My Second World War Experiences

My Second World War Experiences
By Adela Krasnopolska

On 1st September 1939 Hitler attacked Poland. I was then 15 years old, and lived in the eastern part of Poland.
At this time refugees from the western part of the country were escaping from German bombs and shells. Wearing my grey scouting uniform with a white-and red band on my arm, it was my regular duty to help these displaced people with tea and sandwiches in the local railway station, and escort them to various places providing temporary accommodation. It was not long, however, before our town became part of the war zone. The main roads were severely damaged by bombs, so the only form of transport was by foot.
One day I was in my back garden after coming off duty, when suddenly I saw four holes in the wooden fence. They were caused by an aircraft machine gun, and had missed me by only a few inches.
On 17th September the Soviet Union attacked Poland and the Nazi and Soviet forces clashed near my town. After an all-night battle the two aggressors agreed to carve up Poland between them, in accordance with the previously signed Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. My town ended up in the Soviet zone.
On 10th December 1939 my father (Wladyslaw Underka) was taken by the NKWD (the contemporary equivalent of the KGB) at four o’ clock in the night. For the first few months he was held in a local prison. I went there two or three times a day with food and drink for him and the fellow-prisoners in his cell. Winter that year was exceptionally cold, and I would have to wait for hours and bribe the guards with cigarettes to take my food baskets. Later my father was sent to prison in Archangel where he died and was buried in the prison cemetery.
In 1940 eight thousand Polish officers were killed in Katyn Forest, each with a single shot to the back of the head. In addition, thousands of prominent Poles were murdered in other places, making a total of about twenty three thousand people who were slaughtered in cold blood by the Soviets.
During 1940 more than a million Polish people were deported to the far eastern part of the Soviet Union. On 13th April my mother and her six children were taken from our home, again at four o’ clock, herded into goods wagons (eighty people to a wagon) with a single small hole in the floor. Early in the morning a priest from our parish came and blessed the train, and we began our journey to the east. After three weeks we arrived in the middle of nowhere, with only the steppes around us. It was a kolkhoz (collective farm) and my first work on the soil was to help in planting a new forest.
When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, we were sent to the infamous gulags (labour camps) of Siberia for even harder work in a cobalt mine. By this time my mother was already dead, which may have been for the best, as at least she did not have to watch her children struggle and her eldest son die. A few yards from us criminal chain-gangs were at work, supervised by rifle-carrying guards.
One day we were suddenly set free, because the Soviets had joined the Allies. I still have in my possession a document stating that I had worked in a cobalt mine. We were informed that a Polish army would be created somewhere in the southern part of the Soviet Union from the men and women who had been released from the camps and prisons.
In Samarkand (Uzbekistan) I contracted typhoid before I could join this new army. Miraculously I survived, though thousands did not, and as part of the force under the command of General Anders we left the Soviet Union, that inhuman land. We sailed through the Caspian Sea to Persia and Iraq. Some people on the ship died during the voyage, and their bodies were thrown into the sea. In Iraq near Baghdad the temperature reached 50 degrees Centigrade. Once when visibility was virtually nil, I nearly drowned in Lake Habbaniya, after I had lost all sense of where I was.
We moved on to Transjordan (now Jordan) and I bathed my legs in the river Jordan, where Jesus was baptised.
Next stop, the British Mandate of Palestine, where we were issued with khaki uniforms. I underwent training as a switchboard and telegraph operator. I also completed my studies to the equivalent of A level, including English Language, in Nazareth. Then I was sent to Egypt and in the Sahara Desert at Camp Cassasin I was trained as a radio-telegrapher and sent to Italy to join the 2nd Polish Corps (part of the British 8th Army).
There was also another Polish army under Soviet command. Their motto was ‘The shortest way to Poland’. Many of them were killed, however, at the battle of Lenino. At times they only had one rifle for every five soldiers, though later they obtained more weapons from the Allies.

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My future husband, Tadeusz Krasnopolski, was in the regular Polish Army before the war started. After the Germans had overrun most of Poland he left the country before the Soviets attacked. His route took him through Romania, Hungary, the French Mandate of Lebanon, to Marseilles and Paris. One night he went with fellow-officers to the Cassino de Paris and heard Maurice Chevalier singing that he could not understand why soldiers were fighting over the Gdansk Corridor, when there were so many beautiful women in the world. He soon found out why, when the fall of France came.
I still have a photograph of my husband sitting in an empty coal container on board a small ship used to evacuate troops from Dunkirk. He was a second lieutenant in an anti-aircraft unit. In England he received additional training that enabled him to serve on an armoured train that ran along the east coast of England as part of the defences against a possible German invasion. On one occasion he was a part of security operation for King George VI while the monarch was visiting Scotland. My husband heard the King say a few words in Polish. (‘Greetings Polish soldiers.’)
By early 1942 Britain had been saved from the treat of imminent invasion by the Battle of Britain, in which one in every eight pilots was Polish. Many Polish soldiers were sent to the Middle East, to Palestine via the Cape of Good Hope route. Later they trained in the Iraqi desert near Kirkuk and Mosul, alongside their compatriot survivors from the battle of Tobruk and from the Soviet Union. They were also ready to defend Iraqi oil-fields from possible German air-attacks that could be launched from the Libyan desert. Thus the 2nd Polish Corps was born and sent to Italy as a part of the 8th Army. In Scotland the 1st Polish Corps under General Maczek was formed, which later took part in the D-Day campaign.
On 18th May 1944, Polish soldiers captured the ruins of the monastery at Monte Cassino, and raised their national red-and-white flag on the summit, together with the Union Jack. On the 19th a song that was to become famous was heard for the first time. It was about the red poppies that were in bloom on the hillsides of Monte Cassino before the final battle; according to the lyric the flowers would grow more quickly and redder than ever because they had been nourished by Polish blood. Later when Poland was taken over by the Communists this song become almost a second national anthem. Polish forces were subsequently involved in the battles of Ancona and Bologna. In May 1945 when I was travelling by train from Rome to Naples, I glimpsed the ruins of the monastery in the distance. After the Nazis had been driven out of Italy the Polish Corps remained in the country to help secure free and fair elections.
After the war many Poles abroad were unable to return to their country because of Communist rule. They came to England, were demobilised here, and were granted permission to stay. My husband, who had attained the rank of captain, and whom I had married in Italy after the war had ended, had to change his occupation at the age of thirty five, and embark on thirty years of hard physical work. His character and sense of duty are reflected in the fact that he did not miss a single day’s work. After he had retired we moved to Torquay in 1979. In his later years my husband become vary fragile and confused as the traumas that he had endured during the war caught up with him. He died in 2000, aged eighty-seven.

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Over the course of the Second World War 600,000 Polish soldiers fought by land sea and air, the fourth largest contribution to the Allies’ cause after those of the Soviet Union, the USA and Great Britain. Polish mathematicians saved thousands of British and Allied lives by helping to crack the Enigma code, and Polish intelligence remained vitally important to Britain throughout the war.
Six million Polish citizens perished during the war, including three million Polish Jews, probably the highest proportional loss of any of the combatant nations.

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