Description
Object description
Polish officer served with 1st Lancers, 1st 'Warsaw' Independent Cavalry Bde in Poland, 9/1939; served with Polish Union of Armed Struggle (ZWZ) and Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) in Warsaw, Poland, 10/1939-4/1943; inmate of Pawiak Prison, Warsaw, Poland, 4/1943-5/1943; inmate in Auschwitz II -Birkenau Concentration Camp, Poland and Neuengamme Concentration Camp, Germany, 5/1943-4/1945
Content description
REEL 1 Background in Kiev, Imperial Russian Empire and Poland, 1913-1939: family circumstances; education. Recollections of operations as officer with 1st Lancers, 1st 'Warsaw' Independent Cavalry Bde, Polish Army in Poland, 9/1939: mobilisation, 1/9/1939; morale in regiment; use of horses; character of German blitzkrieg tactics; question of failure of Great Britain and France to act; wounding near Zamość, 22/9/1939; capture by German troops; German Fifth Column; attitudes of other nationalities including Jews to German invasion. Aspects of period of hospitalisation in German field hospital, Poland, 9/1939-10/1939: treatment received; escape from hospital to Warsaw; story of marriage to Irish subject, Eileen Short in Warsaw, 4/9/1939.
REEL 2 Continues: Recollections of period as officer with Polish Union of Armed Struggle (ZWZ) and Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) in Warsaw, Poland, 10/1939-4/1943: nature of counter intelligence work; use of agent within Gestapo headquarters; use of forged documents; use of secret offices; question of trust within resistance movement; question of women's endurance under interrogation; methods of cutting contact with arrested resistance members; problems of political rivalries; narrow escapes from German round-ups.
REEL 3 Continues: character of forged documents. Recollections of arrest and imprisonement in Pawiak Prison, Warsaw, Poland, 4/1943-5/1943: how he came to be arrested, 20/4/1943; destruction of documents in Gestapo headquarters; interrogation; contact with women agent in prison; reasons for hiding identity; sight of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 4/1943-5/1943; question of death penalty for sheltering Jews; prior knowledge of Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Aspects of period as inmate in Auschwitz II-Birkenau Concentration Camp, Poland, 1943: initial impressions of camp, 13/5/1943; selection for penal company.
REEL 4 Continues: meaning of allocation of red circle within penal company; receiving food parcels. Aspects of period as inmate in Neuengamme Concentration Camp, Germany, 1943-1945: reasons for transfer to camp; conditions in camp; control by Communist trustees; struggle for good jobs between Poles and Communists. Recollections of period as inmate in Auschwitz II-Birkenau and Neuengamme Concentration Camps in Poland and Germany, 5/1943-4/1945: nature of resistance in camps; exploitation of inmates by Schutzstaffel (SS); Schutzstaffel (SS) policy of divide and rule; respect for Jehovah's Witnesses.
REEL 5 Continues: liberation of Neuengamme Concentration Camp., 4/1945; effects of camp experience.