An Ordinary Polish Boy

As I started to build the timeline, I was drawn into a story that I needed to investigate, a story of betrayal of countries, broken promises and horrors it was impossible to comprehend…………………… On 1 September 1939, when my father was just fourteen, Germany launched its invasion of Poland, with 1.8 million soldiers using the blitzkrieg method of total war ……………………. With the Polish defeat at Tomaszow, the Germans were now in total control of the country, and as the occupation continued they put into place their plans for the population. Throughout the country, the Germans started to enforce new decrees particularly relating to the treatment of the Jews. ……………………. Poles were forbidden to sell food to the Jews under penalty of death, many of whom were close to starvation. With no doctors or medicine, disease and death were common particularly among the young and old. Several atrocities occurred in the town, groups of disabled Jews were forced into cellars, which were then filled with water until they all drowned. The elderly and sick were routinely shot. ……………………. By April 1940, the Germans decided to build a forced labour camp at Belzec, a small village about three miles from Tomaszow. . ……………………. Conditions in the labour camps were appalling; Prisoners were tortured, beaten and starved. Mothers killed their own babies because there wasn’t enough food. SS guards killed people for fun and target practice. ……………………. Surviving Jews in the ghetto were made to wear an arm band with a yellow star on their jackets to indicate they were Jews. The ghetto was designed to contain the Jews so they were ready for future transportation to labour or extermination camps. ……………………. This plan was also known as ‘the Final Solution’. Belzec was to become the first permanently sited extermination camp – Belzec was used to experiment, refine and discover the best way to kill and dispose of thousands of people. ……………………. My father recalled seeing Jews taken every day in cattle cars to Belzec. Rumours of what was going to happen to them were starting to spread, but few believed them. My father suspected that the families he saw taken away were going to be killed, but in the early days no one really knew, most believed the German story that they were going to be resettled, ……………………. My father recalled his mother having to produce papers to show that he was Polish and not Jewish when he was rounded up with some Jewish children. The Germans let him go, but they took the others to the square and later to Belzec. They all died. ……………………. These Einsatzgruppen or SS Mobile Death Units were the specialized German forces that followed the invasion under the pretext of containing guerrilla and local partisan activity. ……………………. Archive photos of naked women holding their children in line waiting to be shot only because they were Jewish provide images beyond comprehension. ……………………. The victims, mainly Jews and Gypsies would arrive at Belzec by lorry or train; They had been told they were being resettled in the east. They were told to shower for the journey, the gas chambers were disguised so the victims were unaware of what was going to happen to them ……………………. A person only survived if he or she was of any value, like being fit enough to work. That person would then be taken into forced labour. If the intensity of the work didn’t kill him or her, the hunger, extreme cold, poor living conditions and disease in the labour camps were likely to……………………. In late 1942 / early 1943, an order went out for the SS to collect one hundred and ten thousand able bodied Poles from three hundred towns and villages in the Zamość and Lublin regions of Poland. The round ups in these areas included Tomaszow Lubelski and this is when my father was taken from his family and transported nearly 900 miles to Berlin to be used for forced labour. ……………………. This order was also part of a much bigger plan, the complete Germanification of the whole region, the plan was to empty all these villages and expel more than a hundred thousand Polish and Jewish peasant farmers from the area, and then colonise the whole region with sixty thousand ethnic German families……………………….. The Germans needed to maintain an effective supply line from Berlin to the Italian front line. To organise this they decided to use forced labourers to work as auxiliaries, driving supply trucks to their front line troops, this was organised by the transport section of the German Army, the Transportkorps Speer, ……………………. My father and his companion continued south, travelling mostly by night until they were eventually picked up by American soldiers. As Poles, they were taken to Taranto to be processed and then to the Polish Second Corps base in San Basilio where they were given uniforms, and after signing an oath, conscripted into the Polish army. ……………………. Poland suffered a higher percentage of casualties during World War II than any other country in Europe, with nearly 22 per cent of the population, over six million people, being killed, a fifth of the population. ……………………. Hitler made his intentions very clear with a speech on the 22 nd August 1939 when he ordered his forces ‘to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital living space that we need’……………………. The magnitude of what happened to the Jews sometimes causes us to overlook the fact that although the Germans had murdered three million Polish Jews they had also murdered three million Polish Christians. ………………… Back in Tomaszow, the Russians, allies of the West since 1941 had liberated the town in July 1944. The following year, the Russian NKVD and the UB (Polish secret police) established a prison there to house and execute soldiers of the Polish Home Army (Partisan Resistance) and Peasants’ Battalions……………………. My father and his comrades disembarked onto English soil with just the clothes they stood up in and a few belongings, and in my father’s case, the small suitcase found in the attic.. ……………………. After arriving in England, my father and other Polish Second Corps soldiers were conscripted into the Polish Resettlement Corps. …………………….