| This is a special Remembrance Day because it falls on the year that marks the 70th Anniversary of the start of World War II. When I heard the news announcement on September 1 of this year – that it was the 70th Anniversary – I was taken a little off guard. I knew I had to commemorate that day somehow, so that is why I am here today. Why? Because my father was there when the first bullets of the War were whizzing past his ears. He was a sergeant in the Polish Army, leading a bazooka platoon and trying to fend off the onslaught of the German blitzkrieg.
In 1989, I was visiting him at his home when the announcement came on the TV evening news that it was the 50th Anniversary of the start of the War. I asked him, tongue-in-cheek, whether he felt any pangs of nostalgia. “Nostalgia?” he replied, “Not for that day.” He began to recount the events of that time, consulting an atlas I had taken down from a shelf. In it he retraced the route his army had taken, the retreat from the German border, towards Warsaw.
Tracing his finger along that path in the atlas, he said, “I still feel a cold chill down my spine thinking about that time. It’s as if it were only yesterday.”
He recollected the hand-to-hand combat with the Germans. He even remembered the most common phrase used by the Germans when they got shot on the battlefield: “Holy Mary!” That was the first time he had recounted those events. And he remembered the prelude to that fateful day September 1, 1939: he and his soldiers humoured one another by asserting that it couldn’t happen again, like it did in 1914; surely everyone had learnt their lesson from that carnage.
Until then, when he talked about his army days, he’d recall pranks he and his mates played in the barracks. But never combat. He never talked about that if he could help it. And when you think about it, most people who experience it don’t…talk about it. It is too harrowing a memory, immersed as it is in blood, death and terror.
The retreat, for him, lasted a fortnight. That’s when he took a bullet. It entered his gut and came through his back. He was left for dead on the battlefield. It was the Germans who stitched him up in their infirmary. They gave him some crutches and told him to go home. And so he did. But he had been there, and participated in one of history’s turning points, one of those events that mark the end of everything…and the beginning of other things.
John Hospodaryk, 11/11/09
Speech delivered by John Hospodaryk on Remembrance Day 2009, at St Clair High School in Sydney.
Mikolaj Hospodaryk. c. 1937 in pre-War Polish army uniform |
Mikolaj Hospodaryk c. 1946, in US uniform, Dachau, Germany, where he was an MP guarding SS prisoners as they were going to trial for war crimes |
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