The western portion of Poland was under Nazi occupation. Nevertheless, the Polish people managed to set up an entire underground government and military organization, the latter known as the Home Army (AK). At its peak, the AK was comprised of 300,000 soldiers. On average, a person who joined this underground government was killed in three to four months. Despite such high risks, many men, women, and Boy and Girl Scouts volunteered to join (pictured below is a teenage AK soldier). The underground government took orders from the Polish government, which was in exile in London. The war devastated the Polish economy. At the start of WWII, the economy of Poland had just begun to recover from decades of international crisis. During the war, Poland suffered more destruction than any other nation excluding Germany and Japan. Countless Polish houses and buildings were completely obliterated.  |  Polish Jagoda Urban-Klaehn writes, "I was born almost twenty years after the war, in the early 1960s but, the impact of the war on my childhood was just very significant. Even as kids we were very conscious of the war. To this day I remember my fifth birthday...because my older brother was teasing me that the war was going to start on the day of my birthday...It had such an impact on me that I could not really enjoy my birthday, waiting for the war to start at any moment. I still remember vividly fragments from my fifth birthday. For many Poles, long after the war, hearing an airplane low in the sky was associated with the irrational fear that it may be a bomber." The war led to the deaths of millions of Poles. Three million Jewish and three million non-Jewish poles perished in the Holocaust. In the east, the Soviets killed some 8,000 Polish officers and 14,000 Polish civilian leaders in the Katyn Massacres and buried them in mass graves. Many Polish soldiers were sent to Soviet POW camps, and hundreds of thousands of others, including entire families, were deported to labor camps. At least 15% of these deportees perished. |
