WGA#2150977
Painting: Husaria – Aleksander Orłowski
Treatment
The Last Winged Hussar
A True Story
By
Paul Krepinski
And
Emmanuel Burgin
Logline: Lieutenant Mieczyslaw LITINSKI, groomed by his brutal father, a traumatized Polish war hero, to uphold the family’s famed Winged Hussar legacy, confronts the Nazi Blitzkrieg in 1939, overcomes years of brutal Nazi imprisonment, and saves the life of his future wife.
The Last Winged Hussar
A True Story
Act One 1
Evening 1930: The Old Manor of Colonel STANISLAW LITINSKI, Ten Thousand Acre Farmland Estate Near the Ukrainian Frontier.
Ten-year-old MIECZYSLAW (Mietek) LITINSKI, and his six-year-old brother KAZIMIERZ (Kazimir) LITINSKI, dressed in boy scout uniforms sit at the dining room table, staring at their large soup bowls served by their father, Lieutenant Colonel STANISLAW LITINSKI. “Where is Anna?” Ask Kazimir, of the servant cook. “She is sick. Why do you ask”? His father replies. “This is awful,” Mietek says. “It will make you boys strong. Eat.” But they refuse. The Colonel removes their bowls. “Go to bed.” The following day, the Colonel serves the same meal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. After holding out until dinner, the starving boys relent. However, the lesson continues for the entire week.
Kazimir lies in his bed crying. “I wish mother was here.” Mietek, sitting on Kazimir’s bed, stares at his little brother and sighs. “Mother is not coming back, she divorced father. She is never coming back. Accept it.” Kazimir wipes his tears. “I want to hear the stories of our ancestors, the Winged Hussars.” “I know, I know. It always makes you feel better.”
Mietek stands and thrusts an imaginary sword, reveling in telling the story of their first great ancestor, the Polish knight in King Henry III of France’s court who, exiled for marrying a commoner, joins the Winged Hussars. Now he is galloping on horseback with a lance, describing the battle of Vienna where the Winged Hussars save the Western world from the Ottoman Empire. He recounts their father’s heroic calvary charges, and the battles won during the Austro-Serbian war in which their father suffers severe wounds. He finishes with the account of their father’s role in the Battle of Warsaw in which, during the decisive battle, the Colonel, once his men had run out of ammunition, led the charge with fixed bayonets, swords, and lances. Mietek feigns throwing his rifle aside and mounting a horse. Again, he is riding into battle, but this time swinging a sword. “The Red Army ran in terror and father cut them down as they retreated.”
“Father is an ogre,” Kazimir says. Mietek flops onto Kazimir’s bed, clasps his hands behind his head to catch his breath. “No, he is not. It is father’s head wound, giving him pain. Sometimes it is too much, and it drives him to anger. That is why mother left. And always remember, little brother, father is preparing us to be Winged Hussars. Father is bringing us up the only way he knows.” Kazimir looks at Mietek. “I will never be a Winged Hussar.” Mietek hugs Kazimir. “And I, little brother, cannot wait.”
Late Afternoon November 1937 Poznan Hospital of the Deaconess Sisters
Mietek exits the Poznan University of Medical Sciences and, as he does every day, walks the short distance to the military hospital where his father lies, dying, succumbing to the head trauma and other wounds suffered in war. When he enters, his MOTHER is there. She had returned months earlier to look after Stanislaw and the boys, but the Colonel’s care had become too great for her at home and so they admitted the Colonel. Mietek, standing beside her, looks at his father. “All these months and never has he spoken to me. Soon I will be at officer’s school. I wish he would speak to me as a man. I know he can speak. The nurses have told me so.” His mother wraps her arm around him. “He will speak to you when he has something to say.”
Evening January 19, 1938 Poznan Military Wing of the Hospital
Mietek stands staring out the window of his father’s room. “Mietek. Mietek.” “Yes, father. I am here.” Mietek quickly steps to his father’s bedside. “Bring me my pistol.” Mietek stares at his father. His father’s eyes are stern as ever. “My pistol Mietek, now. Now.” Mietek grabs a chair and pulls it close to the bed and sits. “Now, my son.” Mietek turns to look out the window. “My pistol, bring me my pistol.” Mietek grips the arms of his chair. He turns to look at his father and shakes his head. The following morning, Mietek is in lecture hall when given a note informing him that his father has died.
August 1938 Warsaw Train Station
Lieutenant Mietek places his father’s satchel on a station bench. He will use it as a pillow. He has travelled to Warsaw to take care of his father’s business affairs and has missed the last train home and has decided to sleep at the station. He will board the first train home in the morning. “Excuse me sir.” Lieutenant Mietek opens his eyes to see a middle-aged man and young girl staring at him. “I cannot allow an officer of our military to sleep at a train station,” the man states, and then invites the young lieutenant home for dinner and to be his guest for the night. “This is my daughter MARIA.”
Modest Apartment Warsaw
That evening Lieutenant Mietek discusses the legacy of the Winged Hussars, his father, and the purpose of his visit with his host, a university professor. Lieutenant Mietek and the nineteen-year-old Maria exchange addresses. They agree to correspond. However, after several months, it wanes and eventually ends.
Act Two
September 1939: Blitzkrieg Farmhouse Outskirts of Rowne, Pomeranian Voivodeship, North Poland
Lieutenant Mietek is studying a map, contemplating his orders, undoubtedly, a suicide mission. He is to defend the town of Rowne, west of Poznan, with only one small field artillery piece and forty men against the approaching Nazi army. He points to a position, a narrow fork in the road one mile from the town. It is the only road suitable for a mechanized army with Panzer tanks.
Mid-September 1939 Two Miles from Rowne
Returning from a reconnaissance mission from a nearby town, Lieutenant Mietek pulls on the reins of his horse and scans the billowing clouds. His scout does the same. They are on a road that cuts through an open field. “Luftwaffe! Go!” The plane swoops down. His scout jumps from his horse and runs to the distant edge of the field. Lieutenant Mietek makes the pilot choose between them and races on horseback towards the far away woods. When he looks back, he sees the pilot has chosen him.
Bullets kick up dirt around him, and then his horse shrieks and falls. He tumbles over his horse and jumps to his feet and runs towards a ditch alongside the road. More dirt kicks up from a second strafing. He dives into the ditch and, laying on his back, returns fire with his pistol. Several strafes follow and then the plane climbs, disappearing into the clouds. He stands and brushes dirt off himself and sees bullet holes trailing up the full-length of his leather cavalry coat and ending precariously close to his crotch.
Farmhouse Outskirts of Rowne, Pomeranian Voivodeship, North Poland
Three days after his encounter with the Luftwaffe, Lieutenant Mietek’s scouts report one tank company with two hundred men had broken off from the main group and would reach their position in three hours. Mietek now believes they have a fighting chance to at least hold out long enough for his one artillery piece to knock out the tank.
Battle for Rowne
The Nazi company attacks across the open field protected by heavy machine-guns positioned in the hedges along the road. Lieutenant Mietek leads an attack on the machine-gun nests. His best friend falls beside him from a machine-gun burst. He spots the loader frantically feeding a fresh belt of ammo into the machine gun and takes both him and the gunner out. All the men in the attack lay dead around him. He sees the tank rumbling down the road. He gives the signal, and the hidden artillery piece is uncovered and fired. It is a direct hit. The tank explodes. He looks around. He has less than a dozen men left. “Put down your weapons. We live today. Tomorrow, we plan for our escape.”
A Nazi soldier snatches Lieutenant Mietek’s pistol from his hand, and with the butt of his rifle, the Nazi soldier strikes Lieutenant Mietek in the head. When Lieutenant Mietek awakes, he is in a truck with his men. They are all blindfolded, with their hands tied behind their backs.
On the Road to Imprisonment
Lieutenant Mietek and his men journey for two days, never once leaving the truck. The truck stops only for the conveniences of the Nazi soldiers. With their hands tied, they are left to relieve themselves in their pants. The truck reeks. There is little water and nothing to eat. On the third day, they arrive at a military encampment. Lieutenant Mietek and his men stumble out of the truck. His blindfold removed; he is shocked. He turns to his men. They, too, are in shock. The Nazi soldiers delivered them to a Russian Red Army prison camp. They have delivered them to their eternal sworn enemy. They did not know the Red Army had allied with the Nazis.
Red Army Encampment at the Former Polish Town of Szepetowka, Now Known as Shepetivka, USSR
Once the Germans leave, Lieutenant Mietek is again stunned when the Russians feed them and allow them to clean up. Over the next month, they are treated to the best food available, good vodka and even women. Mietek knows this is not sincere and waits to learn the Russian’s intent. He discovers soon enough when he meets with the Red Army Commander and is told that Stalin plans to betray Hitler and that Stalin wants the Poles to join them to fight against their “mutual enemy,” the Nazis. He and his men refuse to join, asking, instead, a return to the Polish army. “This is impossible.” They are given one day to change their mind.
The next day, Lieutenant Mietek stands before the Red Army Commander and again refuses to join the Red Army. “Very well. All of you will be shot.” The following day, Lieutenant Mietek and his men are marched to a wall in front of a firing squad. “Last chance.” Lieutenant Mietek stares straight ahead. “Fire!” Bullets riddle the wall above Lieutenant Mietek and his men’s head. The Russians laugh. The Commander tells them it was a joke that they would never kill them. “We are all brothers; we wouldn’t kill you!” But every few days they are asked to join, and the scenario repeated with the bullets getting closer, and then their food and living condition deteriorate. They are no longer brothers, but prisoners.
Lieutenant Mietek and his men endure the torturous game for weeks. One day, as Mietek scratches his head, to his amazement, a tuft of hair falls out. He looks around and notices another of his men’s hair has turned white. He turns to look at SERGENT BOGUSLAW, “WILK.” The Sergeant answers to his nom de guerre, “Wolf,” “Yes sir,” “We cannot stay here any longer.” It is agreed among them that he and the Sergeant will attempt the first escape.
December 1939 Escape
Lieutenant Mietek slips beneath the inner barbed wire perimeter. The Sergeant follows. The two guards, positioned in the no-man’s-land between the inner and outer perimeter fences, are strangled and stripped of their handguns and knives. The Lieutenant and the Sergeant slip under the poorly constructed outer fence and escape into the countryside.
Countryside Enemy Territory
They follow a road toward home through open fields. There is no cover. When they rest, they lay on their stomachs facing opposite directions. Eventually, the terrain changes, and they find cover in a lightly wooded area. Days later, the surroundings turn to vegetation and rock outcroppings. Abandoned dwellings and sheds become more frequent, which they hide in during the day, traveling only at night. All the while, they are on the lookout to waylay Soviet troops or civilians for clothes, but always there are too many traveling together to ambush. Finally, Lieutenant Mietek sees two civilians approaching and recognizes them as Russians. He steps out from behind a tree with his handgun aimed at their heads. They lift their arms to surrender, but Lieutenant Mietek does not hesitate and squeezes the trigger. He and the Sergeant drag the bodies into a ditch and remove their clothes.
Now dressed as civilians, they move during the day and travel further into Western Poland, hoping to reunite with Polish forces. After a month on the road, they have holed up in a Polish farmer’s barn. One evening, they ambush three German soldiers and drag them into the woods and strip them of supplies. Lieutenant Mietek pulls a folded newspaper from one of the dead soldiers. Then tosses it to the ground. “What is it?” asks the Sergeant. “Wilk, the Polish army is no longer. We are on our own.” The Sergeant flays his arms. “No home, no army. What can we do?” “We will roam our countryside and eradicate as many Nazis and Red Army scum as possible.”
Using the barn as their hideout and base of operation, within a month, they kill over two dozen of the enemy. Then one night the farmer yells into the barn, “You must leave.” Lieutenant Mietek explains who they are and their predicament. “There are no compatriots around here. They have all have been captured or killed. You must leave.” With nowhere to go, they leave their fate in the hands of the farmer. All said and done, they believe the farmer can be trusted. He would not turn his back on Polish officers. But the next day German troops arrive from a nearby outpost and capture them. “Reward money is a greater than any kinship,” says the German officer. Lieutenant Mietek turns to the farmer: “I’ll be back for you.”
December 1940 Camp Funfeichen Stalag ll A, Former Estate within the City Limits of Neubrandenburg, Mecklenburg Northern Germany, SS Prisoner of War Camp.
The POW camp is nothing more than a slave labor camp. Lieutenant Mietek watches as his men are worked and starved to death. Only to be replaced with incoming POWs. He and some of the other prisoners survive by eating small amounts of what they produce on the farms, mostly cloves of garlic. And they eat eggs whole, not wanting to leave eggshells behind as evidence.
Months of working in the snow take its toll on Lieutenant Mietek. One morning, he stands teetering at his bed. His toes are black and blue. He cannot walk, the pain intolerable. Each step sends shivers up his legs. “Walk, you filthy beast,” SS guard SERGEANT MUELLER hates Poles. To him, Poles are “Untermensch” subhuman, “dumb as mules,” and he enjoys brutalizing them. Mietek tries to move again, but the pain is too great. He knows his time has come. At least he will die on his feet, facing the enemy. The strikes with the butt of the rifle are fast and powerful. The first blow ignites a fire in his brain, but then the pain leaves him, and he feels only the sensation of thumps, as if one were a rug being beaten. The pounding continues. Now he feels nothing and hears nothing as he lies on the floor, staring at Sergeant Mueller’s shiny black boots moving about him.
Lingering near death, lying on his bloody cot for days, Lieutenant Mietek decides if he lives, he must learn some skills to increase his chance of survival. He will make himself useful to the Germans.
April 1940 Stalag ll A
Four months after his beating, Lieutenant Mietek is again back working in the fields. As he enters the barracks one evening, Sergeant Boguslaw tosses him a Private’s issued uniform. “Quick, change out of your uniform. The SS are rounding up all Polish officers and turning them over to the Soviets.” Later, Lieutenant Mietek learns that from late April into early May 1940, these officers were executed in the Katyn Forest near the Soviet village of Antonowka, along with thousands of Polish intelligentsia.
December Christmas 1945 Stalag ll A
Lieutenant Mietek sits on his cot in reflection, as the men prepare for another miserable Christmas eve. Five years had passed and true to his vow on this very cot, this deathbed, he had survived by his wits. In time, along with German, he had learned English, Russian, French, and Greek, and became a translator for the German guards. A skill that enabled him to eavesdrop on conversations amongst the guards, allowing him to stay clear of them when necessary and to help his men; he had learned to traverse this treacherous terrain. And, as an addition, he had made himself more valuable to his captors by putting his cavalry officer horse training to use, becoming known to them as a horse whisperer, astounding them with his ability to control the horses with verbal commands. “What are you thinking, Lieutenant?” Sergeant Boguslaw asks. “I am thinking we must continue to survive, Wilks. That is all. Survive.”
Act Three
Late Afternoon January 1945 Stalag ll A Neubrandenburg, Northern Germany
Lieutenant Mietek grabs a rucksack from beneath his cot. He has returned from the nearby labor fields and now is going out again. However, this time he is seeking work and odd jobs on nearby farms for himself in exchange for food and cash. The SS guards are gone, transferred to the Russian front. Elderly local militia are now in charge, and they, too, are starving and trying to survive until the end of the war. Lieutenant Mietek has negotiated a deal with the guards: in exchange for the freedom to scavenge about, he has promised that he and his men will return each evening and share what they have earned.
March 1945 Near Ravensbruck Women’s Prison Camp
Returning to their encampment, Lieutenant Mietek walks with three of his men along a road. They have found no work this afternoon and no food. He is thirsty and starving and cannot focus on the road. There is a long pile of bodies in a ditch parallel to the road, but he is not interested. He has seen too many bodies these past five years, and besides, he can barely move his feet. Then he hears his name in a whisper “Mietek.” He stops for a moment and wipes his brow. He looks at his men, who continue along the dusty road. He lumbers again. “Mietek, Mietek.” The voice is desperate. This time, his men stop as well. “Did you hear it?” “Yes, we heard it.” “I know that voice.”
He stumbles toward the piled bodies. They are all woman in grayish blood-stained peasant dresses. Some are missing limbs; others are only torsos. He and his men search franticly. More muffled voices are heard. “There are others alive!” Then he sees her. “Mietek, Mietek.” “Maria?” “Yes, it’s me. Please help me” He looks for her injuries and when he is certain she is all in one piece, he gently pulls her free from the pile of bodies.
Stalag ll A
Lieutenant Mietek carries Maria in his arms back to the encampment. The guards, stunned and afraid, refuse the women. “I will double what food we give you and, for every woman, one bottle of our distilled vodka. That is five bottles!” The guards accept the offer.
Inside the barracks, the men tend to the women. He looks at Maria on the cot. It has been almost six years since they met at the Warsaw train station. Six long years since that evening at her house with her father.
“The Nazis turned part of the city into a prison. Then I was sent to Auschwitz. After three months, I was moved to a factory work camp, a prison for women, called Ravensbruck. The Americans bombed the factory. We heard the planes. Then the Germans took us, the dead and injured, and threw us, like sacks of flour, onto trucks and then took us away from the factory and dumped us in ditches alongside the road.”
Early April 1945 Stalag ll A Neubrandenburg
In the middle of the night, one month after Maria’s rescue and a month before the end of the war and liberation, she is loaded onto a truck along with the other women. Several more trucks are loaded with young children and adolescents, who in the last few weeks had been shipped in as the Nazis moved and hid prisoners from the advancing Allies approaching from both the west and east. “A guard told me they are to be delivered to the Red Cross, but I don’t believe him,” Lieutenant Mietek says to the Sergeant. A few days later, Lieutenant Mietek and his men are loaded onto trucks and sent one hundred miles northwest to Lubeck, near the Baltic Sea.
April 1945 Lubeck POW Camp
In the early morning, on the outskirts of town, Lieutenant Mietek climbs out of the truck into a clambering, chaotic world. He can see the cities’ port filled with Nazi naval ships, submarines, tugboats, and freighters. Two large Red Cross ships are dockside. Along a road entering the city are thousands of ragged POWs and civilians marching in two columns. They are being directed into barbed wire holding pens with makeshift barracks. The streets teem with Nazi trucks, and armored cars hurdling past. Lieutenant Mietek turns to Sergeant Boguslaw and mouths the word “Survive.”
May 2 1945 Lubeck POW Camp
In the camp yard, Lieutenant Mietek stands shoulder to shoulder with Sergeant Boguslaw. It is hard to move without stepping on bodies. Inside the packed crude rooms, it is worse. Prisoners, suffocating, push to get outside. Food and water are scarce. He thinks of Maria. Had she survived? Is she on one of the Red Cross Ships? Word among the prisoners is that the British Army is approaching. He has only to survive another day or two. Again, word comes that the prisoners are to be moved onto the Red Cross freighters. “We must not get on those ships, Sergeant. We must be here when the British arrive.”
May 3 1945 Lubeck POW Camp
For two days, the prisoners are herded onto the ships. Lieutenant Mietek moves his men about in the chaotic holding pens, trying to be inauspicious as possible among the masses and doing everything he can to avoid being placed in the line that is moving out of the gates toward the ships. Finally, the ships loaded, the Nazis position one of the Red Cross freighters among the departing Nazi ships. The other at dockside lifts anchor. Planes appear in the distance. “Find cover,” Lieutenant Mietek yells to those in the camp yard.
May 4 1945 Lubeck Liberation
Smoke fills the city. Ships burn in the bay. A Red Cross ship sits capsized in the harbor, the other capsized along the smoldering pier. Thousands of prisoners have perished, burned, and drowned. Lieutenant Mietek and his men meet the British Army. “I am glad it is you and not the Russians,” he says, hand extended, walking toward them. After he and his men have scavenged for food and water, they go down to the water’s edge to help pull the dead from the water.
Staging Area British encampment
The advancing British force, in pursuit of the Nazi army, is not prepared to manage the city and the chaos. Lieutenant Mietek and his men roam outside the British encampments, appealing for food but are rebuffed. Spurned by the British, they must fend for themselves and with nothing to eat or a place to sleep, they move on. “Why did they treat us this way? Are we not Allies? Ask Sergeant Boguslaw”
May 7 VE Day American Encampment
After three days without food, Lieutenant Mietek and his men approach an American encampment. Soldiers sit eating. Lieutenant Mietek and his men keep their distance and watch. CAPTAIN HUGHES walks out to greet them. “Are you boys hungry? Food? Eat? Motioning with his hands as if using a utensil. Lieutenant Mietek replies in English that they are starving. Captain Hughes ushers them in.
Lieutenant Mietek recounts his six years as a POW to Captain Hughes, who relays it to his commanding officer. And he asks for help to find Maria, praying she was not on board the ships sunk in the harbor. He meets with the colonel and Captain Hughes. “Lieutenant Mietek, my orders are to prepare to receive SS troops and gestapo agents who will stand trial for war crimes. I am to hold them temporarily before transferring them to Nuremberg. Once a facility is secured, Captain Hughes will request your transfer. Meanwhile, as a Polish officer, you are to help here in Lubeck as needed, and we will do what we can to find your Maria.”
Late May 1945 Lubeck
Lieutenant Mietek is helping with the cleanup and organization of the Polish Displacement Person camp. He is in a room arranging desks in which he will soon teach English to Polish children. A silhouette stands in the doorway. “Maria!” He moves towards her open arms. She is smiling, and then, once in his embrace, she is crying.
In June, they are married
November 1945 Near Hamburg
With the Army Corps built facility completed, Lieutenant Mietek receives his orders. Maria accompanies him. Sergeant Boguslaw, at Lieutenant Mietek’s insistence, has also been transferred.
Evening Outside of Army Corps Encampment
The encampment for the prisoners is four-by-four wire pens with latrines attached. Several escapes are attempted; none succeed.
Lieutenant Mietek, Sergeant Boguslaw, and two other guards are on patrol near a small levee. They stop when their flashlights, sweeping across shrubs and fallen trees, illuminate in the shadows, three SS officers and a woman gestapo agent. “Stand up!” The escapees stand only to laugh and hurl obscenities at him and his men. When Lieutenant Mietek orders them to advance towards him, the escapees dismiss the Lieutenant and his men with more obscenities and then turn and run. Lieutenant Mietek takes a few steps towards them. “Halt!” The woman stops and lifts her dress, revealing her bare bottom, and calls him a filthy beast. He is the first to open fire.
Captain Hughes’ Quarters
Inside the officers’ building, Lieutenant Mietek and Sergeant Boguslaw stand before Captain Hughes. “Lieutenant Mietek, in the future, please, do not kill anymore prisoners.”
Prison Yard Army Corp Encampment
A few days later, Lieutenant Mietek sees Sergeant Mueller offloaded from a truck. He stands face to face with him. “Hello, Mueller, remember me? Your old friend from Stalag Two A.” He turns to the other guards who had not been with him at the stalag and explains who Mueller is and how Mueller brutalized them and had nearly beaten him to death. The next day, Sergeant Mueller is found dead.
Late January 1946 Army Corp Encampment Near Hamburg
Lieutenant Mietek closes the truck’s tailgate. Sergeant Boguslaw signals the driver and then slaps the tailgate as it departs, transporting the last prisoners to Nuremberg. They watch it disappear into the distance. “Wilk, are you sure you want to return home? Those Russian bastards will hunt you down.” “I will do the hunting. I know where to find my fellow brothers in the forest, and together we will chase those bastards back to Siberia. And you?” Lieutenant Mietek smiles at the Sergeant, “I am to join the Guard in Moosberg.” “A Guard in these zones? Be careful, these zones are filled with corrupt officials, black markets, and spies.” Lieutenant Mietek puts an arm around the Sergeant. “Just stay out of my way.” Sergeant Boguslaw embraces the Lieutenant, and they laugh as they never had. It would be the last time he would see the Wolf.
February 1946 Moosberg Civilian Internment Camp No. 6
Once a Nazi POW camp, Moosberg now holds twelve thousand German civilian prisoners thought to be Nazi collaborators. Lieutenant Mietek is assigned to the Polish Guard Company. The company is one of several auxiliary and paramilitary organizations formed to support the Allied troops with security, technical and transportation duties, as the Allied armies begin the transition to peacetime operations.
In March, Maria gives birth to a son STANLEY. Mietek and his family spend ten months in Moosberg in crowded rooms where the food is scarce and sanitation slow to improve, where prisoners languish behind barbed wire fences and subjected to harsh treatment by their captors. The clashes with corrupt officials are exhausting and, as Sergeant Boguslaw stated, the black-market profiteers dangerous. “I don’t care where we go, Mietek. We must get out. It is no place for a baby.” Mietek agrees. He must take care of his family and believing he has fulfilled his duty to his American Allies, resigns from the Guard and requests relocation.
Late October 1946 Moosberg Processing Office
Inside the small plywood office, Mietek sits beside Maria, who is holding eight-month-old Stanley in her lap as the U.S. official explains the opportunities and options to Mietek.
Mietek declines the offer of U.S. citizenship attached to enlistment in the U.S. military (he is through with war and death). Likewise, with reports of the Red Army plundering, raping, and the mass executions of returning Polish combatants, all corroborated by letters from Maria’s sister who still lives in Warsaw, they decide not to return to their homeland. Relocation to the United States is their preference. However, the only jobs offered are in the slaughterhouses of Chicago. Again, Mietek declines. He wants no more bloodshed.
The other options are the oilfields of Brazil and Venezuela, or the mines in Northern Canada. He chooses Canada even though it is the most dangerous occupation. Because the word is out that the danger in the oilfields is not because of the job but those countries’ growing reputation as havens for escaped Nazis. And the mines, because they are the most hazardous of occupations, offer the highest pay, which will give him the quickest way to raise the money to pay for the passage of his family. He is told of the mandatory six-month probation period required before any family may immigrate. Mietek signs the paperwork.
Within days, they are to be transferred to Waldorf Displacement Person Camp, where they will wait for final approval from the Canadian government. “How long will it take?” The official looks at Mietek and then at Maria and her baby. “Two months. It could be four. There’s about a million of you trying to get out of this mess.”
April 1947 Waldorf Displacement Person Camp
Mietek walks into their small one room quarters, consisting of a bed, a table and two chairs, a washbasin, and a small stove. Maria sits on the bed with Stanley. They are lucky to have a room of their own. Mietek holds up his hand, which is clutching papers. He shakes his hand and smiles. After four months, Mietek is on his way to Canada.
Maria must stay on her own with one-year-old Stanley for six more months.
Within a few days, Mietek is in Munich. But then transportation bogs down under the substantial weight of hundreds of thousands of displaced migrant Europeans moving about. It is a logistical nightmare. On his journey, Mietek looks out of train and truck windows observing the devastation of cities, some nothing more than rumble, of burned-out farmhouses and splintered trees, of people searching amid village ruins and in country sides lonely figures roaming aimlessly, and everywhere check points. His journey from Munich to Canada takes two months.
Five months after Mietek left for Canada, Maria and her son are again transferred. This time to Stuttgart Displacement Camp.
August 1946 Campbell Red Lake Mines Northern Ontario Canada
Three months after arriving in Canada, Mietek’s fears regarding the safety of the mines and his fellow miners are affirmed as he narrowly survives a cave-in. Afterwards, Mietek sees several miners leaving. But for him, there is no choice.
June 1948 Stuttgart Displacement Camp
Maria has been on her own for ten months. It has been three years since the end of the war in Europe. Maria sits on a bench where mothers gather to watch their children play between long clapboard barracks. Stanley, now two-years-old, is chasing a kicked ball made of cloth. She is reading a letter from Mietek. She slowly leans back against the side of the barrack and gently lays her hand with the letter on her lap.
It has been fourteen months since she has seen Mietek. In the letter’s fold is their passage to Canada.
North Atlantic Ocean
A freighter in route to New York churns through heavy seas and rain. Emigrants and makeshift accommodations crowd the deck. Maria holds two-year-old Stanley tightly under her coat with them both wrapped in a wet blanket while she vomits over the side rail and prays little Stanley does not get sick. A woman showing concern for her, and Stanley gently places her hand on Maria’s back. Maria turns to face the woman. She wipes her mouth and nods at the woman. She has steeled herself for this last part of the journey. The hellish voyage will be over in days, not in years, and nothing like the misery she has gone through. She clutches little Stanley close to her chest, blinks as the rain splatters on her face, and she manages a smile.
PostScript
Mietek works in the mines for ten more years, raising a family in the one-room house provided by the mining company where they sleep with their clothes on for fear of fires. Later at the Balmer mines, he rises to the position of Safety Supervisor until a second cave-in cost him most of his teeth.
In 1957, he seeks a less hazardous profession, and with the help of the town’s Polish priest, secures a janitorial position 1100 miles away at the 900-bed General Hospital in Calgary, Province of Alberta.
He tells Maria, “I have gone from medical school to a hospital janitor. But at least here I have no worries of coming home alive or not, and of the dead that I see, very few have bullet holes or signs of torture.”
In 1980, after 23 years at the City Hospital of Ontario, Mietek retires, serving his last eight years as a member of the hospital’s Board of Directors. He is known for his efforts to employ military veterans and for helping those veterans in need of emotional care. Mietek and Maria raise three boys, Stanley, Joseph, and Mark, and remain married until Maria’s passing in 1994 at seventy-four. Mietek passes in 2006 at eighty-six.
The Polish resistance against the Soviet takeover of Poland continued until 1954. Still, some ‘Cursed Soldiers’ continued to fight.
The last officer of the Polish underground, Stanislaw Marchewka “Ryba,” dies with a weapon in his hand in 1957. The last known ‘cursed soldier’, Józef Franczak, is ambushed and killed in 1963.
In June 1989, Poland holds free elections. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapses.