Jozef Garlinski Obituary: Wrote On Poland's War
Jozef Garlinski, who has died aged 92, was a devoted anti-Nazi and eminent historian of wartime Poland. He was born in Kiev, making him a subject of the last Tsar of all the Russias. Most of his early childhood was spent on the run from the Russo-German battles fought on Polish soil during the first world war.
...
When the second world war began, with the German attack on Poland on September 1 1939, the 25-year-old Garlinski had just fallen in love with Eileen Short, a Dublin nurse on an exchange visit to Warsaw; his colonel gave him an hour's leave to get married before the regiment left for the front, where their horses were of little use against the German tanks.
Garlinski survived the first blitzkrieg, and at once joined the Warsaw underground, in which he held several important posts, including chief bodyguard to the commander. He was arrested by accident in 1943 - the German police searched his street for a wireless operator using the cover name of Tadeus Garlinski, and seized the first Garlinski they found. He was sent to Auschwitz, which he entered full of the disdain for Jews then common in Poland.
In the ghastly rigours of that camp, Garlinski became aware that there was a small, but efficient, underground at work, run by Jews whom he could not help admiring - though they refused to recruit him because he was a stranger. Against the odds, he survived and was sent to Neuengamme, a less notorious camp, where he remained until the end of the war.
His wife, Eileen, meanwhile, had used her nursing skills during the second Warsaw uprising of 1944. As it ended, and she stumbled up the cellar steps of her hospital to surrender, her Red Cross armband fell off; she stuffed it in her pocket. Everyone wearing uniform or an armband was shot; she survived.
...
In retirement, Garlinski enrolled at the London School of Economics, and completed a doctoral thesis on the concentration camp resistance movement that had cured him of anti-semitism. He turned his thesis into a book, Fighting Auschwitz (1975), and established himself as a historian. He wrote Hitler's Last Weapons (1978) about the underground struggle against the V1 and the V2, Intercept (1979) on the ultra secret intelligence tangle, and The Swiss Corridor (1981) about espionage in wartime Switzerland.
He wrote a more general history, Poland in the Second World War (1985), bringing out for American and English readers a point no Pole could forget -that to replace Hitler's regime by Stalin's was not much of a liberation. All these were accurate, sober histories, though he let his private feelings show rather more in The Triumph of Love (1991), a wartime autobiography.
...
When the second world war began, with the German attack on Poland on September 1 1939, the 25-year-old Garlinski had just fallen in love with Eileen Short, a Dublin nurse on an exchange visit to Warsaw; his colonel gave him an hour's leave to get married before the regiment left for the front, where their horses were of little use against the German tanks.
Garlinski survived the first blitzkrieg, and at once joined the Warsaw underground, in which he held several important posts, including chief bodyguard to the commander. He was arrested by accident in 1943 - the German police searched his street for a wireless operator using the cover name of Tadeus Garlinski, and seized the first Garlinski they found. He was sent to Auschwitz, which he entered full of the disdain for Jews then common in Poland.
In the ghastly rigours of that camp, Garlinski became aware that there was a small, but efficient, underground at work, run by Jews whom he could not help admiring - though they refused to recruit him because he was a stranger. Against the odds, he survived and was sent to Neuengamme, a less notorious camp, where he remained until the end of the war.
His wife, Eileen, meanwhile, had used her nursing skills during the second Warsaw uprising of 1944. As it ended, and she stumbled up the cellar steps of her hospital to surrender, her Red Cross armband fell off; she stuffed it in her pocket. Everyone wearing uniform or an armband was shot; she survived.
...
In retirement, Garlinski enrolled at the London School of Economics, and completed a doctoral thesis on the concentration camp resistance movement that had cured him of anti-semitism. He turned his thesis into a book, Fighting Auschwitz (1975), and established himself as a historian. He wrote Hitler's Last Weapons (1978) about the underground struggle against the V1 and the V2, Intercept (1979) on the ultra secret intelligence tangle, and The Swiss Corridor (1981) about espionage in wartime Switzerland.
He wrote a more general history, Poland in the Second World War (1985), bringing out for American and English readers a point no Pole could forget -that to replace Hitler's regime by Stalin's was not much of a liberation. All these were accurate, sober histories, though he let his private feelings show rather more in The Triumph of Love (1991), a wartime autobiography.