We are continuing our series on the ties between the Polish soldier and our city and the Bolesławiec region. These are ties rooted in recent history, following Poland’s return to the old Piast lands. We must not condemn to oblivion those who, as Polish soldiers of various formations—primarily soldiers of the 1st and 2nd Polish Armies, as well as partisan units in Yugoslavia—created a new home of their own here and raised the city and the Bolesławiec region from ashes and ruins. We owe them chiefly the present condition and appearance of Bolesławiec and the Bolesławiec region. The March of the 2nd Army and the 1st Armored Corps
First, let us describe how the regular units of the 2nd Army and the 1st Armored Corps marched through the area. The soldiers of these formations were the first to reach the Bóbr, and although their stay was brief, they returned several weeks and months later to settle here.
The soldiers wore field rogatywka caps and the green uniforms of the September 1939 army, without the crimson facings and colorful bands of garrison caps. They marched across our land along the Bóbr toward Lusatia and farther on, in order to defeat the cruel enemy who, in collusion with the Soviet army, had sought in 1939 to carry out another partition of Poland.
At the outset, it must be noted that the history of the 1st and 2nd Armies and the 1st Armored Corps still awaits comprehensive, reliable studies and the presentation of the full truth. So far, what has been said on the subject has been incomplete and only partly true. Today, as is often the case here, we swing from one extreme to the other. At times, we diminish the military effort of the soldiers of these armies. We do not present the complex political circumstances surrounding the formation of these units. It is true that this is heard less and less often, but some still claim that these soldiers brought communism to Poland on their bayonets, even though that political system was hated by soldiers who had lived through the Soviet occupation in 1939–1941, many of them even having endured labor camps and prisons. At times, monuments to soldiers of the Polish 1st and 2nd Armies were destroyed, although here in Bolesławiec the monument to the 2nd Army stands and will continue to stand. It is the only monument to the Polish soldier in the Bolesławiec region.
For the Polish soldiers who, by marching through Bolesławiec on an April night in 1945, sealed the return to the Piast lands, it was not important on the basis of which legal and political act we had returned to these lands. The postwar borders of our state and its political system were decided by the Big Three. Nor did it matter that the return to these lands was compensation for the lost Eastern Borderlands, and that Poland—although it had fought the longest and made the greatest sacrifices—was territorially smaller after the war than the Second Polish Republic. The Polish soldier had no victorious parade of the kind held on a grand scale in London, Moscow, Paris, and Washington. Let us recall that a group of a dozen or so Polish soldiers took part in the Moscow parade. But they were Soviet generals assigned to the Polish Army, and only two Poles: the then Captain Huszcza, later a major general, and a corporal.
The soldiers of the 2nd Army and the 1st Armored Corps came mainly from the Eastern Borderlands, which had been incorporated into Soviet Russia after the September defeat. During the German occupation, many men and adolescent boys took up arms in order to fight the enemy in Home Army units and document Poland’s right to these lands, or to defend Polish villages and towns against mass murders perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists. We still know so little about these exceedingly bloody events, reminiscent of scenes from "With Fire and Sword." Polish self-defense units later formed Home Army units, led by the famous 27th Volhynian Division.
In the spring and summer of 1944, these lands were occupied once again by Soviet forces, which treated Home Army units as the enemy. Many units were forced to lay down their arms, despite having supported Soviet units during the fighting against the common German enemy—for example, in the battles to capture Vilnius, Lviv, and other cities.
After being disarmed, Home Army soldiers were deported to labor camps deep inside the USSR. Those who returned home from the disbanded units were taken from their homes at night by the NKVD and met the same fate as those who had been disarmed.
The Soviet authorities announced general mobilization in those territories. Reporting to the "Voyenkomat" (the Soviet military recruitment office) to receive an assignment to the forming 1st or 2nd Army offered shelter from arrest. Young men not covered by the mobilization went voluntarily, for the same reasons, or simply because this was the only Polish Army being formed there. Only a few joined the Soviet Army. Some underground-structure commands even prohibited joining the "Berling Army" or the "Wasilewska Army," saying that if one could not go into the forest, one should join the Red Army. There, service for Poland was extremely difficult. Poles were often assigned to labor units, almost penal units.
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