The Mysterious Death of Jan “Anoda” Rodowicz, by Przemyslaw Benken
The Mysterious Death of Jan “Anoda” Rodowicz, by Przemyslaw Benken
(For professors, college students, and interested adults) The following are extracts of the Foreword by Pawel Kurtyka, President of the Janusz Kurtyka Foundation. This book is available free of charge as a PDF and can be downloaded at this link.
The story of “Anoda” is not just about an individual. It’s typical for a whole generation of Polish intellectuals born and brought up in the two decades between the World Wars. Can you imagine the devastating fate that awaited them? Just as they reached maturity, World War Two erupted, and along with it the Nazi occupation of Poland, followed by the Soviet occupation, and the regime implemented by the Polish Communists. For the young people of Poland, it meant a continuous, desperate effort to avoid being surveilled, arrested, and subjected to economic discrimination only because, during the war, they had engaged in the defense of their country, which was invaded and oppressed by two aggressors, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. The story of that young generation is the story of the victims of a war started by two totalitarian states. This book shows the effects of that clash of totalitarian powers reflected in the life of one idealistic boy. But this story could be multiplied hundreds of thousands of times in the lives of his peers in Poland, and millions of times throughout the entire region.
Although officially Poland was one of the Allies who won the Second World War, and despite the fact that the criminal pact Hitler and Stalin made to wipe Poland and its people, in practice Poland was a loser because it did not achieve the aim of its battle against its aggressors – that is, it did not recover its status as a sovereign state. Polish soldiers, especially the young ones, were not fighting to set up a Communist system in their country. They joined the Home Army because it was under the authority of the lawful government of Poland in exile in London. They were in the service of the legal authorities of the Polish state.
Poland had the largest underground resistance force operating on is territory during the Second World war in occupied Europe. In 1944, the Home Army and its associated organizations had 390 thousand serving in their ranks. For comparison, the better-known French resistance movement had 200 thousand members in 1944. As the Soviet forces proceeded further and further into the German-occupied territory pushing out the German army, the Soviet intelligence service started to infiltrate the Home Army, which was implementing Operation Tempest (Akcja Burza), its biggest military undertaking, of which the best-known episode was the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944. The aim of these operations was to clear part of the prewar Polish territory of the occupying German forces and act as the domestic military power receiving the incoming Soviet forces. Stalin was well aware of these Polish plans and that is why he refused to come to the aid of fighting Warsaw during the Uprising. Soviet troops bided their time on the right bank of the Vistula, waiting for the outcome of the battle between the Germans and the Poles in left-bank Warsaw. When the Uprising fell, Hitler issued an order for the utter destruction of Warsaw and the eviction of its inhabitants. The city was razed to the ground.
After the Uprising was crushed and the Soviets occupied most of the Polish territories and infiltrated the ranks of the Home Army with their agents, General Leopold Okulicki, its Commander-in-Chief, decided to disband it. However, this did not spell the end of Polish resistance on the home front.
Some units hid in the forests. Others, such as NIE (for Niepodległość, “Independence”) or later WiN (Wolnosc i Niezawisłość, “Freedom and Independence”), continued to engage in civil and military resistance operations against Poland’s new, Communist occupying power. Estimates of the manpower of this second resistance force give figures of up to 180 thousand. So fighting continued on Polish territory, even though Hitler was dead and officially the War had come to an end. The last resistance fighter was killed in 1963. These facts are not widely known even in Poland. The Communusts tried to stop such information from spreading, and to do this they imposed long prison terms or death sentences on resistance fighters and intimidated their families. When the Communist system fell in 1989 and the last Soviet forces left in 1993, surviving veterans of the anti-Communist resistance forces, who had been “doomed to oblivion,” were given the epithet Żołnierze Wyklęci, “the Doomed Soldiers.”
The Communist Party soon set about dealing with the underground resistance movement, using their secret police forces, the special investigation units of the Ministry of Public Security and the Internal Security Corps. These units relied on the methods and skills developed for surveillance, investigation, and security operations by their trainers and advisers from the Soviet NKVD.
The main operation applied to disarm and infiltrate the resistance forces was the so-called Amnesty, whereby every resistance fighter hiding in the forests or keeping a low profile in the cities could return to a normal, “legal” lifestyle if he “came out.” The first Amnesty was announced on August 2, 1945, and nearly half of the 150 thousand-strong force “came out” into the open. A second Amnesty was held in 1947, in connection with the forthcoming parliamentary election. Over 76 thousand “came clear.” Only a vestige – about 2 thousand – of the original numbers were left in the secret resistance movement. The communists rigged the election and used forged results to set up a permanent Communist power system in Poland. On February 4, 1947, at the first session of Parliament, the Communist leader Boleslaw Bierut was elected President, and on February 19, a “Small Constitution” was adopted enshrining the Soviet political model in the Polish legislative system.
That is the background to the story of Jan “Anoda” Rodowicz. Born into the family of a professor of the Warsaw University of Technology, Anoda grew up in a patriotic environment. His relatives had participated in the Polish uprisings of 1830 and 1863 against the Russian tsarist regime. They were his role models. He joined the Home Army [Note: “Anoda” was Jan’s nom de guerre], took part in Operation Arsenal, and fought in the Warsaw Uprising as a combatant in Battalion Zośka, one of the most renowned units. He received the Virtuti Militari [Note: equivalent of the US Medal of Honor] for bravery and was wounded on several occasions. In September 1945, he “came out” in compliance with the rules for the amnesty. But he did not engage in active resistance once he had come out into the open. Instead, he went to university, first as a student of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Warsaw University of Technology, later switching to Architecture. So he was not unusual but quite typical of the young postwar generation in Warsaw.
The Communist authorities did not take a favorable attitude to people like Anoda, even though they had stopped their underground activities. Such youngsters were experienced combatants and had intellectual acumen. They were independently-minded and did not approve of the new political system. That is why those in power ordered the Ministry of Public Security to disintegrate the community of Home Army veterans, who were believed to be continuing underground resistance activities even though there was no evidence for it.
The man who masterminded the arrests was Wiktor Herer, a member of the Ministry of Public Security’s management and a staunch Communist. He was born into a Jewish family in Lwów and his parents were killed by the Germans. Stalin needed dedicated Communists like Herer. When the fighting against the Germans was over, Herer joined the Ministry of Public Security’s office that surveilled young people. His superiors had a good opinion of him. He was good at recruiting snoops and secret agents, and interrogating Home Army veterans. He was an intellectual and a strategist. In general, he did not resort to violence, preferring to outwit his adversaries by intelligent means, provoking and hoodwinking them into disclosing information, setting traps by facing them with evidence he had gleaned from his spies. Ideologically, he was the exact opposite of Anoda the young patriot.
We still do not have the full facts relating to the death of Jan Anoda Rodowicz. We know that he fell out of a window on the fifth story of the Ministry of Public Security building in Warsaw. It was the same building in the basement of which he had been imprisoned and where he had been interrogated. The cause of death was multiple trauma. He had spent four days in detention there – not much compared to prisoners incarcerated for years on end.
The story of Jan “Anoda” Rodowicz offers a message for the world at large. It shows what happens when the world ignores the fate of the freedom and democracy of people left abandoned in a country under a totalitarian regime. There may be many like Anoda in Ukraine under Russian occupation. This book also shows what the Communist system was really like: an oppressive machine dealing out terror operated by well-trained functionaries who turned against their own people under the influence of an ideology. This is a truth still so hard to grasp for many in the West. As a character, Jan Rodowicz speaks volumes for the young people of his generation and for Poland in general – what kind of country it would have been if it had not found itself on the wrong side of the iron Curtain. The situation we are in now, wondering what the outcome of the present war will be for Ukraine, makes the message of Anoda’s life all the more relevant for us. We hope the young men and women of Ukraine will come out on the right side and enjoy freedom.
