Featured Female French Resistance Fighter WWII

A British friend of mine survived the bombings in London. We use to have family reunions with fireworks for July 4th which was also her birthday. She could never stay for the fireworks. She says she still panics.

 

A lot of refugees here have the same problem with our New Years Eve fireworks. Dutch people do explain it to them long before, so they can prepare, but how do you prepare for a gut reaction.

 

Now the reaction's instinctual-hardwired.

 

@bosko69
This photo you posted is a well-known one of 3 young boys of the Szare Szeregi (aka Gray Ranks). They were Polish Boy Scouts who fought in the Warsaw Uprising. My father was one (though not in this particular photo).

 

That is really something Bluumz-all these young heroes in a time of utter terror.
Boys and Girls-"Older Scouts carried out sabotage, armed resistance & assassinations. The Girl Guides worked as nurses, liaisons & munition carriers. Younger Scouts were involved in so-called minor sabotage."
This is something that needs to be told.Not to sound trite or demean-it would make,in the right hands,an amazing movie.
God bless your Father and all His comrades.

 

That bunch didn't need phones and a metaverse to get an adrenalin rush. Survival did that job all on its own. American kids didn't know how good they had it.

A friend who was in Nam still avoids fireworks. He tells a story about coming home and being in a bunkhouse with a bunch of recent returnees. A car backfired outside and they all found themselves looking at each other from under the bunks. Once you hard-wire that reaction into a kid, it doesn't leave easily. It at all.

 

Thank you!
I, too, have thought it would make an excellent movie. A few Polish movies have been made on the subject but I think the story/stories would even appeal to non-Polish audiences. Warsaw 44 (2014) is about young people in the Uprising, though not specifically the Scouts. Kanal (1957) is about the resistance fighters and the use of the sewers, though again it is not specifically about the Scouts.
[EDIT: I have now found that Battle for Warsaw/Stones for the Rampart was also made into a movie in 2014. So glad to find this, I had long been searching for an English translation of the book! It's story does center on the Szare Szeregi.]
Dad was a member of the Zyrafa ("Giraffe") group, who moved supplies, ammunition, and people through the sewers under Warsaw. They are/were often referred to - proudly - as "sewer rats". At 16yo, he was one of the older scouts and he also had rifleman duties. He was captured at the end of the August 1944 Uprising and spent the last year of WW2 (and his 17th birthday) in a German prisoner of war camp.
Dad never told us (myself and my 3 siblings) stories about those days, but he actually seemed to come out unscathed, emotionally. No issues with nightmares, loud noises, etc. But, he was always strongly against guns in the home. We never had any and he and my brothers were not hunters. I do remember him saying that he'd "seen enough of guns and shooting". Fishing, however, was frequent!
He is pictured on a commemorative plaque in Zoliborz, an area of Warsaw. That's dad, the last boy in line on the left of the photo. All the boys are dressed and ready to descend into the sewers.

"Here, next to the tram tracks, near the intersection of Krasinskiego and Ks. J. Poplieluszki there is a manhole to the sewers which during the Warsaw Uprising were the communication routes of Zoliborz with the Old Town and Downtown."

 

Agree!

A true hero, and what a life.
It is amazing how young so many Resistance members were, your and my parents included.

I am glad he did. Traumas of any kind can be debilitating.

 

Good Lord-The Warsaw Ghetto,one of the most infamous of all the many Nazi atrocities.These kids were an extraordinarily gutsy bunch,but some kids have a moral clarity we lose as we get older.As adults we seem to weigh things more complexly and the inner debate becomes paralysis.

 

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was in 1943 and was the uprising of the Jews confined in the Warsaw Ghetto.
The Warsaw Uprising was in 1944 and was the uprising of the whole of Warsaw. This is the uprising that my father participated in.
Both Uprisings were doomed to failure.

 

Lord what a time-I'd like to visit Warsaw some day.

 

I'm considering a trip in 2024 for the 80th anniversary of the Uprising. I don't speak Polish (beyond a few simple phrases I learned as a child) and going to a country where I don't speak the language makes me a bit nervous. All my father's relatives with whom we once had [infrequent] contact years ago are now dead.
But I've never been there, and it's about time I went!

 

Trip of a lifetime Bluumz-discover the old neighborhood,and I wouldn't be surprised if You still don't have a cousin or two around.Worth checking Ancestry.com or some such 'kin finder'.

 

Or just ask around when you get there. They may not be related, but I bet someone's around who's related to someone else who was there.

 

I hope u get the chance to go....
my neighbour is in Poland right now.....
there's something going on in the next country....that I think may be worse than 1943 & 4.................

 

Many Polish people speak English nowadays. If you come across one who doesn't, I'm sure there will be people to help translate.

 

Just about anywhere we went w/ the exception of say tiny villages in Portugal,Sicily,etc folks speak some English.Most are good natured & you get to show-off Your 'Pictionary' & pantomime skills.

 

And if all else fails, swap out into Spanish nouns. A lot of times the old Latin-based words connect.