HARD TIMES
By Helen McAnulty
“The resistance of Warsaw was magnificent and forlorn... the Polish army was no match for their assailants and resistance everywhere was brave but vain... The Polish army ceased to exist.”
I used to walk past his little weatherboard house nearly every day on my way to the shops and he was almost always on the verandah or pottering in his garden.
We nodded good day and he would smile a beautiful smile which lit up his face. He didn’t speak much and when he did it was in a thick accent which was often hard to understand. I tried to ask a few questions about his earlier life but he always shook his head.
Then one day he suddenly declared: “I would like to talk to you” and to my delight he did.
Eddie was born in Obobno, Poland in 1918, one of the four children of Mary and John.
He remembered the Great Depression which began when he was about ten years old.
Like the rest of the world, the Polish people were unemployed and hungry.
Europe was in turmoil in the 1930s, Germany was flexing its muscles and England and France were nervously watching the build up to World War 2. In 1939, young Edward was drafted into the Polish army. Six months later Germany invaded Poland. Eddie remembered the tanks chasing the army which was on foot. He managed to clamber aboard a troop truck and when the driver was killed by a sniper, Eddie took over the driving. Coming to a checkpoint he yelled to the Polish lieutenant: “Sir, I cannot drive!”
“You’re doing alright,” replied the officer, “Move it!”
Eddie and his mates finally abandoned the truck, hid the ammunition and took off for the Czechoslovakian border where they were organised into an underground force to work against the invading enemy.
In 1941 they were sent to Manchester in England where they trained as parachutists to be dropped behind enemy lines in Cyprus to join partisan soldiers.
Eddie paused in his story here and found it hard to go on. His eyes filled with tears and he apologised but it was obviously a very difficult time to talk about.
Finally he continued.
“In 1942 I was with a group of resistance fighters and we were attempting to sabotage an ammunition depot in Hamburg when we were caught by the Nazis and taken to a camp in Mauthausen in Austria.”
This was an horrific concentration camp known for its infamous ‘Stairway of Death” where prisoners were tied together and made to carry 50 kilos on their backs up a long, steep stone stairway where, if one fell, the rest would follow, breaking limbs and heads with little chance of survival.
The conditions as in all concentration camps, were dreadful... thousands were crammed into the most primitive of housing. The prisoners were stripped of their clothes and given prison garb. “We slept on our side on the concrete, crammed together like sardines,” Eddie told me. “There was no heating and little food. My best friend was Jewish and after the medical examination I never saw him again.”
Under these conditions most of the prisoners were constantly ill but the Nazis methods of treatment were harsh and primitive. It was now that Eddie’s intrepid friends in the resistance stepped in and, with great daring, they managed to rescue the men who had been captured. They stole an S.S. truck and in this, and after a fair bit of mayhem, escaped through Poland to Czechoslovakia, finally returning to England in 1944.
This was followed by more parachuting behind enemy lines in Cyprus and many dramatic moments of sabotage blowing up bridges and roads. At one stage they escaped over the Italian Alps, dragging blankets behind them to cover their tracks. Finally, with the help of the French underground they were smuggled back to England just as the war was about to end.
Poland had been destroyed and was now under the control of the Soviet Union. Millions of “displaced persons” were homeless and Eddie himself was one of them. Then an American officer suggested to him that Australia would be a great place to live.
So on a warm sunny day in 1951 the ship carrying Eddie docked in Sydney Harbour.
“There was a feeling of freedom in the air,” he told me. “I’d never felt anything like it before.”
It was then that his life changed.
After spending some time in a migrant camp in Bathurst he began to play his violin again and joined a band. He and two Polish friends decided to try their luck in the bush and answering an ad for rabbit catchers they came to the Central West.
Despite the difficulties of his young life, Eddie went on to marry a local girl, bring up a family and enjoy happy years of peace and freedom.