewage system. Among them was the last commander of the uprising Marek Edelman. It is presumed that about 6,000 insurgents died in the fighting. Survivors were mostly deported to German concentration camps. Of what remained from the ghetto was razed to the ground by German troops led by SS General Juergen Stroop. Stroop was tried, convicted, and hanged for crimes against humanity in Poland March 6, 1952.
NOTE 12:
The Home Army-organised (see: NOTE 2) Warsaw Uprising broke out on August 1, 1944, as the biggest resistance operation in German-occupied Europe. Initially intended to last several days, it continued for over two months before its suppression by the Germans. The uprising claimed the lives of 18,000 insurgents and around 200,000 civilians.
After the insurgents surrendered and the remaining 500,000 residents were expelled, the Germans methodically burned down and blew up Warsaw house by house. By January 1945, app. 90 percent of the buildings and city infrastructure was destroyed.
NOTE 13:
Over the decades under the communist regime, the Polish nation stood up to the Soviet oppressor a few times, inspiring other countries in the bloc to do the same. One of the first such initiatives in the Eastern Europe was the so-called Poznan '56, which paved the way to numerous such revolts and walkouts in the coming years, including March 1968, December '70, Ursus 1975 or August 1980 to name just few.
The Poznan 1956 riots broke out on June 28, 1956 in the city's renowned Cegielski engineering plant as the first mass protest against Poland's post-war communist regime. Demanding better working conditions, about 100,000 protesters, mainly workers, rallied in the city's downtown section near the local security ministry building, where they were confronted by 400 army tanks and a 10,000-strong force of military and security police units under the Polish-Soviet general Stanislav Poplavsky.
Ordered to suppress the protests at all costs, the soldiers and security corps began firing at the demonstrators, killing 58 people, including a 13-year-old boy, and hurting hundreds. According to some accounts the death toll was much higher and ran to over a hundred.
The Poznan protests were a major step towards the installation of a less Soviet-dependent government in Poland in October of that year.
NOTE 14:
John Paul II (May 18 1920 – April 2 2005) was the first non-Italian pope in 456 years, since the Dutch Pope Adrian VI (1522-1523). Polish pope's long pontificate spanned from 1978 to 2005, and some Catholics call him Saint John Paul the Great.
John Paul II is held to have helped end communist rule in his native Poland and subsequently all of Central and Eastern Europe. According to historians, his 1987 visit to Poland was instrumental for the 1989 fall of communism in Central-East Europe.
He also significantly improved the Catholic Church's relations with Judaism, Islam, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Anglican Communion. He upheld the Church's teachings on issues like artificial contraception and the ordination of women, but also supported the Church's Second Vatican Council and its reforms. He was also the first Pope with a modern approach to media, among others introducing the custom of holding mid-air press conferences.
One of his main goals was to transform the Catholic Church, which he expressed by the wish "to place his Church at the heart of a new religious alliance that would bring together Jews, Muslims and Christians in a great religious armada".
John Paul II died on April 2, 2005 at 9:37 pm, a month and a half before his 85th birthday, prompting a spontaneous world-wide surge of mourning. A number of tv stations put on hiatus emissions of entertainment content and commercials.
John Paul II was canonised by Pope Francis in 2014.
"Unconquered" is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q88AkN1hNYM
More to come... (PAP)
