National “Cursed Soldiers” Remembrance Day
Pity Poland, living between two historical enemies, Germany and Russia. In the late 1700s Poland ceased to exist, being partitioned like salami and divided between Russia and various German-speaking lands. It regained its independence after World War I, only to be threatened by a Soviet invasion in 1919. Twenty years later it was again invaded from east and west and divided between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The conquerors immediately tried to liquidate Poland’s leadership class, singling out military officers, politicians, academics, doctors and intellectuals for murder. The Poles fought back with an underground army and with exiles serving with the western Allies.
When the war ended in 1945 Poland found that it was not going to be free. It was occupied by the Red Army and a Communist government imposed on its people. The Soviet occupiers and their Polish collaborators were resisted for years after the war by a number of guerrilla groups, known collectively as the “Cursed Soldiers”; cursed because they were doomed to fight on without hope of winning or being aided by the outside world. The Underground Polish Army, the Home Army Resistance, Freedom and Justice, and the National Military Union attacked Soviet military units, police stations, prisons and concentration camps but one by one they were tracked down and eliminated, with the last resister killed in 1963.
Today these patriots are honoured with their own day of remembrance by an independent Poland.