    |
|
|
|
|
|
|
On September 3, 1928, Danuta Helena Siedzikówna was born in the small village of Guszczewin, in the Podlaskie Voivodeship, Poland.
Danuta was the daughter of Wacław Siedzik, a forester, and Eugenia Tymińska. She had two sisters: Wiesława and Irena. Four days after Danuta turned 11, on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, triggering the outbreak of World War II. A few days later, on September 17, the USSR invaded eastern Poland, as part of a strategy previously agreed upon with the Germans in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
The war tore Danuta's family apart. Her father was deported to the Gulag by the Soviets on February 10, 1940, later joining General Władysław Anders's Second Polish Corps alongside other Poles deported by Stalin. Wacław Siedzik died in Tehran on June 6, 1943. Her mother enlisted in the Armia Krajowa (AK, Home Army), the main Polish resistance organization against nazi Germany, and was arrested by the Gestapo in November 1942 and shot in September 1943 in a forest near Białystok.
After their mother was murdered, Danuta and her sister Wiesława joined the Armia Krajowa in December 1943, training as nurses. After the end of the war, like other members of the AK, Danuta suffered the repression of the communist dictatorship imposed by Stalin in Poland against members of the resistance loyal to the Polish government in exile, who made up the vast majority of the Polish insurgents who had fought against the Germans.
In June 1945, she was arrested by agents of the NKVD, Stalin's secret police. Her comrades in the AK managed to free her in an operation led by Stanisław Wołonciej "Konus" of the 5th AK Brigade in Vilnius, commanded by the legendary Colonel Zygmunt Szendzielarz "Łupaszka", one of the great heroes of the Polish resistance against Nazism and Communism. Danuta joined this unit of the Armia Krajowa, adopting the pseudonym "Inka".
In late June 1946, the AK sent Danuta to obtain medicine in the city of Gdansk, in northern Poland. Agents of the communist dictatorship arrested her on July 20, 1946, and held her in the city's prison as a special prisoner. Danuta was tortured by her captors but did not betray her comrades in the AK.
After failing to obtain the information they were seeking, the communists subjected Danuta to a sham trial in which the witnesses against her, members of the Citizens' Militia (UB, the police organized by the communist dictatorship), contradicted each other. One of the witnesses even admitted that Danuta had provided him with medical care despite being an enemy. It was to no avail. On August 3, 1946, a court-martial presided over by Adam Gajewski sentenced her to death despite her age of 17, even though the minimum age for capital punishment was 18. Danuta was shot on August 28, 1946. According to a witness, her last words were: "Niech żyje Polska! Niech żyje Łupaszko!" (Long live Poland! Long live Łupaszka!).
In the following decades, Danuta was vilified by the communist dictatorship, which portrayed her as a sadistic bandit, a propaganda campaign directed by the anti-democratic regime imposed by Stalin in Poland against all members of the Polish resistance who did not submit to Moscow. After the fall of communism, Danuta was rehabilitated on June 10, 1991, by the Gdansk Provincial Court. Like other Polish patriots murdered by the communists, Danuta's burial site after her execution was never identified, but it was finally discovered in 2015.
A state funeral was held for Danuta in Gdańsk on 28 August 2016, with a mass in the city's cathedral presided over by Metropolitan Archbishop Sławoj Leszek Głódź. She is buried at the Gdańsk Garrison Cemetery. Today, Danuta is considered a heroine in her country and a victim of a totalitarian regime, communism, which did not "liberate" Poland from Nazism, but subjected it to a second, bloody occupation.
Honor to her memory!
---
Main photo: Mikołaj Kaczmarek - Kolor Historii.
|
Don't miss the news and content that interest you. Join Counting Stars for free on Telegram: Click here to join |
Opina sobre esta entrada: