SZNUK o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-08-30 published
Krystyna SZNUK-
SPARKS,
Resistance
Fighter (1922-2005)
A member of the Polish Home Army during the Warsaw uprising of
1944, she cared for the wounded and survived by her wits until
sent to Ravensbruck and Buchenwald
By Buzz BOURDON,
Special to the Globe and Mail, Tuesday, August
30, 2005, Page S11
Ottawa -- A loud pounding at the door meant only one thing for
people living in occupied Poland during the Second World War:
The Germans had come for you.
Krystyna SZNUK watched in horror as the door opened. The Warsaw
uprising had erupted two weeks earlier, on August 1, 1944, and
as a member of the Polish Home Army, she was on the run.
"Two Vlasov men walked in. They looked us over. No, they were
not interested in males, they wanted a female. Jazdia was holding
her child in her arms, so I was the obvious choice," she wrote
50 years later in an unpublished memoir. The soldiers, members
of General Andrei Vlasov's so-called Russian Liberation Army,
Soviet soldiers who had switched sides to fight with the Germans,
ordered her to come with them. She knew they wanted her for sex.
Just 22 at the time, she refused.
"They both had hand grenades and indicated that if I didn't go,
they would throw [them] at us. They promptly began to remove
the pins. There was no choice so I went, my mind racing with
plans of escape," she said.
Fortunately, the soldiers started to argue about "who would go
first." She bolted up a flight of stairs, knocked desperately
on a door and was admitted to an apartment where someone whisked
her across to a window. "[I went] through the open window where
a helping hand was outstretched to me. A minute or so later we
heard a pounding at the door and noises of a search."
After that, she took to disguising her looks by smearing coal
ash on her face and hair. Later, she came upon more of Vlasov's
men in an abandoned factory. "[They] were checking for jewellery.
One of them noticed a diamond and blue-enamel ring on my finger,
which I had inherited from my grandmother. He almost tore my
finger off trying to get [it] so I took it off and gave it to
him. Being dirty and smeared with ashes seemed to repulse them
and I was left alone," she said.
During the uprising, during which almost 50,000 members of the
Polish Home Army attacked the German garrison, she helped care
for the wounded. When the Poles surrendered two months later,
about 18,000 Polish fighters had been killed, along with 150,000
civilians.
The Nazis destroyed 90 per cent of the colourful and cosmopolitan
capital she had known as a child. Her family was upper-middle
class, with connections throughout Polish society. "[They] lived
in very comfortable circumstances," said daughter Mariea
SPARKS.
"They lived in a large, comfortable apartment filled with art
and employed a cook and a maid."
Major-General Stefan
SZNUK was a pioneer Polish aviator who fought
in the First World War for Imperial Russia and later, after the
Russian revolution, with the counterrevolutionary White Russians.
For his daughter Krystyna, who studied at the exclusive Plater-Zyberk
School, life as a teenager during the 1930s centred on school
and family.
Dr. Danuta
PODKOMORSKA, now living in retirement in Winnipeg,
first met her when they were both eight years old. "We went to
prep school and then to high school together, where we sat at
the same desk. My mother died when I was very young so her mother
mothered me as well."
It was "carefree and naive," said Dr.
PODKOMORSKA. "We were sheltered
from the world through school and family." In May of 1939, young
Krystyna graduated from high school. "I was bursting with life
and joy. The world was open to me, first the holidays, then entrance
exams to university, and maybe an occasional meeting with my
boyfriend. Those were my plans."
It all came to an end on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded
Poland. Over the next six years, she and her mother, Stanislawa,
survived a brutal and oppressive occupation in a "grey and sad"
Warsaw. Food was short and fear was endemic. One day, two Gestapo
agents barged into their apartment and interrogated her on the
whereabouts of her father, who had escaped to Britain, where
he became an aide to General Wladyslaw
SIKORSKI, head of the
Polish government-in-exile.
"Of course we did not know, and what little we suspected we would
not divulge." Her mother was arrested the following day. Weeks
later, her uncle was shot.
Desperate to get her mother out of jail, she borrowed money,
which she gave to a lawyer to bribe the Gestapo. It worked, and
her mother arrived home a few days later.
"I opened the door and my heart sank with pity, a feeling stronger
than the joy of seeing mother free. I could not believe it was
the same person. She was so thin, poor soul, and her hair had
gone completely white. Four months of prison took its toll, but
she was free, free, free and we were together."
She herself was not free for long. For the last eight months
of the war, she was a slave labourer at the infamous Ravensbruck
and Buchenwald death camps. Risking their lives, she and her
Friends "deliberately sabotaged the shells they produced," said
daughter Nina
SPARKS. "
She knew that if the Germans caught them,
they'd be killed."
After the war, Krystyna
SZNUK decided to emigrate to Canada,
where her parents had already settled. They were reunited in
Ottawa and in 1948 she married Roderick
SPARKS, scion of a prominent
local family.
Krystyna SZNUK-
SPARKS was born on January 2, 1922, in Warsaw.
She died of an aneurism on June 11 in Ottawa. She was 83. She
leaves her daughters Nina, Mariea and Anna, and son Robert. She
was predeceased by her husband, Roderick
SPARKS.
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