byKatarzyna Szalajko, OSV News
Capt. Witold Pilecki, left, is seen in a 1930 photograph with a friend in Lida, Poland. A veteran officer of the Polish Army and member of World War II underground resistance Home Army, he voluntarily entered Auschwitz to gather intelligence and later escaped the death camp in 1943 to alert the world to ongoing Nazi atrocities. A devout Catholic, he was tried by Polish communists after World War II and executed in May 1948. (OSV News photo/courtesy Institute of National Remembrance)
Listen to this article now
WARSAW, Poland (OSV News) -- The story of the Polish "cursed soldiers" is about the highest price one can pay for their desire for freedom and one about an unconditional trust in God.
Throughout March, Poland commemorates patriots who fought against the communist regime after World War II with God as their strongest ally.
After World War II, Poland found itself in the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. The Polish communist government elected in the fraudulent elections in 1947 was dependent on Moscow -- embodying a direct consequence of the agreements made at the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences that led to a de facto division of Europe into spheres of influence.
In 1945, Gen. Leopold Okulicki, commander of the underground resistance Polish Home Army, ordered his soldiers -- Polish patriots fighting the German Nazis since 1939 -- to carry on: "The war is not over. ... We will never agree to a different life, except in a fully sovereign, independent and fair Polish state. ... I give you my last order. Continue your work and activities in the spirit of regaining full independence."
The soldiers obeyed and did not lay down their arms, resisting so-called sovietization of the country that was fully aligned with the West prior to the war. The underground struggle of the "cursed soldiers" began.
"What united all those military formations was a faith in God," Jan Zaryn, Polish professor of history, told OSV News. It was their Catholic faith that "formed the basis for choosing a very difficult path and was evident in their daily lives," the historian said.
"They were guided by a chivalry ethos," Zaryn said. "They took the oath of military formation, in which there was always a reference to God. It was before God that they swore to defend the homeland and its right to independence to the last drop of blood."
Zaryn told OSV News that the trademark of the soldiers of the underground Home Army was a large medal with an image of the Blessed Mother.
The spirit that sustained people in the underground, Zaryn stressed, was saturated with religiosity understood as regular prayer and Catholic rituals accompanying their daily battles. All this was not only ceremonial but an indispensable condition for maintaining the appropriate spirit in the formation of the soldiers, the historian added.
Bishop Wieslaw Lechowicz of the Polish Military Ordinariate said in his homily during a March 2 Mass in the Museum of Cursed Soldiers in Warsaw that they were a "source of light" in very dark times.
"Jesus told his disciples that they were to be the light of the world. It is not only the apostles, but all those who believe in Jesus Christ, who base their lives on the Gospel, who are such a source of light in the world. Even when the world is engulfed by the darkness of evil, the darkness of sin, the darkness of hatred, the darkness of bondage," the bishop stressed.
Father Tomasz Trzaska, chaplain of the museum, told OSV News that their prayer, their devotion to God, is something that inspires him most. Father Trzaska said that in their arrest protocols prayer books, rosaries, crosses and medallions are listed. "Their faith was steadfast despite what they've been through. Evil did not penetrate them, inside they were pure," he said of the soldiers who were also "tough guys," often involved in brutal battles.
Polish Catholic clergy ministered to and formed the cursed soldiers after the war, often risking their lives.
"These were exceptional priests," Zaryn told OSV News. "They were ready to stay with the soldiers throughout the existence of the underground structures -- we're talking about chaplains, confessors, spiritual guides. They were ready to celebrate Masses in the forests, bury fallen soldiers with dignity and according to the Catholic ritual. It was also not uncommon for them to store the archives or weapons of the soldiers who were hatched as part of the underground."
The most intense armed resistance against the forcibly imposed Polish Soviet-aligned authorities took place in 1945. In the following years, nearly 200,000 people took part in various underground formations.Capt. Witold Pilecki was a Polish Army veteran and resistance Home Army officer. He made a bold decision to voluntarily enter the German concentration camp in Auschwitz, located in Nazi-occupied Poland.
He let himself be caught in September 1940 in a "lapanka," or "roundup," in Warsaw's Zoliborz district -- a common way to intimidate civilians by the German officers, sending groups of people to labor death camps. Pilecki not only willingly entered Auschwitz but managed to organize a successful resistance movement there. When he collected enough information to later disseminate to the resistance about the so-called German death factories, he escaped with two other prisoners in April 1943, armed with invaluable intelligence information. With this, he gained the title of Polish wartime James Bond.
He was arrested by the communists in May 1947, his trial started on March 3, 1948. In communist detention, in his own words, he endured worse torture than in Auschwitz.
The captain's daughter, Zofia Pilecka, recalled in a Polish Radio Maria interview in 2012: "At one of the last hearings, when it was already known that he was going to die, my father told my mother to make sure to buy the book 'The Imitation of Christ' by Thomas á Kempis." He wanted his wife to read passages from the book to their children every day. "This will give you strength," Pilecka recalled her father saying.
The message was a testament he left behind. Captain Pilecki was sentenced to death by the verdict of a Stalinist court. The devout Catholic and father of two little children was executed by the shot in the back of his head on May 25, 1948. The captain's burial place is unknown to this day.
Feeling that they're fighting an impossible battle, the cursed soldiers "needed contact with God," said the Polish historian Zaryn. "Because they lived in increasingly difficult conditions," they were "sustained by a deep faith in the moral rightness of these difficult choices."
Communist authorities cracked down ruthlessly on the anti-communist underground. Harassment, persecution, imprisonment, torture, show trials, which very often resulted in death sentences, were a common pattern.
Some 9,000 resistance fighters were killed in guerilla fighting that lasted until the early 1960s. Another several thousand were murdered on the basis of communist court sentences or died in prisons, with the search for remains of the iconic patriotic officers like Pilecki ongoing. Until the fall of communism in Poland in 1989, any public mention of those resistance fighters was forbidden.
Since 2011, March 1 in Poland has been commemorated as the National Day of Remembrance of the cursed soldiers. On this day, in 1951, the last of the leadership of the Polish underground were murdered in Warsaw.
- - - Katarzyna Szalajko writes for OSV News from Warsaw, Poland.