Oath, Sabotage and a Horse

As a secondary-school student, Stanisław Żurowski witnessed the outbreak of World War II. He devoted his youth to fighting in defense of his homeland as a soldier in the Home Army. Sixty years after those events, he recalls his wartime experiences in a conversation with Boleslawiec.org.

Boleslawiec.org: Where are you from?

Stanisław Żurowski: I come from the eastern borderlands, from the county town of Sarny. The town was a railway junction connecting Warsaw with Kyiv and Vilnius with Lviv. It is now located in northern Ukraine. I attended school there, and later secondary school in Lubieszów in Polesia. It was a school run by the Piarist fathers.

B.org: It was during your secondary-school years that the war found you.

S.Ż.:I was in the second year of secondary school. I had just been admitted to the third year. The war found me when I was visiting my uncle for the holidays near Łomża. I do not remember the name of the place. It was near East Prussia. When the war broke out, my uncle was afraid to let me go home alone. On the third day, I was already determined to go home, so my uncle gave me one hundred zlotys and a horse, and I made my way to Łomża on that horse. The Polish Army took the horse from me because mobilization was underway.

B.org: Do you remember your first wartime episode?

S.Ż.: I was traveling home in a military transport. It was at Czeremcha railway station. German planes flew in and bombed the station and the military transport. I took shelter in a small grove near the station, and a Polish Army major was mortally wounded beside me. I managed to return home via Brest. My mother was happy, but my father was not there. He was a railwayman and had been mobilized.

B.org: What was mobilization like?

S.Ż.: Mostly reservists were called up, several months before the outbreak of war. People talked about the war. They expected it. I would like to tell you that young people were imbued with a patriotic spirit. Today there is not the kind of patriotism that existed before the war. Young people were disciplined, especially students in secondary schools, but also those in primary schools. Every holiday, whether May 3 or November 11, was celebrated very solemnly.

B.org: Right after the outbreak of war, we were stabbed in the back.

S.Ż.: When the Red Army came from the east, we experienced a terrible tragedy. No one expected it. Rather, everyone expected some kind of help. We knew that Hel was still defending itself and that Warsaw had not yet fallen. Young people tried somehow to go underground.

B.org: How did such underground activity work afterward?

S.Ż.: In 1943, the Cichociemni were already being parachuted in. We took the oath in groups of three. We met and distributed underground publications...

B.org: But sometimes you took great risks.

S.Ż.: During one roundup in 1943, the Germans caught me. They wanted to send me to forced labor. First, they transported me to the city of Rivne. It was an industrial and commercial city 100 km from Sarny. When we stopped at the local barracks, I decided to use every possible means to avoid ending up in Germany. They locked us on individual floors of the barracks building, but there were no bars. I managed to escape, although they had taken my documents earlier. I escaped from the second floor at night, along the windowsill. I had to wait until the guard disappeared around the corner of the building. I succeeded; I was athletic, so I climbed down the drainpipe and fled to my uncle, who lived in the city. I had no documents. I hid in my uncle's attic for three weeks. People brought me food there. Everyone was afraid because no one knew who the neighbors were.

B.org: Despite that, you were not afraid to return to the underground?

S.Ż.: I joined it again under another name. I began working in a group of technicians repairing telephone lines. At first, I did not know that everyone working there was part of the underground Home Army, including the head of the local post office, Mr. Wróblewski, whose code name was Mecenas. It was he who, in agreement with the Germans, organized telephone-line repair brigades. Eventually, we received orders to join the partisans, the forest units of Ryszard. We protected villages with Polish inhabitants. We carried out acts of sabotage, damaged telephone lines, dismantled railway tracks and fought skirmishes with nationalist Ukrainian bands from the UPA.

B.org: The partisans had no communications systems. How did the units pass information to one another?

S.Ż.: In the simplest way. During the day, a peasant plowed, and at night he rode bareback. He mounted a horse, and the forest units already knew where the Germans were.

B.org: Was there any reluctance to cooperate between Home Army soldiers and the rest of the Polish army?

S.Ż.: No. General Anders led the Polish Army out of the USSR, while General Berling remained in the USSR and reached an agreement with the communists. This enabled him to recruit deportees and persecuted people who had been unable to join Anders's forces. Berling's army was not hostile. It was the Polish authorities who were hostile. Bierut was Stalin's man.

B.org: Let us return to what happened to you afterward...

S.Ż.: Eventually, we received orders to cooperate with the Red Army when the front line arrived. Together, we captured Rivne. After the city was taken, the Red Army interned our commander, Ryszard; we did not want to submit to its command because our own command was in London. I made my way to the 27th Volhynian Division, which was stationed near the border in the area of Zamość. The division numbered nearly seven and a half thousand men. After fighting the Germans, we were forced to make our way in groups to other units. I joined Wiktor's unit, where I fought until the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising.

B.org: How far from Warsaw were you when the uprising broke out?

S.Ż.: I was on the Bug River near the Zamość area, where the local population took up arms quite spontaneously and wanted to set out to help Warsaw. The Red Army promised to provide trains for transport. However, instead of providing a train, Soviet soldiers surrounded the Polish units, and a firefight even broke out. After that, the commander disbanded our unit, and we had to go underground again. Later, I stayed in Chełm and managed to make my way to Lublin.

B.org: Did you have to conceal your connection with the Home Army?

S.Ż.: I joined the army together with fourteen Home Army soldiers. We could not admit that we were from the Home Army. All Home Army soldiers were deported to camps in the USSR. I entered the officers' school of the armored forces in Chełm under yet another name. I completed the school with the rank of second lieutenant. I was demobilized because military intelligence discovered that I had been in the Home Army. I later had trouble with the Security Office.

B.org: Eventually, you ended up in Bolesławiec.

S.Ż.: Yes, I began working in Bolesławiec in 1947 and reenlisted at the local barracks.

B.org: How would you comment on the recent incident involving anti-Polish posters?

S.Ż.: The deportations to Germany happened; it is true that people were not allowed to take their belongings. I was here in April 1947, but I did not see any cases of Poles persecuting Germans. There may have been some looting, as happens after a war, but there was no talk of any crimes. The posters were an unpleasant provocation.

B.org: Thank you for the interview.

Marcin Zabawa