POLAND UNITES US - impressions about life

November 11th, 2024

author: Katarzyna Nowocin-Kowalczyk

When I hear the words of Rota*, tears of emotion spontaneously come to my eyes. Because no matter where you live, no matter how far you are from your home country, Polishness is something you carry in your heart, always. Poland is within us. Forever.

My great-grandfather Walenty Bocheński, born in 1872, lived under the Tsarist partition. He was a peasant. He was drafted into the Tsarist army for five years. Then, he spent two years in the Russo-Japanese War. At that time, my great-grandmother Marianna took care of the farm and a bunch of children. When the First World War broke out in 1914, my great-grandfather had to fight in the Russian army again. Politics made a Pole stand against a Pole in two hostile armies.

My grandfather Franciszek, their youngest child, was born in free Poland, a month after the Battle of Warsaw in 1920. When he was 19, another war broke out.

In one of his letters, my grandfather describes that time as follows:

"... in 1939 Germans invaded Poland and we were taken prisoners by them. In 1940, Germans created the so-called Luftwaffenübungsplatz (air weapons training ground) in the area of about 400 sq. km around Przytyk and about 20 thousand people were displaced from this area. First, the Jews, about 4 thousand people, were expelled to the ghetto in Radom. From the lands taken from farmers, estates were created under German administration. "Lemke" was in Zakrzew.

At the beginning of 1941, they were allowed to return to their homes, on the condition of forced labor from 12-70 years of age.

Our village was assigned to work in the Oblas Forest District and Baumschule Zakrzew (managed by Lebrech and Keifot). All forestry districts were subordinate to Forstamt Radom and managed by Forstmeister Feierabend.

The displaced area was a closed area, a normal ghetto. On the main road Radom-Przytyk-Odrzywół there was a barrier and a guardhouse with the inscription "Achtung" no entry, and two gendarmes were on guard day and night and no one was allowed to enter or leave without a pass. One guard at Zakrzew and the other at Podworów. In the villages of Kasprowice and Chruślice a whole town was built for officials, the Gestapo and the troops operating the cannons, because almost every day there were training flights of planes. The better buildings in Przytyk were demolished for these buildings, even the Jewish school and synagogue. There was also a camp for Soviet prisoners of war employed at the construction site.

During the exercises, residents of this area were also killed. As luck would have it, a bullet hit and killed a baby in the cradle.

I worked in the Oblas Forest District, initially as a forest worker, and later as an office assistant. The forester was Dmitryew, a Ukrainian, and the secretary (bureaucraft) was Bolesław Fokt, a cadet who belonged to the Home Army under the pseudonym "Orzeł." He also accepted me into the Home Army on June 10, 1943 under the pseudonym "Cichy" and took my oath. It was the "Błotnica" outpost, a subunit of Jedlińsk, whose commander was Lieutenant Bembiński "Harnaś,” a teacher from Kaszewo. ...”

My grandpa goes on to tell about various sabotage actions against the occupier, transporting reports and how in the village of Stefanów the Gestapo shot six members of the Home Army. They came to arrest Bolesław Fokt, who managed to escape to the forest at the last moment. "I was terribly beaten then, but I did not admit that I belonged to the Home Army and where Fokt might be hiding."

Grandpa describes the time just after the war as: "Those were difficult years. Without livestock, buildings or crops." He worked as a volunteer in the municipal Council and Cooperative. He was also a member of the volunteer fire brigade and played in a brass band. "But the effort was not in vain. I received from the Ministry of Agriculture the 'Meritorious Agricultural Worker' award. ... In 2006, as a veteran, I received the rank of second lieutenant. - Franciszek Bocheński."

My second grandfather, Władysław Nowocin, graduated from the cadet school before the war. During the war, he fought in the Home Army. In the winter, at the beginning of 1941, his son Henryk, my father, was born. Grandpa was not there at the time. He fought somewhere for a free Poland. There was no doctor in the village. An uneducated paramedic was summoned. The woman, my grandmother Katarzyna Nowocin, died in childbirth. The child survived. He was raised by strangers. He changed hands. He saw his father for the first time only when he was seven years old.

Henryk's fate was similar to that of many young boys from the countryside at that time who moved to the city. The army, the party, the school and the belief that they are building a wonderful Poland. They really believed in it. The awakening from the dream created by the omnipresent propaganda came quite quickly. And again, Politics made a Pole stand against aPole in two hostile armies.

Then there was the time of Solidarity, martial law and the time of another conspiratorial struggle. The time fighting for a free Poland and for many the time of emigration. I remember how in 1988, an immigration officer at the American Embassy in Madrid asked, "Why do you want to go to the United States?" My husband and I looked at each other, at our two-week-old son, and we answered in unison: "Because we want our child to grow up in a free country. We want our son to be a free man."

Then there was the round table, great joy and great hope of Poles for... Freedom. And only some quietly asked, why are these still the same faces?

And then came the soap opera of the Civic Platform and the Law and Justice party and everything got mixed up. Poland divided and at odds like never before in history. A Pole fights a Pole. Brother spits on brother. And not because of a Tsar's decree or a German order, but so selflessly...As if out of habit... Hatred is a powerful and pernicious demon. Hatred is the executioner of Freedom. Once again, Politics divides Poles.

Freedom...The history of Poland is over 1000 years of struggle for freedom. The history of Poland is a story about how discord at home opens the door for a thief. The history of Poland is our history. A story about a wonderful, proud, hard-working and brave nation that can unite in a situation of external threat, and which loses its freedom because of quarrels in the family.

Freedom is not given once and for all. Freedom is something that everyone has to fight for themselves. If you don't take care of your home it falls into ruin. Everyone can enter it and take whatever they want. Everyone can govern and settle down in it.

Poland is our Home. Our common Home. And it doesn't matter what latitude you live in. Poland unites us. We are united by 1000 years of history. We are united by my great-grandfather and your great-grandfather. My grandfather and yours. My father and yours. We are united by Sienkiewicz, Słowacki, Norwid. Matejko, Copernicus and Maria, the Nobel Prize winner, unite us. We are united by willow, the stork, Masuria, the Baltic Sea and the Tatra Mountains. Wołodyjowski, Skrzetuski, Boryna, Niechcic and Kuraś unite us. The Warsaw Mermaid, Gdańsk Neptune, Toruń gingerbread, Poznań goats and Kraków Lajkonik unite us. Our tradition, our language, our sayings, our cabaret. We are united by song. We are united by Rota. And we are united by what we call Freedom.

Poland is like that free, beautiful, white bird that Lech saw. Many want to have it. Many want to lock it in a cage. Many have tried. And the eagle still soars high in the sky. The eagle is Freedom, power and strength. United, we are invincible. Poland unites us.

*Rota ("The Oath") is an early 20th-century Polish poem,[1] as well as a celebratory anthem, once proposed to be the Polish national anthem. Rota's lyrics were written in 1908 by activist for Polish independence, poet Maria Konopnicka as a protest against German Empire's policies of forced Germanization of Poles.

© Katarzyna Nowocin-Kowalczyk

11 / 11 / 2024

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POLAND UNITES US

author: Katarzyna Nowocin-Kowalczyk

translation: Elizabeth Kanski

originally in Polish: ŁĄCZY NAS POLSKA