Saturday 1 October 2016

The last 'Cursed Soldier's' son in London tonight

Popped in to Windsor Hall just after 6pm and had a brief chat with Mr Kajetan Rajski, Mr Marek Franczak and the other organisers. 
Mr Marek Franczak, son of the last of  'The Cursed Soldiers' in conversation with a man from Luton, one of the organisers

What was about to take place next to the Polish Church in Ealing Broadway? 
A meeting with these two men to talk about some controversial and tragic events in the Polish 20th century history. Kajetan Rajski is a young law student and already accomplished publicist with a number of published books and materials. Born in 1994, he is famous for a book which contains his interviews with the children of the so-called 'Silent-Unseen'. Maybe we should think of an event like this with an English translation so not only Polish people could learn about this important aspect of our  past.

Thanks to Karolina,  a friend met at the Polish Hearth Club in Exhibition Rd, South Ken, I learnt at the last minute about this event in Ealing . Unfortunately, I couldn't attend the meeting.
Marek Franczak's father was the last of the so-called 'Cursed Soldiers' who fought against the Soviet imposed regime in Poland behind the Iron Curtain. Kajetan Rajski, b.1994, is one of many young Polish people who is fascinated by his country's recent history.
Setting up a room: Mr Kajetan Rajski with the organisers
 This law student has already written a few books and many articlesand attends many meetings like this one in Poland and abroad. I also met a few young men who were helping to set up the room.





Here is what Dear Wiki has to say about people like Mr Rajski's father, Jozef Rajczak:

'The "cursed soldiers" (also known as "disavowed soldiers", "accursed soldiers" or "damned soldiers"; Polish: Żołnierze wyklęci) is a term applied to a variety of anti-communist Polish resistance movements formed in the later stages of World War II and its aftermath by some members of the Polish Underground State. These clandestine organisations continued their armed struggle against the Stalinist government of Poland well into the 1950s. The guerrilla warfare included an array of military attacks launched against the communist regime's prisons and state security offices, detention facilities for political prisoners and concentration camps that were set up across the country. Most of the Polish anti-communist groups ceased to exist in the late 1940s or 1950s, hunted down by agents of the Ministry of Public Security and Soviet NKVD assassination squads. However, the last known 'cursed soldier', Józef Franczak, was killed in an ambush as late as 1963, almost 20 years after the Soviet take-over of Poland.'

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