Izabela WILBIK
Home Army (AK)
„Iza” - a teenage girl who cared for the wounded during the fiercest fighting of the Warsaw Uprising. “This is the hardest fight we have fought since the beginning of the war. It is comparable only to the fights for every house in Stalingrad,” commented Heinrich Himmler.
Reichsführer SS was referring to the fight for the Czerniaków beachhead in Warsaw, where the worst fears of the German commanders busy with the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising were apparently coming true.
On 16 September 1944 soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division of the 1st Army of the communist-controlled Polish People's Army landed on the beaches in Czerniaków district. It seemed that much-needed military help for the insurgents who were desperately fighting for every street and every house in that area was finally provided. The Germans were alarmed. The landing could be a spearhead of much larger force coming to liberate Warsaw.
A day earlier, on 15 September 1944, Izabela Wilbik code-named “Iza”, a 17-year-old orderly and courier of the “Mieczyki” platoon of the “Czata 49” battalion incorporated into Radosław Group, was busy helping the wounded in the area of Czerniaków.
She was probably doing all she could to save her colleague Second Lieutenant Paweł Kaden-Bandrowski (son of a famous Polish journalist and novelist Juliusz Kaden-Bandrowski) in a shelled building on 2 Okrąg Street. The man was heavily wounded, but despite his dreadful condition “Iza” had the courage to take care of his wounds, and while doing so she also became heavily injured. Paweł died on the same day and “Iza” outlived him by two days, during which she probably suffered greatly.
The pain and the misery were finally over when she succumbed to her wounds on 17 September 1944 in the basement of the building. Outside the battle raged on as the Polish People's Army soldiers were trying to link up with the insurgents who were unable to defend their positions and help the advancing Poles to break through out of the beachhead.
They left the Czerniaków area through canals, abandoning their positions on 19 September 1944. Soon the remaining soldiers from the 1st Army retreated to their positions on the right bank of the Vistula river.
“Iza” was probably buried in haste. After the war, her remains were exhumed and identified by her mother. The brave girl finally got a dignified burial at the Powązki Military Cemetery in Warsaw.
Some participants of the Warsaw Uprising fought against the enemy alongside their families. Iza’s brother Jerzy also joined the Uprising. He was only 16 and served in the same unit as her sister. Luckily, he survived the war.
Source: Institute of National Remembrance Facebook post.