Answering the Call to Patriotic Duty : World War II

Eva Konopacki . Ashley Fraser/Postmedia

"At my age, you remember  your younger years better than the present. My memories from that time [1944] are quite sharp."

"We were waiting for that day because our underground activities were all directed to that moment, when we throw out the Germans. I was Polish, and everyone was taking risks. Everyone was engaged, it was a national thing."

"The [commanding] officer thought it's so dangerous that he cannot order anyone to do it [make personal contact with trapped/besieged soldiers]. I knew this place very well. I was restless. I liked action so I just said, 'I'll go'."

"Death became our close companion."

"War, it marks you for life. But, when you put your life on the scale, you can be proud of that."

Eva Poninska Konopacki, 94, Ottawa resident, retired schoolteacher

This is a woman who has seen a lot, had unusual experiences at a time of high danger and stress, when survival was never assured, who chose to do her part to help her country surmount the most dreadful existential difficulties at a time of war and occupation. She emigrated to Canada ten years after her courageous participation in a peoples' struggle to free itself from German occupation during World War Two, moving to Montreal from Trinidad, where she lived for several years, teaching high school.

In Canada, she met her husband, Thaddeus Konopacki, himself a decorated veteran of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, whom she hadn't known in Poland, but found in Canada, post-war. While her husband was a professional architect, Eva Konopacki was a professional teacher. The couple had four daughters, whom their mother chose to raise as a housewife and mother. She returned to the teaching profession eventually and spent two decades teaching high school at the Ottawa Catholic School Board, while simultaneously mounting a career as an artist.

In 1944 however, as an 18-year-old she was herself a high school student, and simultaneously a soldier in the Polish Home Army -- the largest underground resistance movement in the country. An uprising against German occupying forces was launched on August 1, 1944 on instructions from the Polish government-in-exile, just as the Soviet Red Army was in the process of advancing toward Warsaw and the German military meant to stop their advance at the Vistula River on the outskirts of Warsaw.

Polish slave labour had been used to build defensive fortifications there, and it was the intention of the Warsaw Uprising to deny that opportunity to the Germans, and to impede the arrival of the Russians intending to bring communism under Soviet rule to Poland. The Home Army boasted 50,000 trained insurgents who were able to capture much of Warsaw in the first three days of the uprising, but in the end were no match for the reinforcements brought in by the German military even as planes and artillery units bombarded their positions backed by tanks and heavy machine guns, enabling the German forces to regain territory.

The Polish resistance dug trenches connecting buildings, and erected barricades against tank incursions while Russian forces restricted themselves to the Vistula River, prepared to wait out the insurgency against the German positions before involving themselves. While the Russians -- at that time part of the Allied response to the Axis forces they were once aligned with -- failed to offer air or ground support while fighting raged within Warsaw, the Allies themselves launched an airlift re-supplying the Polish resistance forces.

Based in Italy, the British-led Warsaw Airlift failed, as a reflection of the small payloads and the inaccuracy of the drop sites, where the aircraft flew long distances with no fighter support making the supply planes vulnerable to attack, resulting in over 300 Allied airmen perishing in the effort, Canadians included. For the resistance fighters, food and ammunition became scarce and the city was left without water or electricity. So many phone lines were damaged that Eva Konopacki's commanding officer decided on a course to use couriers in communication with other fighting units.

As a volunteer, Konopacki travelled through the war-torn city delivering messages, serving as a guide on nighttime missions to ammunition depots. Resistance fighters were using a fortified convent as a bulwark against German forces. By later September the convent came under assault, and an artillery shell collapsed a portion of the building and the communication line was severed. Eva Konopacki volunteered her services so that under fire she crawled through a tench to reach the convent's entrance, a gap in the foundation.

Eva Poninska Konopacki . Konopacki family photo

Within she found many dead and wounded soldiers. Returning to her commander she reported on the need for medical supplies and ammunition, and was again sent to deliver the message to those left in the convent to retreat. When she made her way back, she discovered what was left of the compound smoke-filled and silent. "I realized there was no one there". They had already retreated. She ventured toward another building adjacent, to discover two wounded soldiers in an abandoned coal cellar. Finding a stretcher and a nurse, they managed between them to evacuate the men to safety.

Eventually, the Home Army had no option but to surrender, laying down their arms on October 2. "We were terribly depressed, devastated", she recalled. Later, she was recognized for her part during the resistance and uprising, receiving the Silver Order of the Virtuiti Militari for "valour in the face of the enemy", induction. Up to 200,000 people were estimated to have died during the two-month uprising, most of them civilians. The city's 650,000 inhabitants were evicted and the Germans levelled what remained of Warsaw. By January 1945 the Soviets took possession of the empty ruins.