Jerzy was born on 18 March 1909 in Warsaw, Poland.

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He was a navigator in the Polish Air Force during WW2.  Evacuating to France, he joined the Polish Air Force there. When France fell, he evacuated to Great Britain and joined the 304 Bomber Squadron as Flight Lieutenant / Navigator.

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Returning from a raid on Mannheim, on 8th November 1941, the aircraft was out of fuel and the pilot attempted to land his plane on an airfield in Belgium. He landed at St Trond near Liege, which, unfortunately, was a Luftwaffe fighter base. The crew all survived and were made prisoners of war, but not before destroying all their papers and anything that might be useful to the Germans and setting the aircraft on fire. The aircraft was a Vickers Wellington 1C. The rest of the Polish crew were F/O Blicharz, P/O Rekszyc, Sgt Jaworoszuk, Sgt Krawiecki and Sgt Lewandowski.

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Jersy died on 29 March 1944 – he was shot as he escaped from the German Stalag III POW camp (The Great Escape) in Sagan, Germany (now Zagan, Poland).

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Jerzy was Prisoner of War No 680 and was active in the year long preparations for this mass escape which seriously disrupted the German war effort by tying up large numbers of German troops and resources at a critical time (less than ten weeks before D-Day), which was a serious blow to the Germans – even though only three of the seventy six who escaped, actually made it home.

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Jerzy was a very useful member of the escape team and performed some very useful functions. He was one of a group of tailors who skilfully converted uniforms into civilian clothes and made warm coats from the POW blankets. In the pre-war days, before he joined the Polish Air Force, he worked on building sites and developed a skill at cutting out shaped profiles from concrete and then replaced them invisibly. This must have been extremely useful when they were concealing the entrances to the tunnels – it was certainly successful. He is also said to have built all the trapdoors in the tunnels. His other duty was to scan German newspapers and magazines for any information that might prove useful to the escape effort. He was assigned this intelligence gathering task because he was fluent in German.

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Once clear of the wire, he was part of a group of twelve who made for the local railway station and he made further use of his German language skills by buying tickets for the group. The ticket seller was suspicious of so large a group, but Jerzy held his nerve, explaining that they were all Spanish workers in the local mills. The basic idea was to get as far away from the camp as possible before the inevitable manhunt started; so they took the early morning train in the general direction of Jelenia Gora and, on arrival, the party split up into smaller groups.

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Jerzy and his three companions headed south with the intention of getting into Czechoslovakia and seeking help from the Czech partisans who had no love for the Germans after their occupation first of the Sudetenland, and later the whole country. The party had to walk through waist deep snow for about 20 kilometres and were recaptured by a German patrol whilst crossing the border mountains near Reichenberg (now Liberec), in what was then Czechoslovakia.

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They were taken to the prison at Reichenberg where they were reunited with other recaptured prisoners and interrogated (possibly tortured) before being taken into the countryside near Brux (now Most) and executed. Stories vary as to whether they were machine gunned or killed with a single bullet to the back of the head by an unknown Gestapo killer. The bodies were cremated at Brux the next day and the urns were returned to Stalag Luft III. Cynically, the cremations were ordered the day before the executions took place.

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Jerzy’s ashes were later buried in the Old Garrison Cemetery at Poznan, Poland. It is a sad irony that he was incarcerated in Stalag Luft III in Sagan (now Zagan) which is in Upper Silesia in modern Poland. The actual killers are unknown but the “executions”, or rather murders, of Jerzy Mondschein and his three travelling companions (F/Lt Lester J Bull DFC of 109 squadron RAF, F/Lt Reginald V “Rusty” Kierath and Squadron Leader John EA Williams DFC, both of 450 squadron RAAF) were orchestrated by local Reichenburg Gestapo leaders Bernhard Baatz, Robert Weissman and Robert Weyland. Baatz and Weyland lived on with impunity and with the complicity of the Russian authorities. Weissman was later arrested by the French military authorities, but his fate remains unknown.

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Jerzy was married with at least one child (a daughter) and, at age 35, he was the oldest of the group of Polish officers who set off for Czechoslovakia. He was in the Polish Air Force before the war and escaped, via Romania, on 17th September 1939. At some point, he was awarded the Cross of Valour.

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On 25th March 2012, the Czech Republic held a ceremony honouring these men and unveiling a plaque in their memory in the city of Most (formerly Brux) where they were murdered. The Czech Air Force organised a fly past and a Guard of Honour at the ceremony, which took place on the 68th anniversary of their escape. Members of the families of the four airmen met for the first time at this event.

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Source: Various Facebook posts

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Copyright: Mondschein family

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