Zygmunt Chojecki

Zygmunt Chojecki was a Polish exile who arrived in England in 1945 after losing his leg in action in Italy with the Polish II Corps.

On 17 September 1940, with no formal declaration of war, and just sixteen days after Germany had invaded Poland from the west, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east. Germany and the Soviets carved up Poland between them. The Russians then conducted a campaign of ethnic cleansing - deporting Poles from the eastern borderlands to Siberia and northern Kazakhstan. There were four mass deportations in 1940 and 1941, displacing over 1 million Polish citizens. Officials and persons of influence were generally locked up or disappeared altogether. Zygmunt’s father Rudolf, a town councillor, was incarcerated in the notorious Sumy prison, near Karkhiv. On 13 April 1940, Zygmunt, his mother Maria and sister Halina, were ordered to report to the railway station in Grodek, carrying what little they could.

The deportees reached their destination in cattle cars, with little food or protection from the elements, and only a bucket to serve as a toilet. Many died on the way.

For over a year, Zygmunt was forced, with his mother and sister, to work on a collective farm, or “kolkhoz”, in northern Kazakhstan, in atrocious living and working conditions, barely surviving and trading their few possessions for food. In June 1941, Germany invaded its previous ally Russia. In July, the Polish-government-in-exile, in London, signed the Sikorski-Majewski agreement that freed the deportees and eventually led to the formation of a Polish army in the southern part of the Soviet Union.

Because the Russians did not provide the equipment and supplies they had promised the Poles, General Anders secured permission to evacuate to Persia (now Iran). This took place in the spring and the fall of 1942. Ships of all shapes and sizes were commandeered to take the soldiers (as well as a large contingent of their families) across the Caspian Sea to Pahlavi.

After the amnesty with the Russians and their release from forced labour, Zygmunt and his mother and sister undertook a harrowing 8-week journey to the south. By December they had reached Taraz (then Dzhambul), in southern Kazakhstan. They stayed there until the summer of 1942, with Zygmunt working at the office of the Polish Delegation in the city. On 12 August, they left Dzhambul and travelled for 2 days to reach Yangi Yul near Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where the Polish forces were being assembled by General Anders. There on 3 September 1942, Zygmunt joined the Polish Army, being assigned as an engineer sapper to the 5th Kresowa Infantry Division, 6th Kresowa Field (Sapper) Company.

From Yangi Yul, Maria and Halina travelled to Tehran and were in due course joined there by Zygmunt’s father who had somehow survived his imprisonment. By the end of 1944 they had moved to Beirut, and Halina attended the University of Beirut. Meanwhile, during 1943 Zygmunt trained with the army – mainly in Egypt in the area of Ismailia, on the Suez Canal. Finally, on 13 December 1943, Zygmunt and his unit arrived in Italy to join the Allies in the Italian Campaign. In May 1944, Zygmunt participated in the Battle of Monte Cassino - one of the fiercest battles of the war. His cousin Tadeusz Bania died there fighting with the 17th Lwowski Rifle Battalion, was one of three battalions of the 6th Lwow Infantry Brigade. Zygmunt’s sappers made pivotal contributions clearing paths to the heavily fortified hilltop monastery of Monte Cassino. Tadeusz is buried in the Polish Cemetery at Monte Cassino.

After Monte Cassino, Zygmunt continued with the Polish II Corps, fighting their way gradually up the Adriatic Coast. As a sapper, he was involved constantly in clearing minefields and mined bridges. On 16 November 1944, just two weeks after his 22nd birthday, he lost his left leg on a landmine, near Forli, west of Rimini. He spent several months in military hospital in Ancona, and in February 1945 he was awarded the Kryzyza Walecznych. After transferring to Taranto, he was transferred to England on the hospital ship Principessa Giovanna, arriving in Liverpool on 14 May 1945.

Zygmunt then underwent convalescence at Taymouth Castle, Perthshire, Scotland. There he received “pen letters” and post-cards of encouragement from a Canadian schoolteacher, from Windsor Ontario, part of a scheme to lift the spirits of the wounded and now country-less Polish servicemen.

In 1946 he joined many other exiled Poles at the Ullenwood Camp near Cheltenham. He was eventually decommissioned from the Polish Army in 1948 through the Polish Resettlement Corps. Before that though, in 1946 he commenced a degree in Modern Languages, at Cambridge University. At Cambridge, he met Caroline “Betty” Rowett, his future wife. Caroline had served with the Bletchley Park code-breakers during the war and by now was back in Cambridge looking after her mother, who, like Zygmunt was missing one leg. After graduating from Cambridge, Zygmunt was recruited to the BBC Monitoring Service in Caversham, Reading, where he translated foreign radio broadcasts for news-gathering and related purposes. In the mid-1960’s he joined the newly established Soviet Studies Research Centre at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Involved in Russian translation in work assessing Soviet strategy and policy during the early stages of the Cold War, Zygmunt introduced his wife to the team. Notably, at the time nobody at SSRC, including Zygmunt, knew of her wartime experiences at Bletchley Park with all its similarities and relevance to the SSRC work collating and interpreting disparate information for purposes of strategic intelligence analysis. Caroline quickly became a key contributor to the team’s work, and after Zygmunt died in 1983 she remained there working well into her seventies.

The couple married in 1953 and had three children, who survive them. Maryla worked as a jeweller, Jan is a technology transfer specialist in biological science and Alina worked as a nurse specialising in premature babies. Jan has written two books about his family history on his mother’s side, with maybe more to come on his father’s tale: https://questchronicle.org.uk/

Zygmunt died in 1983, and Caroline died in 2017.

Source: Zygmunt's son, Jan Chojecki