It was there that Jan Bednarski was given the nickname “Jasiek-Góral”. At the Tobruk Fortress, in the Libyan Desert, he became famous for his daring raids under enemy fire to nearby oasis to supply water. In 1941, Jan fought at Marsa Matruth, Bardia, and Cyrenaica. No one inside the operating room survived. Minutes later, the operating room took a direct hit. They carried me out into a hallway passage. At last the operating table, washing, sewing, and bandaging. ![]() Somehow my brother was brought to me and we waited together in a row of stretchers. The tank rocked on the rubble, what pain! I was carried into and underground hospital. Eventually an English tank passed by, they noticed my eyes, pulled me up on deck, and continued on. Pain woke me…my left clavicle was sticking out of my shoulder straight up in front of my face. Hell in heaven and on earth, cannon and machine gun fire, search light beams and explosions. I came out of the bunker to do observation. There was a night bombing, as every night. At the end of 1940, in Alexandria, Egypt, Jan was posted as an observer for the anti-aircraft defence of the airport. Two of Jan’s companions were shot as they swam a river in Yugoslavia and the third later died a soldier’s dead at Tobruk.Įventually, on June 6, 1940, Jan and Michał were in the Polish uniforms of the Carpathian Brigade in British-controlled Palestine. In May of 1940, Jan his younger brother Michał, and three others escaped through German cordons into Hungary and began a 2,000 kilometre journey to the Middle East, to French-held Syria. ![]() Eventually, he decided that he could fight the Germans best in the regular Polish army in the West. The Germans sought him and put up a reward for his capture. He stockpiled weapons and organized the transfer of people from Poland to Hungary en route to France. Jan than became one of the initiators of underground resistance in Poland’s sub-Carpathian region. Everything worth having, whether animate or inanimate, had been stolen. When he reached home, he found the once flourishing estate devastated by the German Army. Jan managed to escape from the train and thus from fate 15,000 Polish officers, who were murdered in 1940 in Katyń, Starobielsk and Ostaszków. The Soviet separated all Polish officers from the ranks and shipped them eastward for execution. Jan was taken captive in the city of Lwów by the Soviet Army that invaded eastern Poland on September 17, 1939. On September 1, 1939, he was called to the army, took part in the campaign against the Germans (under General Antoni Szylling), and was shot through the chest. The tough highland villagers, the górale were fond of him because of his honesty, directness, helpfulness, and ability to talk with them in their dialect. Appointment to the past of commissioner of the Ministry of Agriculture for Podhale region in 1938 was a distinction for Jan, which he owned to the recommendations of his university professors. ![]() Jan completed military service with the rank of 2 nd Lieutenant, earned a Master’s degree in Agriculture from Jagiellonian University in Cracow, and was managing the family estate and stud farm at Stadniki. At the age of eighteen, Jan became the legal guardian of his family, after his father had died in hunting accident three years earlier. The outbreak of the Second World War inexorably altered the promising career of twenty-eight-years-old Jan Bednarski. Jan Adam Bednarski For Your Freedom and Ours
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