September 1 – The Anniversary of the Beginning of World War Two

Barona recalls family stories from the bloodiest war in human history that began 82 years ago today.

From Toronto Catholic Witness

By Barona

This day, 82 years ago, the forces of Satan crossed the Polish border and unleashed on the world a torrent of bloodshed. In the early hours of that fateful day, Nazi aircraft began to bomb Warsaw leading to the eventual occupation of that nation with co-conspirator, Soviet Russia. The Bolsheviks attacked Poland on the 17th, following the secret protocols in the vile Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. In fact, Nazis had even been training in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s. The right and left hand of Satan met at the river San - the dividing line between the two totalitarian States. Eventually, due to far greater organization and international connections and assorted fellow travelers,  the communist empire would devour more than half of Europe and lead to its monstrous extension over the globe resulting in a a death count, that would even eclipse the fiendish sadistic Hitler and his mechanized death cult.

Nazi hatred for the Catholic Church was on display with arrests and executions of priests. Mass was proscribed, with the sole Mass at the Wawel Cathedral under the eye of the Gestapo. It was in this environment that the great Archbishop Sapiecha would take on a seminarian named Karol Wojtyla. 

My father was a witness to Nazi brutality. He witnessed a Nazi sadistically shooting a neighbour's barking dog. But it got worse, far worse: he and my grandmother on a number of occasions would sneak food to the Jews of Przemysl and pass food through the wired off area where the Jews were kept, prior to deportation to the death camps. My father always remembered this, and he remembered to his horror seeing behind the barbed wire a young teenage boy from his class in school. Eventually, my father would be arrested in a "Lapanka" (or street catch) at a book shop and sent to Germany for slave labour. 

 

He then ended up in Norway on an island doing tree cutting; later transferred to the mainland to a camp near the Swedish border, where Poles and Russians slaved away for the German War Machine. Poles down one side of the barracks and Russians down the other. He and another teenager escaped up into the mountains and to freedom in Sweden. He always remembered seeing the Germans on their motorbikes traveling along the mountain road far below looking for them. In fact, this escape was even more daring for two young men had tried it earlier, did not go high into the mountains, and sadly were captured and shot. 

 

Taken in by the welcoming Swedes he was offered asylum or leave for Scotland to join the Polish Forces. As a Catholic patriot, he chose the latter. From Stockholm, to Scotland, to naval training. After the War he met my very English mother in London  (who spent her war years in Llandudno, Wales, where the civil service had been evacuated) - and the rest is history. 

So, please in your charity remember him and her in your prayers, and remember all the brave Polish soldiers who died in defense of their fatherland. Pray as well that Poland, teetering on the brink of moral collapse, may yet return to Christ the King.