Captive Memories

Second Lt. Zbigniew Orlowski could hear the bombs exploding to the north over Munich.

For almost six years, he had hoped for rescue from the barbed wire-capped walls of a German prisoner of war camp.

Finally, it came.

"That was the most beautiful day. I never forget it - the enthusiasm, the happiness," he said, 60 years after the end of World War II, sitting in his small Monroe apartment. "You know what happened with my mind when I was six year in hunger, and someone come liberated you. Because I was religious, I was thanks to God."

That day, the hell of captivity was over. ...

Invasion of Poland

In late August, 1939, at age 26, he had been recalled into the Polish service and sent to the countryside bordering Germany.

On Sept. 1, 1939, at 4 a.m., bombing began about six miles away.

When the German army was less than half a mile away, the Germans opened fire.

"The (German) army squeeze us," he said in a thick Polish accent. "German was so powerful, and Poland was not ready for war because we got only 20 year independence after 125 dependence from European country … So we losing, and German have easy way. Still, we kill quite a bit."

The fighting continued for nearly 12 hours.

"By me there was one soldier - Polish soldier - and the bullet cut his stomach and all the intestine go out, and he start, ‘Help me, help me.' And this intestine together with sand, he start put them back, and he start put them back and he said, ‘Oh God, oh God, let me go.' And he die. Just by me."

When the day's fighting ended, a horse-drawn wagon collected the wounded from the battlefield, leaving a trail of blood behind it as the army drove along 10 miles of uneven road. By the side of the road lay fly-coated limbs and heads separated from torsos.

"The action of war was so fast, they call ‘Blitzkrieg,' " he said. "There was not time to bury people."

By daylight, he hid in potato fields, while the German front advanced into Poland.

"By me, only bullet, bullet, bullet," he said. "When the German attack us, I saw that pressure from bomb, there was such a horrible pressure. The blood go from (my) mouth, from nose and from ear."

At dark, the remaining soldiers collected the dead and wounded and loaded them onto the carts.

Only Mr. Orlowski and four others from his unit remained by the fifth day of the assault. They focused their sights on Warsaw, the country's largest city, roughly 250 miles away, where they were certain the Polish army was still strong enough to fight off the Nazi advance. At the Warta River, 13 days later, they met more Polish troops thinned by the German attacks. By Sept. 25, when they reached the Vistula River, which divided them from Warsaw on the other side, they found the bridge gone.

They stopped by the river to determine how to cross. Like Mr. Orlowski, some soldiers could not swim the mile-wide river.

He recalled an unarmed German officer approached them quietly, peacefully. He told them the war was over and led them to other captured Polish officers.

"He says, ‘We come liberated you.' The Germans say, ‘We come liberated you,' " Mr. Orlowski explained with a chuckle. "You feel horrible when you lose independence. … When you have job teaching, when you found lady and when you want to get married, when you are ready to start life normal, come war suddenly and destroy everything."

Yet some sense of relief settled on the Polish troops, now prisoners heading to Germany for incarceration.

"During the war, you was always in danger, danger of life. Death was just behind you. Mentally you feel, I don't care what happen to me," he said.

Prisoner of war

The Germans transported about 1,000 officers to a historic castle in Ingolstadt, north of Munich in the south German region of Bavaria. For a month, the soldiers slept on straw and fought bedbugs while the Germans prepared Oflag VII-A, the prisoner-of-war camp in Murnau, Germany, that would house, by the end of the war, about 5,000 Polish officers and more than 45 high-ranking Polish generals by 1945.

In barracks not originally intended for human habitation, the Germans piled bunks three high, again giving the soldiers straw for their bedding.

"The bedbugs eat you," Mr. Orlowski said. "They by thousand, when I put on mattress, I was covered."

The soldiers were given a kitchen - though food mostly consisted of barley - and a small room to use as a church.

"One thing that was in my mind, survive and return to Poland," he said. "They predicted two year, four year, six year, some people 10 year.

"I pray only that God let me pass this horrible time for me.

At 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., the Germans counted their Polish captives.

"The process of counting was very long. Sometimes was rain. Sometimes was cold. We have already not good shoes, not good dress. And sometimes we shaking when waiting," he said. "This standing was sometimes two, three hour on cold, on rain, on snow."

Escape was rare, Mr. Orlowski said. There were only a handful of attempts.

"One day, one man go through the wire - there was six line of wire - and one day on my eye, this man go under wire," he said. "What they do, our friend they performing fighting that this German… was watching us. He's involved with the fighting and, in the meantime, (our friend) go under wire and fly away."

The Polish officers attempted to cover for the missing soldier in the count, with one soldier sneaking down the line to be counted twice. But the escaped man was eventually caught and beaten. Mr. Orlowski said the conditions at Oflag VII-A were not enough to prompt his escape.

"To me, if I go to Poland, I be arrested," he said. "Here (in the camp), International Red Cross have mercy on us."

So he stayed, obeying the rules to the best of his ability.

In fact, the German officers told the Polish POWs they had "only one law: Be alive. That's all," Mr. Orlowski barked, imitating the German officer who had said it 66 years ago. "If we do something wrong, we lose this freedom in the camp."

‘Many tragedy happen'

Instead, Mr. Orlowski said, many chose suicide - about 100 by his recollection.

At night, the POWs would listen to radios smuggled into the camps and bought off Germans soldiers with cigarettes.

"First we expect French … they liberated us. So we learn a few words in French. ‘Je suis lieutenant polonais.' ‘I am Polish lieutenant,' " he said. In mid-1940, news of France's fall to Germany reached the POWs.

The radio sustained the POWs while they awaited a new liberator.

After some time, life in the camp began to organize.

Many of the Polish officers had been professors, artists and scientists before the war. The highly educated officers organized classes in art and literature, promising the "pupils" degrees when freedom allowed them to return to Poland.

Mr. Orlowski took courses toward a master's degree in art, his makeshift professors assuring him the Polish universities would honor his work after his return from Germany. The Polish officers offered their talents of art for paintings and woodcarvings, even a forming a choir, in which Mr. Orlowski sang, and theater. Mr. Orlowski helped fashion dresses out of paper scraps for the camp production of Guiseppe Verde's opera "La Traviata."

"The theater was for us big help, the miserable day, day after day the same," he said, tearfully.

Finally, liberation.
In 1945, almost six years after Mr. Orlowski was taken prisoner, American and British bombs began falling on Munich, 50 miles north of the camp. By then, organized life in the camp slowed, and most of the POWs could only lie in bed, too weak to do much else.

"There was one danger in our mind, that 5,000 officer and 49 general, (the Germans would) liquidate," he said, his Polish accent thickening as his voice rose. Mr. Orlowski said that as the Allied forces reached the gates of the camp, one German soldier raised a white flag to surrender, but the five German officers shot the surrendering soldier, turning their guns toward the Allied forces outside the gates. From the windows of the barracks, Mr. Orlowski and his fellow POWs cheered as the American soldiers shot and killed the five German officers and unlocked the gates, liberating the camp.

On April 12, 1945, the gates were opened, and although the nearly 5,000 freed-POWs were ordered to continue to live at the camp so the Allied forces could ensure the Polish officers and generals were healthy enough and mentally capable of returning to the outside world after six years of captivity, they were allowed to see the outside of the walls for the first time since 1939.

"And I never forget this moment, and I left this camp, even don't look back. On this grass I walking, and there was such a beautiful day and grass was green and sunshine. And I says, ‘Oh god, I'm free.' And I fall down on my back and I make my pray, thanks go to God that after five years I was liberated," he said, his voice thick with memory, tears running down his cheeks. "I'm free. I'm free."