The Last of the Griffins; or, how my grandfather tried to assassinate Hitler

A forest landscape in Pomerania

I never met my Grandfather, at least not in the sense of an engagement between two equally conscious people. He died of a heart attack while listening to Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ during the Armistice Day parade in 1991, three months after I was born. My family was not one for taking photos, and so once he was dead there was little around any of the various houses I grew up in to help me bring to mind his face. The one my Grandmother kept was a posed portrait of him as an older man and does not give a strong impression of the dynamic, stern individual who she, my mother and my uncle occasionally spoke of. I was told the usual stories which dead relatives always seem to have told about themselves: that he had seen me when I was a month old and declared me to be a “fine boy”; that he would have been proud of my subsequent academic and professional achievements (such as they are). In each case the hypothetical nature of these assurances was seemingly meant to give them more weight than any actual ones could have done, as if he was being deployed as an expert witness in court.

Outside of these hypothetical assurances, the life story which was told about my Grandfather is that he was Polish, had fled the Nazis and then stayed in the United Kingdom after 1945. He had told his wife and children a general story about his escape from Nazism, one which had been passed on to me: that he and his friend Leo Olszewski had left their village on the day of the invasion and were competing in a regional sporting event; that his mother somehow got word to him and Leo not to return to the village; and they had then made their way, seemingly on foot, first to France then subsequently to the United Kingdom. This was a simple, broad story which, when I was a child, appealed to my sense of boy’s own adventure.

It was also untrue.

During a holiday from university as an undergraduate, my then-partner, who had a personal interest in genealogies, began googling my Grandfather’s name and hometown. She discovered a number of Polish-language articles which mentioned him and revealed a quite different story from the one I had been told. They told the story of a young man who had, as a teenager, led his local resistance unit for a number of years before disappearing at some point towards the end of the War. All of these articles finished with a variant of the observation that they believed he had ended up in the United Kingdom but had been unable to contact him. Some of them even ended with a plaintive request for him or his relatives to get in contact if they came across this story.

This story was such a strange departure from the family tale that had been handed down to me that I was initially sceptical of whether they even referred to the same Marian Szostak. However, the way that various details in the articles — such as place and date of birth, departure to the United Kingdom, profession of his father — tallied with what I did understand about him meant that I eventually came round to the idea that this might be him. I then contacted Leo Olszewski’s widow, Anne, who told me that, while he and my Grandfather had been childhood friends, they had not in fact travelled together across Europe and that Leo had instead been forcibly conscripted into the Wehrmacht before defecting to the Allies in May 1944 during the Battle of Monte Cassino. (Anne was an Austrian emigre who during the War had occupied a minor secretarial position in the German bureaucracy, leading to her telling me that when she and Leo argued he’d call her “Nazi” and she’d call him “coward” — love comes in all forms, I suppose.) Leo had subsequently met my Grandfather again by coincidence on the platform of Piccadilly Circus station in 1948, where they had rekindled their childhood friendship.

I was now convinced that this man mentioned in these Polish articles was my Grandfather. In later life he belonged to a particular migrant tradition which had seen moving to a new country as an opportunity to leave behind his native land completely. After the War he had quickly ceased to attend the Polish Social and Cultural Association in west London which had been set up for the purpose of keeping together the Polish emigre community who had not returned to Poland in 1945. Similarly, he had always discouraged any attempt by his children (my mother and my uncle) to learn more about Poland or learn Polish. After 1989, he did not return to Poland, even as a visitor (by contrast, Leo went there regularly until his death a few years after my Grandfather). The only evidence of his Polish history in later life was his accent, which apparently never left him, and his preference for houses near woods, which he had reportedly said reminded him of his boyhood.

Neither my mother nor my uncle were aware that the story they had told me about my Grandfather’s flight from Poland was false. It occurs to me that this is somewhat of a piece with his attitude towards his past: he gave a vague story which seemed convincing, discouraged further questions and allowed himself to, at least publicly, not think about the fate of his homeland any further. After his death, my Grandmother burned or otherwise destroyed most of his papers, including the records he had kept of his military service in the Second World War. He existed to me, then, as this enigma, taking form only when he came into contact with my other relatives. He was not so much a person as somebody who was spoken about by other people. Perhaps this is the situation faced by, ultimately, every person in history but it raised questions about whether I could possibly now have a relationship with somebody who was, after all, my Grandfather. Nevertheless, in a fatalistic manner I decided that that was that.

This feeling was changed by a throwaway remark of my Grandmother’s many years later. She mentioned that, among the few of his papers she had kept, was his correspondence with his mother. Apparently, in the months before his death, around the time that I was born, he had been re-filing this correspondence and had said that he was going to translate it into English. I cannot be certain about his personal reasons but this timing does suggest to me that he had decided that he wanted to share at least some aspect of his past with others, something which may have been occasioned by the birth of his first grandchild.

*

Born in 1885, Lorenz Szostak was 40 years old when he was appointed Commandant of Police in Czarna Woda in December 1925. The post would have been something of a mixed blessing for him. On the one hand, the fortunes of his family, although once prosperous in the days of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, had fared poorly under the century of Prussian domination since 1815 and they now had little to its name other than a folk history of having rode with Jan Sobieski at the Battle of Vienna in 1682. No doubt the extra income would be beneficial for his young family. On the other hand, the town of Czarna Woda was so small that, in practice, the Commandant of Police was the only police officer in the town. At the time of his appointment he was married to Anna Bronislawa Banach and had two children: Marian (born 1921) and a younger son (born 1924), the former of whom was my grandfather.

Marian was educated at Chojnice State High School from 1935, where he had been a member of a military cadet training service. He also competed in regional competitions in a variety of track and field activities but most notably the triple jump and the pentathlon. In addition to Polish, he could speak German, English and Latin. At the time of the outbreak of the Second World War, he was in his final year at school.

When the Nazi invasion of Poland commenced on 1 September 1939, the majority of the town’s administrative officials fled. Lorenz appears to have been offered the chance to leave with them but he chose to stay. The first German soldiers arrived in the town on 9 September 1939 and their first action was to seize the local headmaster Leon Landowski. Landowski was an anti-fascist campaigner who had gained a degree of local and regional prominence through his writings for the local newspapers ‘The Sunday Echo’ and ‘The People’s Defence’. Having been seized, Landowski was dragged outside his house and shot in the street.

Being the only remaining government official in the city, Lorenz was the natural next target. Doubtless aware of this, he had sent his family outside of the town when word of the Germans’ arrival had emerged that morning and barricaded himself inside his home. Local legend has it that he held off the German soldiers until he ran out of ammunition, at which point he was killed in his own home. His rotting corpse was hung from a post in the centre of the village with Landowski’s until it was removed by local townspeople and buried in secret.

But his family were not out of town for long. They returned to the house shortly after Lorenz’s death, where Anna reputedly never washed her husband’s blood from the floorboards. With its only ‘celebrity’ and sole remaining administrator now dead, Czarna Woda was considered pacified. The town’s name was Germanised to ‘Schwarzwasser’ (a direct translation of the town’s name from Polish to German) and the Starograd region in which it was situated was incorporated directly into the German Empire as part of the expanded province of Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia.

Aside from his weapons, Lorenz’s role had given him access to a radio and a transmitter. These were overlooked by the occupying forces and on his return Marian stole them and removed them to a disused barn nearby. At the beginning of 1940, Marian founded a small resistance movement in Czarna Woda. It is not entirely clear what this unnamed organisation actually did during the first few months of its existence, or indeed if it had any members beyond Marian himself and perhaps Anna and his unnamed brother. Nevertheless, this organisation seems to have gained notoriety amongst the burgeoning Polish underground movement sufficient enough to be, in spring 1940, formally subordinated to the wider guerilla organisation known as the ‘Kashubian Griffins,’ which would merge with some other groups to form the ‘Pomeranian Griffins’ on 7 July 1941.

The Griffins were commanded by Jozef Gierszewski and the priest Father Józef Wrycza. They recognised the Polish government in exile in London as the rightful government of Poland but did not subordinate themselves to the command of the Polish armed forces in the United Kingdom. The Griffins were divided into six district commands and each command was further divided into a varying number of regional commands. Marian was given the title of ‘Commander of the Karsin Commune,’ one of six regional commands within the Chojnice District. At only 19 when he was given his command, Marian was less than half the age of Jan Binczyk, his immediate superior, which perhaps goes some way to explaining his codename of ‘Student.’

It was very shortly after his induction into the Griffins, some time during the spring of 1940, that Marian was introduced to Jozef Weltrowski. In April 1941, Marian’s group of Griffins was responsible for stealing a printing press from German forces in Czersk, a town approximately six miles south-west of Czarna Woda. From September 1941, this printing press would be used by Marian and Weltrowski together to edit, print and distribute an underground propaganda newspaper entitled ‘The Voice of the Polish Heart.’ The site of this unlikely publishing venture was the barn where Marian had previously removed his father’s weaponry and radio equipment. Weltrowski had some skill as a writer (after his retirement many decades later he became an amateur historian) and did most of the writing, while Marian would use his linguistic skills and father’s radio equipment to listen to British radio broadcasts and gather stories.

The barn being about the only building which the Griffins could conclusively be said to control, at least in that district, it soon became the closest that such an organisation could have to a central filing location. Hidden in an attic of the barn was an archive which eventually swelled to include reports on the deployment of Wehrmacht units in the local area, lists of Nazi collaborators, intelligence on German v-weapons and even the plans for an, at-best, fanciful landing of Allied troops on the Pomeranian coast.

Shortly before he and Weltrowski stole the printing press, Marian went to work in the offices of Georg Konig, a construction and civil engineering firm. Founded in Konigsberg in 1898, Konig had set up an office specialising in the construction of bridges and railways in Danzig-West Prussia shortly after the outbreak of War. Marian — his surname now Germanised to ‘Schostak’ — began working as an office clerk and general draughtsman from March 1941, shortly before his 20th birthday. He would remain working there for two years.

It was during his time working at Konig that Marian would be involved in the Griffins’ most audacious operations: two direct attempts to assassinate Hitler. The first attempt took place in autumn 1941 just outside the Czarna Woda railway station. Having received word that Hitler’s train would be passing through the town, the Griffins placed explosives under the tracks which were to be detonated by a short-wave radio device. It is unclear what exactly happened to Hitler’s train: some sources claim that it was simply delayed whereas others say that Hitler was in fact in Rastenburg at the time (it is possible that both may be true and that the train was due to pass through and was delayed but without its most famous occupant). Either way, the train which came through Czarna Woda at the appointed time was an ordinary passenger train. This was, of course, not known to the Griffins, who detonated the bomb and derailed the train at the cost of 430 lives. Although it seems that the Nazis were unclear as to who perpetrated this first attack, initially blaming communists, they eventually placed a bounty of 100,000 Marks on each Griffin.

The second attempt took place on 8 June 1942 and seems to have been slightly better planned, or at least based on better information. This time the chosen site was the railway outside the village of Stych, eight miles north-east of Czarna Woda. Hitler was on his way from Prague, having attended the funeral of Reinhard Heydrich. This time, the Griffins removed part of the track and then ambushed the train once it had run off the rails and fallen on its side. They then machine gunned the passengers before fleeing back into the woods without sustaining any casualties. After the attack, several hyperbolic estimates of the results abounded, suggesting casualties ranging from 200 to 300, including two generals and even Hitler himself. Of course, Hitler was not amongst the dead and the Nazi reprisals resulted in the deportation of 50 locals to concentration camps and the arrest of over 100 more. The reward for the capture of one of the Griffins was increased from 100,000 Marks to 250,000.

*

The history of the Polish resistance is relatively well-documented but is nevertheless largely unknown in the West (outside of certain incidents such as the Warsaw Uprising). Because of Poland’s political situation after 1945, what historical study was done tended to be in either Polish or Russian — which has been left untranslated since 1989 — and the archives closed to English-language or other Western researchers. Consequently, a lot of my early research consisted of following up on my online leads and trying to gain access to Polish-language archives.

My first lead came when I discovered the story of Mariusz Ziegert, a junior policeman in the Starograd Police Department. In 1999 he had successfully purchased a cache of documents which had appeared for sale at an auction of various inter-war memorabilia. According to his account, he was collecting exhibits for a future museum on the history of the Starograd police. Once he had obtained them, it was discovered that the documents related to Lorenz’s life — including his application to join the police and certificates showing that he had completed his training and qualified from the Police School in Grudziadz — and the activities of Marian during the War. I was able to get in contact with Ziegert who sent me electronic copies of these documents. At some point after buying them he had handed the original documents to the Starograd Police Department, although the promised museum does not appear to have come to fruition. These documents then formed the basis of my narrative of Lorenz’s life and death and provided a number of clues as to Marian’s activities immediately after his father’s death.

Having discovered this cache of documents, Ziegert got in contact with Jozef Weltrowski, the former Griffin. Together they returned to the barn — which during the communist period had been converted into a post office — and began to excavate the attic, uncovering the enormous archive of the Griffins along with a variety of items like binoculars, a wooden double-headed Polish eagle, batteries and even a hand-drawn portrait of Winston Churchill. In our emails, Ziegert revealed that this discovery was a moment of enormous personal validation for Weltrowski, as previously ‘The Voice of the Polish Heart’ had been dismissed as a legend.

Although Weltrowski died in 2014 at the age of 90, Ziegert claimed to have been in close contact with him from the discovery of the archive in 1999 through to his death. As such, when I interviewed him he was happy to give me information which he said had been given to him by Weltrowski. These answers gave me more colour and detail as to Marian’s activities in the Griffins, in particular how he and Weltrowski produced ‘The Voice of the Polish Heart.’

Elżbieta Skerska is the chief archivist at the Elżbiety Zawackiej Foundation. I first came across her when I was exchanging emails with Ziegert and he suggested that the further questions I had for him about the activities of the Griffins and Marian might be better answered by that organisation. The Foundation holds most of what archives are available on the Griffins and, it emerged, even holds one file explicitly on Marian. Although it would have been impractical for me to review the entire archive for the purposes of this essay, she was nevertheless happy to be interviewed and answer my questions about the Griffins at length. In addition, she sent over scanned copies of all of the documents which were held in Marian’s personal file. Much of these documents, however, do not seem to relate to Marian, or indeed the Griffins at all (for instance, one of the documents is a railway timetable from 1970) and suggest that the archive may have been compiled in something of a haphazard manner. Nevertheless, there are documents which do confirm his involvement in the plots to assassinate Hitler, his codename and various other matters about his work with and for the Griffins.

Aside from the Polish sources in translation, there were a few English-language secondary sources available. The most useful one I found was Roger Moorhouse’s ‘Killing Hitler,’ which references the Pomeranian Griffins several times in the index. It also gave me the first detailed description I had come across of the two assassination attempts on Hitler. Moorhouse casts doubt on the veracity of both of these stories, in particular the first one in autumn 1941. He says that Hitler was nowhere near Czarna Woda at the time of the attack, claims that the attack was not recorded in contemporary German records and casts doubt on whether the Griffins would have had access to the technology required to detonate a bomb via short-wave remote control. He concludes that the references to this attack contained in the British SOE’s archives was the result of the officer who drew up the report being either fed false information or simply inventing it from sparse facts.

In my interview with Skerska, however, she confirmed that both attacks did take place, broadly as described in Marian’s file and the other sources. She notes that a contemporary reference to the attack was in fact made in the state archives in Bydgoszcz, in which (in standard procedure where the Nazi authorities were unclear as to who the perpetrators were) Communist partisans were blamed. Furthermore, the items which were uncovered in the barn in Czarna Woda included various pieces of radio and other electrical equipment. Speaking to my relatives, later in his life Marian was a capable engineer and used to build and repair televisions and other electrical equipment. While, taken together, these facts are not conclusive proof that he could have manufactured a short-wave remote detonator, it does create a certain amount of circumstantial evidence. This is supported by the other pieces of evidence, such as the fact that the Nazi authorities chose to place a bounty on the Griffins after the first attack and by the fact that it turns up in the files held by the Elzbiety Zawackiej Foundation. These files were compiled internally by the Griffins and correspond closely (albeit with certain discrepancies) with what later turns up in the SOE files in the United Kingdom. While there certainly were reasons why the Griffins would have sought to exaggerate their successes to the Allies, there is no such convincing reason for them to have done so in their own internal records.

*

By the time of the second assassination attempt, the Griffins had begun to be the victim of increasingly fractious internal wrangling, between Jozef Gierszewski and his subordinate Jozef Dambek. Gierszewski had been in favour of affiliating the Griffins with the Polish government-in-exile, whereas Dambek favoured continuing their independence and instead affiliating with another independent guerilla organisation known as the Sword and the Plow. Gierszewski was formally removed from command in February 1943 by Dambek’s faction and was subsequently murdered in June. The agreement to affiliate with the Sword and the Plow was concluded in April 1943.

However, by this time, the Sword and the Plow had been infiltrated by the Gestapo and the first of a series of large-scale arrests of members of the Griffins began the following month. Many of the arrested were the commanders of the local communes. One of those arrested was Jan Binczyk, who was detained in the Gestapo prison in Gdansk after an ambush outside of one of the Griffin’s safehouses, where he would subsequently die after two days of interrogation. In September 1943, the Gestapo discovered what was described to me as a “census of its [the Griffins’] members” and the arrests became larger and more systematic. Approximately 1,300 members of the Griffins had been arrested and transferred to Stutthof Concentration Camp by the end of the year.

Marian was not caught up in this particular round up, for reasons which are not initially clear. The best explanation I can find for this is that, towards the end of 1942, Anna was coerced into signing German naturalisation papers, thus making her sons eligible for conscription into the German army. This was in line with the policy of Albert Forster, the Gauleiter of Danzig-West Prussia, to define as many of the residents of the region as possible as ‘German,’ presumably in order to make it possible to dragoon as many men as possible into the Wehrmacht.

The Griffins’ own records for November 1943 somewhat cryptically refer to him having last been seen “two months ago.” My other Polish sources all show that the Griffins did not know what happened to Marian: contact with him is said to have “broke [sic] off” or he is said to have simply “disappeared.” The truth of this matter is that around this time he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht. Considering what was happening to many of the other Griffins at this time, this was perhaps the only time that such an eventuality was the best possible scenario for someone. The exact timing of this can only, ultimately, be guessed at but given the comment in the Griffins’ files, August or September 1943 would seem a plausible suggestion.

The exact nature of Marian’s service in the Wehrmacht is known principally through the papers later collected by the British Ministry of Defence (“MOD”). He came to be attached to the 1055th Grenadier Regiment, which was formed in February 1944 from a merger of the 1023rd Grenadier Regiment and the 89th Infantry Regiment. The regiment is listed as having been destroyed in Normandy in July 1944. It seems likely that the engagement in which this would have occurred would have been Operation Spring, which took place 25–27 July 1944. Canadian forces attempted to capture Verrieres Ridge but were stalled by an effective German defensive strategy. Marian is listed as having been captured (or, given his personal history, more likely defected) by the Canadians on 8 August, where he is listed initially as a German and then, the ‘z’ restored to his surname, as Polish on 28 September. He was interred in Auchinraith POW Camp on 19 October before, his captors seemingly convinced of his identity, being sent “to Polish Forces” on 25 October.

*

One of the main mysteries I faced when I came to researching my Grandfather’s background was how he came to leave Poland and arrive in the United Kingdom. All of my Polish sources were consistent on the fact that they did not know why Marian had disappeared in late 1943, or where he had gone (although some did say that they understood that he had ended up in the United Kingdom after 1945). Simple logic suggests that it would be improbable that he would have made his way via the most direct route: across Germany, France and the Low Countries and then the English Channel. Although some people did manage this, by the time Marian is last reported amongst the Pomeranian Griffins in late 1943 the chances of success in such an endeavour would have been extremely slim. Before beginning this investigation — when the only details that I had about Marian was that he was in the resistance, disappeared at some point and then reappeared in the United Kingdom before the end of the War — I had entertained some rather fanciful theories about his potential escape, none of which ever got out of the realms of fantasy. When thinking more seriously about his time during the War, four lines of enquiry suggested themselves.

The first one was to consult the British National Archives to see if they hold anything on my grandfather. I was expecting to find at the very least a certificate of naturalisation, which could then provide further leads. However, while the surname ‘Szostak’ appears to be a more common Polish surname than I had previously realised, the only Marian Szostak with a naturalisation record open to the public was a Marian Henryk Szostak, who did not move to the United Kingdom until the 1970s and, in any event, lived in Lancashire. He is listed as being unmarried with no children, whereas by this point I know that my Grandfather had been married to my grandmother for nearly twenty-five years and had two children. Further enquiries with my Grandmother revealed that one of the few documents of my Grandfather’s which she had kept after his death was a travel document issued to him under the 1951 Refugee Convention, entitling him to travel to any country in the world except for Poland. It appears that he never took British citizenship and instead periodically renewed this document when it expired. I next turned my attention to what foreign archives might be of use. I had often theorised he could have made his way out of Germany to neutral Sweden, from where transport to the United Kingdom may have been easier to obtain. However, after speaking to two separate people at the Riksarkivet, they confirmed that they have no records of my Grandfather.

These two avenues of investigation exhausted, I turned my attention to what sources or archives might be available in the United Kingdom itself. It occurred to me that archives may be kept in the various Polish cultural institutions which were set up in London to cater to the emigre community after the War, the most prominent of which is the Sikorski Institute. It was them that I tried first. However, it became clear to me that, after the War, documents had not been deposited with the Sikorski Institute in any systematic way. Its archive, such as it is, is built upon documents donated or otherwise provided by these Polish emigres and their families. Conversations with other Polish institutes in London revealed a similar story. My Grandfather had not deposited any papers with either the Sikorski Institute or any of the other such institutions I checked and, as such, their archives would be unlikely to be of any further use to me for the purposes of this paper.

My final potential line of enquiry was with the MOD. During the War, the Polish Armed Forces in the West were officially a subdivision of the British army. The MOD still operates a disclosures office specifically to deal with Polish enquiries. If there are any records still held somewhere on my grandfather, I suspected that it would be there. However, when I initially contacted APC Disclosures and asked if they had any records of my Grandfather, they claimed that they did not. As with my searches in the British National Archives, they had records of a number of men with the surname ‘Szostak’ none of which was Marian. This seemed to suggest that my searches had reached a dead end.

However, about a week after this disappointment, I was contacted again by APC Disclosures to say that they had done another search and this time had found my grandfather’s file. It contained a surprisingly full record, including the papers documenting him when he was captured under his Germanified name of ‘Marian Schostak.’ This then formed the basis of my narrative above about Marian’s conscription into the Wehrmacht and then below about his subsequent service with the Allies up to the end of the War.

My narrative of the breaking up of the Griffins relies heavily on the Polish secondary sources I have already described as well as the help of my interviews with Elzbieta Skerska and Mariusz Ziegert.

*

Following his transfer to the Free Polish forces, Marian was sent to the Polish Armoured and Technical Training Centre in Crawford, South Lanarkshire. This was the only armoured training centre run exclusively by and for the Polish forces. There he took part in tank training from 23 November 1944 to 10 January 1945 under the command of Leonard Zyrkiewicz.

Having completed his re-training, Marian was sent back to Europe in January 1945. He was now attached to the 10th Armoured Cavalry Brigade, a subdivision of the 1st Armoured Division commanded by Stanislaw Maczek. The division had liberated the city of Breda in October 1944 with no casualties and had spent the winter of 1944–45 guarding the area around Moerdijk in the Netherlands on the south bank of the Rhine. They remained there for three months after Marian joined them until they were ordered north to Drenthe on 7 April. The advance was a difficult one, with the flooded marshes in the area slowing down the tanks’ progress.

On 12 April the division was part of the force that liberated Westerbork Concentration Camp.

Between 13 and 18 April, the Division was once more in action, pushing between Buinen and Veendam before linking up with the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division at Gieten. They crossed over into Germany on 20 April, where they were engaged in clearing operations around Papenburg (modern day Lower Saxony), reaching the Kusten Canal and liberating the village of Neulehe. Earlier allied bombing had severely damaged the surrounding area and this, along with minor operations to mop up isolated pockets of resistance, slowed the advance for a few days. Marian is mentioned in dispatches for his actions during the liberation of Ostrhauderfehn over the course of 24–25 April.

From 1 May, the Division divided into two prongs and advanced along the rivers Leda and Ems, although progress was slow due to damage to roads. What resistance remained was now minor and isolated and the villages of Remels, Moorburg, Hellweg, Westerstede and Halsbeck all fell over the course of 2–3 May. On 4 May, the two prongs met up again and prepared for an assault on the port of Wilhelmshaven. However, by this time the German forces had been in full retreat for a long time and were now in complete disarray. Despite the fact that the naval base at Wilhelmshaven was staffed with around 19,000 men, 159 field guns and approximately 64,000,000 rounds of ammunition, it was clear that their position was hopeless and they capitulated to General Maczek without a fight on 5 May 1945, three days before Germany’s unconditional surrender. Following VE Day, the 1st Armoured Division remained in Lower Saxony as part of a general occupation force and, on 11 August, Marian was promoted to the rank of Corporal. The Division remained in Germany carrying out general duties as part of the British Army of Occupation until 1947, when it was disbanded and its men were given the choice of returning either to Poland or the United Kingdom.

Back in Poland, the Griffins had managed to continue their activities, albeit in a much reduced manner, after the arrests of 1943. However, Jozef Dambek was killed by a Gestapo double agent on 4 March 1944 and, only two months later, in May 1944, Marian Jankowski (who had only that month taken over command of the Griffins’ coastal operations, such as they were) was ambushed near the village of Lubiana. Although he managed to escape with his life, he abandoned a backpack containing a lengthy list of the remaining Griffins, which occasioned another round of arrests. In addition to all this, from the middle of 1944, NKVD officers began to be parachuted into Poland with the aim of infiltrating the various resistance movements. Although the Griffins were not an explicitly anti-Communist organisation, it was nevertheless a Polish nationalist and strongly Catholic one and was quickly identified as a potential threat (or at least an irritant) to future Soviet control of the region. Augustyn Westphal (who had assumed command in May 1944) ordered the Griffins to continue sabotage operations against the Germans in January 1945. As the Red Army advanced across eastern Europe, he seems to have been leant on by the NKVD and formally liquidated the Griffins on 21 March 1945, ordering the members to disarm themselves. There is a popular conspiracy theory that this order was falsified by the NKVD in order to neuter the organisation as a threat. Most of the remaining members were arrested and deported to Gulags by their erstwhile Soviet allies.

As it became clear that the future of Poland was Soviet-dominated, it was also clear that many of the members of the Polish forces in the west would not want to return. To that end, the formation of the Polish Resettlement Corps (“PRC”) was announced on 22 May 1946 and began recruiting in September. Volunteers were signed up for two years but could leave at any time (becoming reservists until their two years had ended). Members were given English lessons, accommodated in military camps and paid the normal British Armed Forces rate for their work (indeed, this generous provision may explain the timing of Marian’s promotion). If possible, dependents were brought over too, although this was rare.

Marian would not have known the exact fates of his comrades in Pomerania but he could surely have guessed. Poland, it would have been clear, was not safe for him. As such, when he left the 1st Armoured Division and was offered the choice between returning to Poland and joining the PRC, he would have had no hesitation in joining the latter on 10 June 1947. Whether he made efforts to be reunited with either Anna or his unnamed brother (whose fate is unknown but it seems almost certain that by this point he was dead) is not clear from the documents but, if he did, they were unsuccessful. He would remain attached to the PRC in Witley until 16 August 1948, when he was relegated to reserve duty in order to move to Stockwell and take up employment as a waiter at the Ritz. The money earned waiting tables would subsequently finance his engineering studies, the profession he would subsequently be employed in until he died.

*

The vast majority of people who have ever lived have done nothing that has attracted the notice of history. There is perhaps an alternative world where one of the assassination attempts my Grandfather was involved in succeeded and he is known as an historical figure, either as a great hero of the twentieth century or as a martyr in subsequent reprisals. Instead they failed and he lived the rest of his life as a man with a history he concealed even from his own family.

His choice not to tell any of his family about these events in his lifetime was clearly a conscious one and it was made for reasons that, ultimately, we can only guess at. Possibly it was too painful for him: a man of broadly conservative views for the rest of his life, he did not feel that the Poland which emerged under Soviet domination after 1945 was the Poland he had fought to save. Or perhaps, when he told people why he never spoke of Poland or wanted to return, he was telling the truth. There certainly is an immigrant tradition which actively encourages the immigrant to give up memories of their homeland. After all, what good would it have done for my mother to learn Polish when she was a child or a teenager?

I admitted at the beginning that I am writing it for mostly selfish reasons: it is the only form of relationship I can have with my Grandfather. Whether he personally would have wished me to write it is a question that I considered but is one that is ultimately unknowable. The evidence of his actions immediately before his death — filing and preparing to translate some of his old correspondence just at around the time he knew his first grandchild was born — suggest that he may have been considering revealing at least part of it.

In what sense have I really had a relationship with him now? In a strange way, I find myself feeling more of an emotional distance from him. For example, I find it hard to fathom the psychology of a man who refused to countenance returning to Poland even after 1989, who overtly distanced himself from several aspects of performative communitarian ‘Polishness’ and who discouraged his children from demonstrating interest in his background, and yet who never took the British citizenship which would have been available to him. Until his death he remained technically a stateless person: a psychological state which it is easy to imagine he felt profoundly. He traveled abroad frequently and every time he did so he would show a document which was valid in every country “except Poland,” a handwritten entry in black ink to remind him of the country he had helped save from one tyranny only for it to fall to another. The psychology of that must have been torture for him, although perhaps that was the point.

One of the strange things about following one’s family history through an event as seismic as the Second World War is that it in fact alienates one from the subject. By the time my Grandfather was the age I am now, his father had been murdered and strung up in the middle of the town, he had attempted to assassinate Hitler twice, been forcibly conscripted into his enemy’s army, waded over bodies and explosives to defect to the other side and then been part of the army occupying the country who had previously conscripted and subjugated him. Most alienating of all, he had killed men. One of the most profound divides in humanity must be between those who have been directly responsible for the death of another person and those who have not.

In a superficial sense I am now closer to my Grandfather, in the sense that I now know more of the facts of his life and am in a position to know more should I wish to pursue further enquiries. But in another, psychological sense, I feel that I know him less, or at the very least am in less of a position to empathise with him. Those facts of his life create such a gulf between us that I find it hard to really empathise with him, although I certainly do feel sympathy and pride for him and his struggles. Historical actors can only ever be known to the historian in a factual sense. We can understand and know their actions but ultimately nothing about their interiority. Even diarists keep some kind of distance through the medium of writing, which serves to slow down and organise one’s thoughts. But relatives are supposed to be known on a different, emotional plane, a plane which has always been out of reach for me and my Grandfather and which my research has only served to emphasise.

I feel an admiration for my Grandfather, certainly, for having done things, in extremis, which are far removed from my sphere of experience (and will hopefully remain so). It is a far greater sense of admiration than I felt before I knew these things about him. I also feel sad that he took the view to not tell people for so long and for him to then die just when it seems that he was about to change his mind. But the act of writing his life has turned him from being a deceased relative about whom I hear the occasional secondhand story or assurance of his pride, into an actor (albeit an estimable one) in a history which is removed from all but my factual understanding. History has done its strange work, wrapping itself in the cloak of difference and remaining another country.

On the disbandment of the PRC in 1949, Marian became eligible for the Polish War Medal, 1939–45. He never collected it.

Some of the books consulted in the writing of this essay

• The Formation of the Polish Community in Great Britain, 1939–1950: The M.B. Grabowski Polish Migration Project Report, by Jan Ciechanowski, Norman Davies and Keith Sword (University of London Press, 1989)
• Polish Army, 1939–1945 by Stanislaw Komornicki (Interpress, 1984)
• Pomeranian Conservation, 1939–1947 by Krzysztof Komorowski (Gdansk, 1993)
• Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe by Mark Mazower (Penguin, 2008)
• Killing Hitler: The Plots, the Assassins and the Dictator who Cheated Death by Roger Moorhouse (Bantam Dell, 2006)
• Jan Kazimierz Szalewski — History of a Pomeranian Patriot by Zgymunt Skiorski (Gdansk, 1996)