Teenage Enduring Soldier heroine executed 71 yrs ago
71 years today, communist security services executed Danuta Siedzikowna, nom de guerre Inka, a 17-year old paramedic in the Polish Home Army and the post-war anti-communist underground as well as a Polish national heroine.
Inka was killed by a shot to the head in a Gdansk, north Poland, prison on August 28, 1946 at 6:15 am, six days before her 18th birthday. Facing up to the execution she was reported saying, "tell my grandma I did what was right". According to a priest present at the execution, her last words were, "long live Poland!". Her burial place remained unknown for several decades, until it was located in 2014 by exhumation teams from Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN).
Danuta Siedzikowna was born on September 3, 1928, in the village Guszczewina. She was a medical orderly in the 5th Vilnius Brigade of the Polish Home Army (see: NOTE). In 1946 she served with the Brigade's 1st Squadron in Poland's Pomorze (Pomerania) region, then part of the post-war anti-communist underground known as the Enduring Soldiers.
She was arrested by the Polish UB security service on 20 July 1946. Althouh tortured and beaten while imprisoned, she refused to give up any information about her contacts in the anti-communist underground and their meeting points. (PAP)
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NOTE: Founded in 1942, the Home Army 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, teams from the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) unearthed remains believed to belong to Antoni Dolega, a member of the post-World War II anti-communist 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. (PAP)
