Memoir of a Polish Resistance Fighter: Defying Nazi and Russian Occupation in World War II

A survivor recounts wartime resistance, exile, and survival through brutal occupation, shifting allegiances, and perilous escape across Europe.

Stanislaw Franciszek Czekaj was born on 10 August 1924. His early life was tough. His father, a veteran, died the following year, weakened by his incarceration in a Russian POW camp. His paternal grandparents had some property but when this was destroyed by arson Stan's mother took him to live with her parents. They scraped a living on a smallholding with dirt floors and no electricity. He was still only fifteen years old when the Germans invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. He vividly recalls the war arriving with 'a terrible roar of aeroplanes and exploding bombs and machine gun fire' as the Luftwaffe attacked the airfield near his village.

Under German occupation, Stan and his neighbours suffered food shortages and a reign of terror by the Gestapo. Brutality, summary arrest, deportation and executions were rife and 'everybody was afraid to talk in front of strangers in case there was an informer present and even in front of people that you knew'. When he was about seventeen, Stan joined the Polish Provisional Brigade (Brygasa Swietokrzyska) and adopted the alias Zwierz (Animal). Caught between two enemies, who then went to war with each other it was a perilous existence, fighting the Nazi occupiers, and then, once they were pushed out, resisting the returning Soviets. Stan's participation in numerous operations, including the elimination of informers (described in sometimes-graphic detail: "How many people have you betrayed?" then I pulled the trigger pointing at his head'), resulted in a "Dead or alive" price being put on his head. Eventually he was forced to escape via Germany under the assumed name of Stanislaw Wozniak. He describes these experiences as a refugee, life in the DP (displaced person) camps, a stint in a Belgium coalmine and finally to Britain, where he was to spend the rest of his life.