On the morning of September 1, 1939, German troops attacked Poland without a declaration of war. Two weeks later, on September 17, while Poland was defending itself in the west, the Soviet Union attacked from the east. This two-pronged attack was too much for Poland to handle. On October 6, 1939, its last troops surrendered.
As many as 450,000 Poles were made prisoners of war. A Soviet campaign of political murders followed, targeting especially soldiers, police, and priests. They killed thousands of prisoners of war, even the staff and patients in hospitals, and gruesomely executed 22,000 Polish military personnel and civilians in the notorious Katyn Forest in 1940. They tortured them in prisons and deported between 350,000 and 1,500,000 civilians to Siberia. Thousands of Polish people died in the infamous Gulag Archipelago, in the taiga, at the Polar Circle, or in the desert steppes of Kazakhstan. But the fate of many changed in June 1941, when the former allies, the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, became mortal enemies.
One month later, the Polish government, in exile in London, agreed with Stalin to form a Polish army in the territory of the Soviet Union from the hundreds of thousands of Poles released from camps, prisons, or places of deportation. General Władysław Anders was to be appointed commander; he himself had been released from the infamous Lubyanka prison in Moscow. Human shadows in ragged clothes rose as from the dead, flocking to the camps where General Anders formed his army.
By September 1942, Stalin and the British had decided to move this army to the Middle and Near East, and 80,000 soldiers and 37,000 civilians were transported to Iraq and Iran. Joining the elite Polish army that had already become famous at Tobruk and in Libya, they were integrated into Generals Alexander and Montgomery’s Eighth Army in Italy. At Monte Cassino in May 1944, they overcame the tenacious German paratroopers who, for several months, had been attacked in vain by the Allies. After taking Monte Cassino, they liberated Ancona, broke through the Gothic Line, fought in the Apennines, and took part in the victorious battle for Bologna. On April 28, 1945, the German troops in Italy capitulated, and soon so did the German Reich itself. When the war ended, many Polish soldiers chose not to return to a communist Poland, and some settled in the United Kingdom.
We now fast forward to the particularly cold winter in Edinburgh of 1960, when I had the opportunity to meet one of these courageous soldiers. He had settled in Scotland after the war, married a local woman, and worked as a painter on the Forth Bridge, which connects Edinburgh with Fife. Like with most other large bridges in the world, he would have to start repainting at one end as soon as he had finished the other.
As I was taking the Membership examination for the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, I was given him as a patient to examine. He said every Christmas, his wife would spend too much buying presents for her relatives, and he had warned her that if she did this again, he would quit his job, which indeed he did. I could find no signs of the neurosyphilis for which they were testing him, and regardless of what they found later, I was happy to pass the exam.
On the way out of the examination hall, I met a fellow candidate who seemed puzzled by her patient’s having a large scar on the back of his neck. I assumed he must have had surgery for something in that area, but as she insisted he had multiple sclerosis, I tactfully said nothing and went to celebrate my success at the pub across the road.