A Story Told Only That It May Not Be Lost

Having been a financial services salesman (heh!), but an honest one, one of my few and minute skills is getting people to talk about themselves. It has helped me a lot, both as a homelessness worker and as a teacher.

A lot of my Polish friends are younger than me, and a lot are older, and so perhaps to me more interesting. An 80 year-old friend named Jósef, a Catholic, told me this:

When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, Jósef was aged 12 and his brother 14 months. The father had an old army carbine, which he buried in the garden for possible future use against the Germans. A neighbour, uncharacteristically for a Pole (see Norman Davis, passim), saw him bury it, and reported the fact to the Germans, and mother and father were taken to Oświęcim and gassed. (Yes, I know the Germans and the world call it something else, but I will use only its Polish name.)

Jósef, carrying his little brother fled to the forest and nearly starved, creeping at night from house to house for food and shelter. Somehow they survived until 1944, and the Soviet 'liberation'. They are still both alive, well, and happy.

Under the post-war communist stalinist puppet government, as a soldier he could not declare his Catholicism, or marry in Church, so a civil ceremony had to do until times got easier. He and his wife, an ex-policewoman, are still married and as soppily in love as any two newlyweds.

God be praised!