大象传媒

Chris begins his story...

I never got to meet my grandfather Zdzislaw Szymanik. Before the war, he used to be employed at skilled labour installing and repairing wooden floors in Polish palaces, other historical places and high class buildings. He was in the reserves in the artillery when the war broke out. When the war broke out my grandfather got called up for service in Warsaw. My mother lived with her parents about 15 kilometres from Warsaw in the suburb of Ursus where her father last worked as a floorer. My mother, Danuta, was 7 years old when the war broke out.

Her first memories of World War II were watching airplanes flying aerobatic manoeuvres overhead from a window in her house in Ursus - thinking it was some kind of strange air show - before she saw airplanes being shot down and before getting chased away from the window by her father who warned her against the danger of stray bullets and that a war had started. Later that day an air raid siren had sounded and my mother found herself in a protective trench with a relative of the same age with whom her family was staying. They found themselves being thrown from the ditch by the impact of a nearby object from the sky. She and her cousin were later playing by the trench when they saw an object in the bushes. They tried to reach it thinking it was a toy thrown from an airplane but were blocked by thorny bushes. They called their parents for help retrieving the toy only to later find out it was an incendiary bomb that dropped errantly and failed to go off landing in a soft spot.

That night, because of air raids my mom and her family started for Warsaw, where her dad, Zdzislaw, had to report for military duty. By early morning they were nearing the big city in a column of civilians and military when Danuta experienced being strafed by German fighters and dive bombers. She remembers seeing the heads of the pilots in the airplanes as the planes came down at her firing their machine guns and people and animals started to drop around her. She cried out to her father as to why the planes were shooting at them? What had they done? He yelled at her that now was not the time to ask but to run. She jumped into an anti-tank ditch, where a large cat she was carrying hidden under her coat, badly scratched her. She recalls how the cat later ate horsemeat, as did the family, from wounded animals and how it was smart enough to run to the fall out area in the basement when it heard air raid sirens. As they neared the city, German bombers arrived and buildings started to collapse around them from bombs. They made it to a relative鈥檚 house in Warsaw where Zdzislaw reported for duty in the military. Danuta and her mom later found themselves buried alive in the basement with the cat after a German bomber hit their four story house and collapsed it half way. She was dug out by her father, other military and civilians from outside.

Zdzislaw Szymanik was demobilized from the army after Poland鈥檚 surrender to Germany. He was rounded up in a mass arrest in Warsaw soon after the war ended and sent to Germany to work as forced labour in a wooden flooring factory. He spoke German and became trusted by his German bosses so he was allowed to go out in town and buy provisions for the factory. He took the opportunity to escape and return to his family in Poland. My mother and her mom had to move repeatedly and hide whenever he escaped and returned home as they were now being hunted by the Gestapo - as a logical place to look for her dad. He was eventually caught in another mass arrest for forced labour deportation or as a reprisal for resistance actions. Whenever one German was killed by the resistance one hundred Poles were rounded up and either killed in the woods or in German concentration camps or sent to perform forced labour in Germany.

Zdzislaw escaped from German factories in Essen and Hamburg and was recaptured again in mass arrests in Warsaw. My mother used to get cryptic mail from him about his friends playing the accordion day and night referring in fact to day and bombings by the Americans and British of the factories. The slave labourers used to celebrate as bombs rained down on their factories.

My mother recalls how he told her how the best place to hide was a big city like Warsaw where everyone does not recognize you and you can disappear into a crowd. My mom and her mom moved many times always being hunted by the Gestapo looking for her dad. He was finally recaptured again and put in a PoW camp as a high escape risk. Again, he managed to escape but ran into a German guard in the process who smashed Zdzislaw鈥檚 teeth with a metal flashlight. Zdzislaw went into shock and rammed the German guard into a bunker many times and supposedly killed him. He returned home to where my mom was back in the suburbs of Warsaw knowing the Gestapo was hot on his trail and made the mistake of letting his neighbours know of his presence, telling them he would make sure to leave and hide in a few days. The Germans would round up everyone in a three or four block radius of a captured escapee and liquidate them for collaboration with the escapee. A neighbour turned in my mother鈥檚 father, Zdzislaw, to the Gestapo as he was afraid for his life. That neighbour hung himself soon after the end of the war.

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