Combat veterans and Polish soldiers of all fronts and various formations—regular and partisan—today, on the 50th anniversary of the end of hostilities in the European theatre of war (the war in the Far East was still continuing), demand not triumph but only remembrance. Their human and historical experiences, their struggle and hardships, their problems and thoughts demand preservation, so that they should not be forgotten.
Let us therefore not forget the winding Polish roads to freedom and to the homeland, for that was the cruel fate of Polish soldiers—the displaced. I would like to recall that around 12 years ago, the “Poltel” film studio of TVP produced a film in Bolesławiec entitled “Roads to Poland.” The film was broadcast several times on Channel 1. Polish soldiers made their way to Poland in it: through Soviet gulags, among those deported in 1940; AK units disarmed in 1944; men who had sometimes fought at Lenino and Monte Cassino; participants in the 1940 campaign who had gone to France in search of bread; famous partisans from Yugoslavia; and soldiers of the First Army from the lands beyond the former eastern border… Most of the film’s protagonists are no longer alive.
On this anniversary, I would like to recall another figure from the Polish roads of World War II. I have stayed in contact with him by letter for years. I keep hundreds of pages of letters written in tiny handwriting, which could serve as material for a film script. The letters reveal the extraordinary memory of this 92-year-old veteran, titular lieutenant Józef Bobrowski, a resident of England, who left the country in the summer of 1944 and never returned… “My bones will rest in a foreign, though hospitable, land that took me in. I will not return to the Homeland; I am too old for the long journey, or for such returns at all. Although returning to the homeland was my dream throughout the last half-century. And the greatest mistake of my life was that I did not repatriate to the country immediately after the war, as others did. Although my dear wife died recently in England, she had been with me on the British island for years. This happened thanks to Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz! I wrote to him when, after the war, the army refused to provide me with financial assistance to transfer my wife and children from the country across the green borders to England. Officers, especially senior ones, received such assistance. When I wrote to the prime minister in Warsaw, I received no reply… but a few weeks later my wife was summoned to the UB in Augustów (she had lived there since before the war). She went because she had to, with her heart in her throat… and there, waiting for her, were a passport and dollars to cover the cost of travelling with the children to England! The journey was supposedly for a visit; no one believed this story, least of all the UB. But the world is governed by strange laws! Today, my daughter, a resident of New Zealand, has been with me since the death of her mother, my wife. She takes care of me. I live in a nursing home. I cannot complain; I am well cared for here. But longing for the homeland eats away at us here, and human characters sometimes break…”
Let us recall the story of this extraordinary soldier, as if taken straight from the pages of the history of the previous century. In 1918, as a 16-year-old boy born far beyond Vilnius, in a small nobleman’s settlement on the Daugava, along which the Polish–Latvian border ran after 1920, he became a Polish soldier and did not remove his uniform until his demobilisation in 1947. He began his service in a volunteer company of young illiterate men like himself, in the division known as the Lithuanian–Belarusian Division. In 1920, he was awarded the Cross of Valour for the first time. He then served for many years as a professional non-commissioned officer in the 1st Krechowiecki Lancers Regiment in Augustów. For the battle at Olszewo in Podlasie on 12 September 1939, he was awarded the Cross of Valour for the second time.
After the September defeat, he returned to his native region and, from autumn 1939, was a soldier of the ZWZ and later the AK. He fought bravely in partisan units. The commander of the AK Vilnius District awarded him the Virtuti Militari Order. In the summer of 1944, as the front line approached from the east, he withdrew westward. Over the radio, he caught fragments of an order from the Commander-in-Chief in England to break through to the west, toward the areas of Western Europe liberated by the Allied forces. He disbanded his unit. In Suwałki, army comrades who were now railway workers hid him in an evacuation train bound for France. After many adventures, he emerged from hiding at night. He was in France! He reached a Polish unit operating within a French partisan brigade. He took part in the fighting, after which the French transported him, together with other Poles, at night by cutter from still-occupied France to southern Italy, already liberated by American and British forces.
There he searched for the Polish II Corps. He reached it. They checked him; he might have been a German agent. When he learned that the 1st Lancers Regiment—his regiment, re-formed in the West—was there, he made his way to it. He reported his return to the regiment to its commander. The commander could not believe his eyes! They had known each other very well before the war. The lancers of this regiment had replaced their horses with tanks.
Our hero became commander of a light-tank platoon and was still at the front, in the vanguard. He took part in the winter–autumn Italian campaign. His tank was hit. They pulled him out. His wound was minor. He climbed into a new tank. He followed the battle route of Henryk Dąbrowski’s Polish Legions. He dreamed of returning from Italian soil to Poland, as the Legionnaires had done. Would they too return to the Vistula and the Warta?…
The final battle took place near Bologna on 21 April. His tanks supported the Jewish Infantry Brigade. On that day, the entire II Polish Corps also ended its fighting and moved to the areas assigned to the U.S. Eighth Army. Soon afterward came the capitulation of the German forces. He received the Cross of Valour for the third time.
He carried eight heavy machine guns with him. He wanted to take them to his beloved Augustów and place them in the local museum, as a token of gratitude to the town’s residents for the four heavy machine guns—brand-new Polish wz. 30s—donated by the local community in August 1939. These machine guns performed excellently. Our hero, the best marksman in the entire 1st Lancers Regiment, shot down a German bomber over Augustów from a firing position on the tower of the Augustów town hall…
Then came the journey to England. And the dilemma: return or remain in exile?… He wrote to me in a letter: “If I had known the contents of the secret order of the commander of the 1st Armoured Brigade No. 95 (demobilisation), from the summer of 1946, I would have returned to the country. Let the politicians and generals stay there…” I have before me a document of the following content, written in England on 23 October 1946 and addressed to officers commanding subunits: “I remind you of the Brigade Commander’s order that the order in which applications for repatriation to Poland are submitted shall serve as the basis for general guidance when assigning soldiers to the regular transports to the country. However, if among the applicants there is an individual who is politically harmful, he should be sent first. This applies in particular to certain senior non-commissioned officers. Signed: Chief of Staff of the Brigade, Major Dowgiałło, Staff Officer.”
Under this document, which our Hero sent me, there is his handwritten note: “Because older non-commissioned officers had glanders (an infectious and fatal disease of horses—W.K.’s note). That is how they were treated.”