Long post: 😊 As someone not of Polish descent, I approach Polish history with an objective and committed perspective. My passion for uncovering and sharing these often-overlooked stories comes from a deep respect for the resilience and sacrifices of the Polish people. In my journey to shed light on these narratives, I’ve faced criticism, name-calling, censorship, and the spread of falsehoods. Some deliberately distort history for personal gain or to diminish the significance of Polish experiences or simply out of malice. I refuse to remain silent in the face of such lies. The truth matters, both to history and to the dignity of those who lived it. As a real Christian, I believe that truth, honor, and integrity are essential virtues. To follow Christ is to value honesty and stand for justice, even when it’s difficult or unpopular. This belief guides my work in exploring Polish history and every other aspect of life. Whether analyzing past events, current issues, or personal struggles, I am committed to revealing the truth. In a world rife with misinformation, this pursuit is a reflection of the gospel’s call to love, humility, and justice. Yet, I’m not afraid to confront evil and call out manipulators for what they truly are. I believe in speaking honestly and directly, as truth requires boldness and integrity. This commitment reminds me that all people, regardless of nationality, are made in the image of God and deserve dignity and compassion. Just as I seek to honor Poland’s history and legacy, I strive to live a life dedicated to truth in all areas. From addressing injustices in my own country to confronting global issues, I am committed to shedding light on what truly matters. Falsehoods must be challenged for the betterment of humanity, wherever they arise. To those who intentionally manipulate facts or distort history, I say this: the truth cannot be silenced. You may mislead for a time, but truth always prevails. Your actions dishonor the memory of those who suffered and are currently suffering. Accountability is not optional, it is essential for justice and healing. Poland’s history is not only a tale of oppression and struggle but a testament to the strength of the human spirit, the fight for freedom, and the belief in justice. These ideals fuel my broader mission to promote truth, compassion, and integrity. The challenges and betrayals I witness in my own country inspire me to uphold the values of honesty, compassion, and justice. Today is a special day for me as I welcome another member of my family, my namesake, Theodor (“Gift from God”). I am eager to teach him the knowledge I have, share with him the truth, and, God willing, see him become a better man than I. I also want to take a moment to thank everyone who has supported my work. Your encouragement and willingness to share my research inspire me to continue, even in difficult times. It is because of you that I remain committed to sharing the truths that must be heard. You remind me that standing by the truth, regardless of the challenges, is always worth it. To everyone who believes in the power of truth: thank you. Together, we honor the past and work toward a future grounded in honesty, dignity, and faith. Let us continue seeking the truth, confronting falsehoods, and ensuring that the legacies of courage and hope endure. Fiat Lux et Veritas

Eighty-seven years ago today, Warsaw endured one of the darkest days of the German invasion of Poland. From morning until night, the Luftwaffe subjected the besieged Polish capital to a massive aerial assault, while German artillery continued to pound the city. High-explosive and incendiary bombs fell across Warsaw as homes, hospitals, churches and entire neighborhoods burned. Thousands of civilians were killed during the bombardment. The people of Warsaw had already been resisting for more than three weeks. They were exhausted, defeated, surrounded, and increasingly short of food, water and ammunition, yet Polish soldiers and civilians continued their defense. September 25 became remembered as “Bloody Monday” - a devastating attempt to break Warsaw through overwhelming bombardment and destruction, yet the city continued to resist and Warsaw would not formally surrender until September 28.

On September 22, 1939, one of the most revealing and stark scenes of the invasion of Poland unfolded in Brest (Brześć). German forces, which had captured the city, formally handed it over to the advancing Red Army. German and Soviet troops then took part in a ceremonial military parade, reviewed by German General Heinz Guderian and Soviet commander Semyon Krivoshein. Photographs from that day remain a stark visual record of the cooperation between Germany and the Soviet Union during the destruction of the Polish state. The parade was not an accidental meeting between two armies. Less than a month earlier, Germany and the Soviet Union had signed the Molotov - Ribbentrop Pact, whose secret protocol divided much of Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. Germany invaded Poland from the west on September 1; the Soviet Union invaded from the east on September 17. At Brest, the two invasions literally met. The transfer of the city and the presence of both armies together symbolized the partition of Poland that their governments had already agreed upon. The image is especially powerful in retrospect. Within two years, Hitler and Stalin would become mortal enemies when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, but in September 1939 their regimes were cooperating in the dismantling of Poland. Behind the flags, tanks and marching soldiers lay the beginning of two brutal occupations. Poland had been attacked by two totalitarian powers, yet the Polish nation survived both…

Three days after the Soviet invasion of Poland, Red Army tanks entered Grodno. Soldiers, policemen, scouts, students and civilians fought to defend the city. Among them was 13-year-old Tadeusz “Tadzio” Jasiński. According to eyewitness Grażyna Lipińska, he tried to attack a Soviet tank with a bottle of gasoline, was captured, and was then tied wounded to the front of a Soviet tank as a human shield, which just shows one how vile and inhumane the Soviets could be. Lipińska later described freeing the bleeding boy. He reportedly cried for his mother before dying from his wounds. Grodno resisted from and Soviet forces later carried out reprisals against its defenders. Tadzio became a symbol of the children and civilians who were dragged into Poland’s desperate fight for survival. Remember Grodno and remember Tadzio.

On the 19th of September 1940, Witold Pilecki deliberately allowed himself to be captured during a German roundup in Warsaw. He was staying at the home of a relative and had a chance to hide, but chose not to. His mission was to enter Auschwitz, learn what was happening there, organize resistance, and get information back to the Polish underground. Using the false name Tomasz Serafiński, Pilecki became prisoner No. 4859. Inside Auschwitz, he helped build a clandestine resistance network, supported fellow prisoners, gathered intelligence, and sent reports about German crimes to the outside world. He remained in the camp for nearly three years before escaping in April 1943. What makes Pilecki’s mission so extraordinary is that he understood the danger before he entered. He did not stumble into Auschwitz by chance. He chose to go in because someone had to discover the truth and carry it beyond the camp’s walls. His courage was deliberate, sustained, and absolutely unimaginable. He

On September 18, the delegation of the Partition Sejm signed the treaties recognizing the territorial seizures made by Russia, Prussia and Austria. It was one of the defining catastrophes on the road toward Poland’s eventual disappearance from the map in 1795. Still, Poland did not disappear from memory. Its state could be divided, its borders erased and its institutions destroyed, but the idea of Poland survived, in families, language, faith, literature, resistance and the conviction that a nation was more than the lines drawn on an imperial map. That is perhaps the deepest lesson of the partitions: a nation can be conquered without being extinguished. For 123 years Poland endured without sovereignty, sustained by memory, culture, sacrifice, and the refusal to accept that political erasure meant national death. The map changed, but Poland remained alive in its people until independence was restored.

Eighty-seven years ago today, while Poland was already fighting Germany, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. The invasion followed the secret terms of the Molotov - Ribbentrop Pact, signed on August 23, 1939, in which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union divided much of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. Germany attacked Poland on September 1. Sixteen days later, the Red Army crossed Poland’s eastern border. What followed was occupation, arrests, deportations, imprisonment, executions, and the destruction of Polish institutions. Thousands of Polish officers and officials would later be murdered in the Katyn massacres. September 17 is a reminder that Poland in 1939 was not defeated by one aggressor, but invaded by two totalitarian powers acting under a secret agreement.

The boy was Ryszard Pajewski, only nine years old, photographed in Warsaw in September 1939 by American filmmaker and photographer Julien Bryan. According to Bryan’s later account, Ryszard had suddenly become responsible for helping support his family and was searching for food for his mother and brother when he stopped to rest on the rubble near his home. Bryan encountered him during the German siege of Warsaw, when the city was being subjected to artillery fire and Luftwaffe bombing. The photograph therefore captures something larger than physical destruction: the instant in which childhood itself was being taken away. A nine-year-old was no longer simply a schoolboy; war had made him a provider in a city where food was increasingly scarce. His story did not end with the photograph. Bryan later learned that Ryszard’s father was taken away by the Germans and never returned. When Bryan returned to Warsaw years later, Ryszard was an adult working as a truck driver, and the rubble on which he had once sat had disappeared beneath a lawn. That knowledge makes the image especially haunting. We are not looking simply at “wartime Warsaw.” We are looking at one Polish child at the beginning of an occupation that would consume nearly six years of his childhood and transform the lives of millions.

Three years ago today, the Ulma family was beatified in Markowa, a Polish family whose Christian faith was expressed through the ultimate act of courage and compassion. Józef, Wiktoria, their children, and the unborn child they carried into martyrdom remind us that even in the darkest days of German occupation, there were Poles willing to risk everything to save their Jewish neighbors.

Today, September 10, Poland observes the National Day of Polish Children of War - Narodowy Dzień Polskich Dzieci Wojny. Established in 2023, the day honors the children who endured the Second World War under both German and Soviet occupation: children who were deported, imprisoned, starved, orphaned, forced into labor, taken for Germanization, or separated from their families. It is also a tribute to those who survived and later helped rebuild a country devastated by war. The date itself recalls the fate of children from Mosina near Poznań. In September 1943, German occupation authorities arrested Polish families suspected of links to the underground, and on September 10 they came for their children. Dozens were eventually sent to the German camp for Polish children on Przemysłowa Street in Łódź, where young prisoners endured hunger, violence, disease, and forced labor. Some were labeled Terroristenkinder - “children of terrorists” - simply because of who their parents were. Their suffering reflected the wider experience of Polish children during the occupation. War entered homes, schools, churches, and village streets. Children saw fathers arrested, mothers deported, homes confiscated, and siblings separated. In occupied Poland, childhood could disappear in a single day. Some children were taken from their families and subjected to Germanization because the occupiers believed they possessed supposedly “Aryan” features. Others were expelled during brutal German resettlement campaigns, including those in the Zamość region. In the east, Soviet occupation brought another form of terror. Polish families were loaded into freight cars and deported to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and other distant regions of the Soviet Union. Children endured freezing journeys, hunger, illness, and exile thousands of kilometers from home. Some eventually escaped with Polish evacuees through Central Asia and Iran, while others remained in the Soviet Union for years. Many never returned. The tragedy of these children cannot be understood through statistics alone. It was a toy left behind during an expulsion, a schoolbook never opened again, a father seen for the last time through a prison door, or a younger sibling who did not survive the winter. Some children survived Auschwitz, Siberia, forced labor, the Warsaw Uprising, village pacifications, and the massacres in Wołyń. Others disappeared without leaving behind even a photograph. Yet this day is not only about suffering. Many of those children grew into the generation that rebuilt Poland. They became parents, teachers, doctors, workers, engineers, and writers. They carried memories that often remained unspoken for decades, but they built homes, schools, and families in a country that had been physically and emotionally shattered. September 10 reminds us that wars are not experienced only by soldiers and governments. Children live through them too, although they choose none of it. They do not declare wars, draw borders, or write ideologies. They simply suffer the consequences. Today Poland remembers the children who were deported, imprisoned, stolen from their families, driven from their homes, and forced to grow up far too soon. Their childhood was taken from them, their memory must not be.

Born on this day in 1909, Józef Noji carried Poland with him wherever he ran. A carpenter and tram driver who became one of Poland’s finest long-distance runners, Noji represented his country at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and won multiple Polish championships in the 5,000 metres, 10,000 metres and cross-country. On his chest he wore the White Eagle, competing not merely for himself, but for Poland. After the German occupation, that same Polish identity became dangerous. Noji was arrested, imprisoned in Auschwitz as prisoner 18535, and murdered there on February 15th 1943.

Poland’s contribution to the defeat of Germany is sometimes reduced to a few famous episodes, the defense of Warsaw, the Battle of Britain, Monte Cassino, or the Warsaw Uprising. In reality, the Polish war effort stretched across nearly the entire conflict and across multiple continents. From September 1939 until the final defeat of Germany in May 1945, Poles continued to fight despite the destruction and occupation of their own country. In September 1939 alone, roughly one million Polish soldiers took up arms against the German and Soviet invasions. After Poland was occupied, the struggle did not end. It changed form. Inside the country, one of the largest underground resistance movements in occupied Europe developed. Abroad, Polish soldiers, sailors, and airmen regrouped and continued the war alongside the Allies in France, Britain, North Africa, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and on the Eastern Front. The scale of that effort was extraordinary for a nation that had been invaded, partitioned, and subjected to mass terror. Polish airmen serving in the West flew tens of thousands of operational missions. Polish squadrons played a celebrated role in the Battle of Britain and continued flying offensive and defensive operations throughout the war. Polish sailors escorted hundreds of Allied convoys and participated in patrols, anti-submarine warfare, and major naval operations. Polish ground forces fought at Tobruk, Monte Cassino, Falaise, Arnhem, Bologna, and many other battlefields. By 1944 and 1945, substantial Polish forces were fighting both in the West and alongside the Soviet armies advancing from the East. Polish formations took part in the final campaigns against Germany, and Polish soldiers were among those who raised their national flag in Berlin. This is what makes the Polish experience of the Second World War so remarkable. Poland was not simply a victim awaiting liberation. It was a fighting nation whose armed resistance continued even after the state itself had been physically occupied. Its soldiers fought under different commands and on different fronts, while its underground fought at home under conditions of extraordinary repression. The cost was immense. Poland lost millions of its citizens, its cities were devastated, and its political independence was ultimately replaced by Soviet domination. Yet through more than five years of war, Poles continued to resist. The Polish contribution cannot be measured by one battle or one army. It was the cumulative effort of soldiers, pilots, sailors, couriers, intelligence officers, resistance fighters, civilians, and families who continued the struggle after their country had been overrun. Poland had been conquered geographically, but it had never truly stopped fighting. Photo: The Polish flag over Monte Cassino, May 1944, a symbol of sacrifice, victory, and a nation that never stopped fighting.

How many heard about the "Polish Thermopylae"? The Battle of Wizna? Not many. It started on 7 September 1939. This battle should be known because there were not many such phenomenal defences in the history of military events. britishpoles.uk/the-battle-o…

Most people know the story of Enigma through Bletchley Park and Alan Turing. Far fewer know that the first decisive breakthrough had already been made in Poland years before the war. Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski, and Jerzy Różycki were extraordinary Polish mathematicians who, working for the Polish Cipher Bureau, reconstructed the workings of the German Enigma machine in the 1930s. Rejewski used mathematics to determine the machine’s internal wiring, while the Polish team developed methods and devices, including the bomba kryptologiczna and Zygalski sheets to help decipher German communications. Their achievement was in no way a minor prelude to the British effort. It was the foundation upon which much of the later Allied Enigma work was built. In July 1939, just weeks before Germany invaded Poland, Polish intelligence shared its Enigma knowledge, methods, and reconstructed machines with British and French cryptanalysts. Still, outside Poland, the names Rejewski, Zygalski, and Różycki remain largely unknown. Their story deserves to be remembered alongside every other great chapter of wartime intelligence. Because before the Enigma became synonymous with Bletchley Park, three brilliant young Polish mathematicians had already done what many believed impossible: they broke Enigma.

Tortured, murdered, buried in secrecy, but not forgotten. Danuta Siedzikówna “Inka” and Feliks Selmanowicz “Zagończyk” were executed by Poland’s communist authorities on August 28, 1946. Their persecutors tried to do more than kill them. They tried to erase them, hiding their bodies in unmarked graves and denying them the dignity of a proper burial. But memory endured. Decades later, their remains were found and identified, and in 2016 they were finally laid to rest with the honor that had been denied to them. Thousands came to say farewell. The regime could hide their graves, but it could not bury their names.

The Auschwitz Memorial records that Zacharewicz’s family participated in producing false documents and that he and his mother, Wanda, were deported to Auschwitz. (Auschwitz Memorial⁠) Witold Zacharewicz did not act alone. His entire family suffered for helping Jews persecuted by the Germans. His mother, Wanda, worked with him to produce false documents for Jews hiding in Warsaw. The Gestapo discovered their activities and arrested them both in October 1942. Mother and son were deported to Auschwitz, where Witold was murdered at only twenty-eight years old. The Zacharewicz family’s story reminds us that rescuing Jews in German-occupied Poland was often an act of collective courage and that the punishment could fall upon an entire family.

Today, August 23, marks the 87th anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, an agreement through which Hitler and Stalin prepared to divide Poland and condemn millions of people to occupation, persecution and death. Signed in Moscow in 1939, the pact was publicly presented as an agreement of non-aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union. Hidden within it, however, was a secret protocol dividing Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. No Polish representative was present, and no Polish family was consulted. Yet two foreign dictators drew lines across their country, deciding which communities would fall beneath the swastika and which would fall beneath the hammer and sickle. Nine days later, Germany invaded Poland from the west. On September 17, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. Poland found itself trapped between two totalitarian empires determined to destroy its independence, eliminate its leadership and ultimately erase its national identity. The consequences were measured not simply in territory, but in human lives: German concentration camps and execution sites, Soviet prisons and gulags, Katyń and Palmiry, deportations to Siberia, burned villages, murdered intellectuals, priests and teachers, and families torn apart forever. What had begun as signatures placed upon a secret document soon entered ordinary homes, taking fathers in the night, forcing mothers and children aboard deportation trains, turning neighbors into prisoners and transforming entire nations into territories to be occupied and divided. This is why August 23rd is observed as the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes. It reminds us that tyranny is not merely a political theory or a chapter in a textbook. It is experienced in the knock at the door, the empty chair at the table, the transport disappearing into the distance and the silence left behind when someone never returns. The pact was signed behind closed doors by powerful men, but its price was paid by countless ordinary people whose names seldom appeared in history books. Today, we remember those who were crushed beneath Germany and Soviet communism, and we remember that Poland’s tragedy was not simply an accident of geography. Its destruction was discussed, planned and placed on paper before the first German bombs fell. The protocol was secret, but the suffering it unleashed could not be hidden forever. Photo: Stalin and Ribbentrop, August 23, 1939, sealing the pact that condemned Poland to invasion and partition.

On August 19, 1893, Stefan Starzyński was born in Warsaw. He would become a soldier, public servant and president of the Polish capital, but history remembers him most powerfully for the choice he made during the city’s darkest hour. Before the war, Starzyński hoped of transforming Warsaw into a modern European capital. Yet in September 1939, he watched the city he loved being torn apart by German bombs. Homes burned, hospitals overflowed and families sheltered beneath buildings that shook with every explosion. Starzyński could have escaped. Instead, he remained with his people. Through his radio broadcasts, he became the voice of Warsaw. He spoke honestly about its suffering while reminding its inhabitants of their courage. His words strengthened soldiers, nurses, firefighters and ordinary civilians who carried the wounded, fought the flames and searched the ruins for survivors. His bravery did not come from believing he was safe, but it came from understanding the danger and remaining nevertheless. He walked through the bombed streets and shared the uncertainty of those around him. He never asked others to endure anything from which he protected himself. After Warsaw fell, Starzyński again refused opportunities to escape. He believed his duty had not ended. The city was wounded, hungry and occupied, and its people still needed him. The Gestapo arrested him on October 27, 1939, and murdered him later that year. His body was never recovered. Still, the Germans could not erase him. Starzyński remains an enduring example of leadership founded not upon privilege, but upon duty and sacrifice. He showed that true courage sometimes means simply remaining when escape is possible, standing beside one’s people and accepting their fate as one’s own.