-
K.T. Czelny
- The University Press of Kentucky
- Chapter
- Additional Information
39 K.T. Czelny the Poles manning it wore German camouflage jackets. But then we noticed they were also wearing red and white armbands. When the Poles saw us, they called out to us to cross the barricade as quickly as possible and then hurried us through the underground passages away from the barricade. This naturally took some time because the crowd was so large. The Germans fired no shots until after the last person had gone through the barricade. Obviously, by this exercise the Germans hoped to demoralize the Polish civilian population. I remained in City Center for the rest of the Warsaw Uprising. After the Warsaw Uprising, Bukowska was held in various German prison camps. At the end of the war, she emigrated to England, where she taught school. Bukowska holds a teaching diploma from the Central College of Commerce in Warsaw. K.T. CZELNY When Germany attacked Poland, my father, who was a major in the reserve of the medical corps of the Polish Army, was asked to report to a field hospital near Lw6w. He prudently took the rest of the family with him. In the face of a total lack of help from Poland's allies, Britain and France, and the hopelessness of fighting armored Nazis, supported by the whole might of the Luftwaffe, my father decided to take me and my cousin and escape to Romania. After several days of traveling by all feasible means toward the Romanian frontier, under incessant vicious attacks by low-flying Nazi planes, news reached us on September 17,1939, that the Soviet forces had crossed the border and were racing toward the Romanian frontier to cut off that escape route. A rapid confirmation of this shattering news came soon from the skies, when a small flight of Soviet planes bombed the Polish columns. Faced with this, we had to turn back and flee in the direction from which we had come-toward Lw6w. For a while we traveled by train, but after the Ukrainians blew up the tracks, the remaining two-thirds of the journey had to be on foot. As we approached every Ukrainian village, we were fired upon. In towns, we were also shot at by the Jewish militia, armed with stolen Polish army rifles and wearing red arm bands. As we ap- 40 Out of the Inferno proached the outskirts of Lw6w, we came upon a tragicomic spectacle: In a meadow beside the main road, about ten of the Jewish militiamen were guarding a sizable squadron of one of the elite Polish cavalry regiments. Soviet tank forces had disarmed the Polish regiment and had assigned their new "allies," the Jews, to guard the Poles. I recall a feeling of pain and disgust that those who were Polish citizens should behave so treacherously. Lw6w, the once proud city, was in the firm grip of the Soviets. People moved about as though they were in a trance, humiliated and stunned by this double-sided aggression and the new partition by Poland's ancient enemies. The so-called free and democratic elections followed, and of course the inhabitants of what was now called the Western Ukraine "unanimously" voted for incorporation into the Soviet Union. In view of the circumstances and after the ubiquitous NKVD began house-tohouse visits to register Poles, my entire family opted to cross the demarcation line into German-occupied Poland at the town of Przemysl . The German troops on the border were Wehrmacht, and I vividly remember a young officer saluting my exhausted mother and taking from her my baby sister, whom he carried to the waiting train. I recall thinking, Thank God we are back in European civilization. However, the illusion was shortlived. As soon as we arrived at our new home in Rabka-Zdr6j, we noticed huge posters announcing the executions of hostages or listing new hostages, a hundred at a time, to be shot in case of "crimes committed by Poles against Nazi Germany." Walking in the street, we had to step off the sidewalk if only one or two uniformed Germans approached from the opposite direction. What is more, as a sign of respect for the "super race," we had to take off any headgear we wore. As the months passed, the Gestapo terror intensified, and every night members of this sadistic, bestial force arrested leaders of Polish society, as well as former Polish officers and any young people. At that time, when many Poles were taken away and subjected...