August 8. I am in the city of Warsaw for the 65th anniversary of the Wola Massacre, a dark moment in which Nazi troops annihilated 40,000 to 100,000 civilians in response to resistance activities. Remembrances that day brought out several members of the military, but the real surprise was seeing a veteran of the Armia Krajowa (“Home Army”) resistance movement. Sadly, the man in this photo is one of the last remaining survivors.
Let me explain what the Armia Krajowa, or AK, were to Poland and the Allies during World War II. Formed in ’42, the AK grew to about 400,000 guerrilla soldiers who operated covertly in the fight against the Nazis. They were, to put it lightly, badass. In the arena of sabotage, the AK damaged about 10,000 trains, blew up about 40 railway bridges and smashed about 4,000 Nazi vehicles, 30 planes and thousands of fuel tanks and supplies. They burned down military stores, disrupted factories and created built-in faults in tens of thousands of pieces of German military equipment, including 92,000 artillery missiles. The AK created secret weapons factories, helped support an underground press, distributed anti-Nazi print propaganda and even created false intelligence about Nazi defectors and Hitler doubters that they allowed to get confiscated as a means of psychological warfare. They even engaged in assassinations of Gestapo officials and others in retaliation for Nazi terror tactics inflicted on the Polish populace.
The AK was also the major supplier of intelligence to the Allies about Central and Eastern Europe and Germany, which included making Winston Churchhill and F.D.R. aware of the concentration camp atrocities. One AK solider, Witold Pilecki, actually volunteered to be captured and sent to Auschwitz in ’40 to gather intelligence. During his years there, he smuggled out information and organized whatever resistance he could within in the camp, and then in early ’44, he made a daring escape along with two other prisoners. His firsthand accounts, along with information from the Jewish underground resistance in the Jewish Ghetto, helped convince the Allies of what was really going on there.
With fewer men and limited arms, the AK only engaged in select full-scale firefights, and the most famous of which is the Warsaw Uprising. This event, which includes the Wola Massacre, will be discussed further in a post on the uprising museum. But in short, Operation Tempest was meant to tie down the German forces as the Soviet armies arrived, but the uprising backfired when the Red Army stopped short of Warsaw. They had plans to take over Poland, so the Soviets thought it was in their best interest to see the AK go down. Nevertheless, the Home Army fought on for 63 days taking out tens of thousands of Nazis and liberating hundreds of Jews from the Warsaw Concentration Camp.
What was left of the AK disbanded once the Soviet armies drove the Nazis out, but to the AK soldiers’ horror, the Soviets then turned on them as potential threats. About 60,000 AK soldiers were immediately arrested, and most of them were sent to the Gulags and other prisons. The new Polish Communist Government likewise made sure their heroism in World War II was glossed over and that they were seen as enemies of the state. Later, the government agreed to grant them amnesty, but when many of the soldiers came out of hiding, they discovered it was a trick and they too were arrested. Many AK soldiers were murdered in prison, including, most tragically, the aforementioned Auschwitz hero Witold Pilecki.
In ’56, over a decade after the war, the Soviets finally released 35,000 former AK soldiers and eventually released the last AK prisoner in ’67. Those who were not imprisoned continued to be hunted until ’63, which is when the last AK veteran was killed. Estimates say that 35,000 to 100,000 AK soldiers died during the war, but another 20,000 to 50,000 were killed under Communist rule. When Communism fell in ’89, the new Polish government immediately annulled every AK soldier’s sentence and began the process to herald these individuals as the heroes they are.
Now look at the man in the photo. Imagine what he survived, what he went through, what he sacrificed and what he’s seen all for the service of his country and the western world. If there are few American WWII vets alive today, imagine how many less AK vets there must be. The current Polish military showed him the utmost respect when he arrived, and one of those soldiers was kind enough to take this shot of the AK hero and me. This was, needless to say, the highlight of my trek so far. I was truly honored to take a photo standing by this man’s side.
