A Special Duty Read Online Free PDF Page A

April 1944 and, having touched down somewhere in Poland, the crew of Halifax JP224 embarked on a whole new experience of “World War II”.
    The names of all the Polish people who helped others during the period of German and Soviet occupation have not been written down to this day. It would take a legion of researchers. The only organisation that tracks such figures is the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem, which has been collecting names for years. The institute also awards the title of “Righteous Among the Nations” to those who brought help to the Jews in World War II. Half of the people honoured are Polish. There is no such list of patriots involved in hiding, providing false papers, freeing from prisoner-of-war camps or helping evaders from Great Britain, Canada, the United States of America or Australia but if such a list existed, it would include the two girl scouts killed for providing assistance to British captives. They were: Janina Lechówa, beheaded at the Cytadela in Poznań and Janina Olszewska, shot dead together with her father by a firing squad in her home village in Lipno County. Two other women, Zofia Garlicka, 68 years old, and her daughter Zofia Jasińska were sent to Auschwitz for providing medical treatment to escaped British officers. Olga Kamińska-Prokopowa was beheaded for helping the British, Józef Grabiński and Wiesława Jezierska were executed following an investigation. In April 1942, Ludwik Bayer, who had been hiding a runaway British officer, was hanged from a pear tree in his own garden in the village of Dymarczewo Stare near Poznań. Three Poles: Józef Hanasz, Robert Hatko and Teodor Tom were hanged on 18 November 1941 in Brzozowice-Kamień; they helped hide and showed the way to a captive who had escaped from a camp in Łambinowice. On 28 November 1943 a Home Army patrol transporting a group of runaway British captives was attacked by gendarmes. The airmen were saved but in revenge, the Germans killed 42 residents of Bichniów. Maria Eugenia Jasińska, a pharmacist, was hanged in Lodz on 20 April 1943 for providing aid to British pilots. Her family received “words of appreciation” from the RAF. The Polish government showed their appreciation by awarding the Silver Cross of the Virtuti Militari War Order, Poland’s highest military decoration.
    Thomas Storey and four of his crew from Halifax JP 224 were not taken prisoner. Despite having landed in a German training area they evaded capture thanks to the actions of these admirable people. Only two of the crew fell into enemy hands; the other five were saved. Walter Davies, sheltering in Smolarzyny near Rakszawa, lived to see the arrival of Allied Soviet forces. Storey, Keen, Hughes and Stradling, hidden by partisans of the Peasants’ Battalions and the Home Army, were transferred across the San River to the partisan unit led by Franciszek Przysiężniak – “Father Jan”, and were eventually taken to a Polish-Soviet detachment headed by Mikołaj Kunicki – “Mucha”. One night two aircraft arrived from Kiev at a prepared landing ground. The wounded partisans and the four airmen boarded those planes and flew out.
    In 1996, when I was writing the “Last Flight of the Halifax” book, together with Jerzy Piekarczyk, we met several soldiers who had been involved in the clandestine rescue; they were simply obeying orders to help the Allies wage war against Hitler. We also came across people who were not involved with the partisan movement, yet they still put their families’ and their own lives at risk because... it was the right thing to do; these airmen had provided our boys with ammunition and equipment. Once the aircrew had joined a partisan group, they could not subsequently decide to give themselves up to the enemy because of the information they held, which could be tortured out of them by the Germans. This was how the German Special Court got their proof and imposed capital punishment on Irena Markiewiczowa, Bronisław