POLAND’S REVENGE AT MONTE CASSINO
In the spring of 1944 the German defence across the Italian peninsula, The Gustav Line, proved impenetrable. To help secure Allied victory and open up the road to Rome, General Wladyslaw Anders led the Polish II Corps, an army of soldiers that had survived Siberia, and travelled across the deserts of the Middle East, to reach their destiny… and raise the Polish flag at the summit of Monte Cassino.
Surviving Siberia
In 1940, when Otton Hulacki was 18, the NKVD came to his home in Lwow. Deportations of Poles began shortly after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in 1939, and few of the Poles sent to the desolate wastelands across the Soviet Union would ever see their homeland again. Hulacki’s father was deported to a gulag in the Urals on the 10 April, two days later the Soviet Secret Police came back to deport young Hulacki along with his mother and siblings. The cattle car train journey took weeks. “But I was not in despair,” Hulacki remembers, “As a young man, going into the unknown … it was unpleasant but still a kind of adventure. Being sent to Siberia was something that many, many Poles had experienced… including Pilsudski.”
“SINCE THE VERY START OF THE WAR HULACKI’S FEAR, LIKE FOR MOST IN THE RESISTANCE, WAS TO BE INTERROGATED AND GIVE UP FELLOW MEMBERS OF HIS UNDERGROUND CELL”
Like so many of his generation, young Hulacki took courage and inspiration from Jozef Pilsudski, the Marshal of Poland and the architect of Polish independence after 123 years of Partitions – times when generations of Poles under Russian rule had been deported to Siberia. Looking back, despite the dire situation, Hulacki also felt lucky because things could still have turned out much worse. As a sworn member of the Polish resistance since the very start of the war Hulacki’s fear, like for most in the resistance, was to be interrogated and give up fellow members of his underground cell. “I have a high pain threshold, but…” Nobody knows if – and for how long – they would be able to withstand torture.
When Hulacki and his family arrived in Kazakhstan, how did they
