Polish people of the Polish\u2013Soviet War

Marian_Januszajtis-Żegota

Marian Józef Żegota-Januszajtis (3 April 1889, Częstochowa, Piotrków Governorate - 24 March 1973, Royal Tunbridge Wells) was a Polish military commander and politician. One of the founders of Polish paramilitary pro-independence organizations in Austrian partition, and last commander of the 1st Brigade of Polish Legions.
He was also the organizer of unsuccessful coup in 1919, general in the Second Polish Republic and Polish Armed Forces in the West, voivode of the Nowogródek Voivodeship (1924-1926), and member of the Polish government in Exile.
Following the Soviet invasion of Poland he founded the Organization for the Struggle for Freedom in Lwów. He was arrested by NKVD on 27 October 1939 and imprisoned in Lwów and then in Moscow Lubyanka prison. After the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement of July 1941, he was released. After the war, he remained in exile in the United Kingdom, where he died in March 1973 and was buried in Crawley cemetery next to his wife. In November 1981, his ashes were brought to Poland – resting in the New Cemetery in Zakopane, in legionnaires' quarters.

Mieczysław_Smorawiński

Brigadier General Mieczysław Makary Smorawiński (1893–1940), was a Polish military commander and officer of the Polish Army. He was one of the Polish generals identified by forensic scientists of the Katyn Commission as the victim of the Soviet Katyn massacre of 1940.
Mieczysław Makary Smorawiński was born December 25, 1893, in Kalisz, then in Russian Empire. There he graduated from a local primary school and then a Russian language trade school. Early in his youth he joined the Zarzewie resistance organization and became one of its leaders in Kalisz. Denunciated, in 1911 he was arrested and sentenced to 6 months in prison in Ekaterinoslav (modern Dnipropetrovsk in Ukraine). After finishing his term he emigrated to Lwów (modern Lviv) in Austro-Hungarian Galicia, where in 1912 he passed his matura exam and joined the Faculty of Chemistry of the Lwów School of Technology. There he also joined the Drużyny Strzeleckie organization, in which he received basic military training.

Stefan_Dąb-Biernacki

Stefan Dąb-Biernacki (7 January 1890 – 9 February 1959) was a general of the army during the Second Polish Republic. He served as a major general in the Polish Army in overall command of strategic reserve Army "Prusy" during the 1939 German Invasion of Poland.

Józef_Czechowicz

Józef Czechowicz (15 March 1903 – 9 September 1939) was an avant-garde Polish poet. Known as a nostalgic, catastrophic author, he was also the leader of the literary avant-garde and bohemians in Lublin. For this visionary poet, verse seemed to be a question of imagination; he would play with word consonances, dreamlike associations, musicality, and create picturesque visions. Czechowicz lived and worked in Lublin before moving to Warsaw; he also died in Lublin, a few days after World War II had started.

Władysław_Belina-Prażmowski

Władysław Zygmunt Belina-Prażmowski (3 May 1888 in Ruszkowiec – 13 October 1938 in Venice), was a Polish cavalryman, colonel and politician.
He was a member of Związek Walki Czynnej since 1909, later Związek Strzelecki. Student of Lwów Politechnic in 1919–1913.
Serving under Józef Piłsudski, he became one of the first Polish soldiers - formally under Austrian command - who entered Russian-held Polish territory during the First World War. Member of Polish Legions, organizer and commander of 1st Regiment of Polish Uhlans and later 1st Brigade of Polish Uhlans. Later he fought in the Polish-Ukrainian War (1918–1919) and Polish-Soviet War (1919–1921). In April 1919 his troops were instrumental in taking Wilno. Piłsudski would declare Belina's cavalry action a most exquisite military action carried out by Polish cavalry in this war.
From 1929 he lived in Kraków and retired from the military. In 1931-1933 he was a mayor of Kraków and from 1933 to 1937, voivode of Lwów. In 1938 he retired from public work due to worsening health; he died later that year, aged fifty.

Mieczysław_Fogg

Mieczysław Fogg (born Mieczysław Fogiel; 30 May 1901, Warsaw – 3 September 1990, Warsaw) was a Polish singer and artist. His popularity started well before World War II and continued well into the 1980s. He had a characteristic way of staying very serious yet slightly emotional on stage when singing. Fogg had a lyric baritone voice and can be compared to French Tino Rossi in style.

Stanisław_Wigura

Stanisław Wigura (9 April 1901 – 11 September 1932) was a Polish aircraft designer and aviator, co-founder of the RWD aircraft construction team and lecturer at the Warsaw University of Technology. Along with Franciszek Żwirko, he won the international air contest Challenge 1932.

Alexander_Imich

Alexander Herbert Imich (February 4, 1903 – June 8, 2014) was a Polish-American chemist, parapsychologist, zoologist and writer who was the president of the Anomalous Phenomena Research Center in New York City. He was born in 1903 in Częstochowa, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire) to a Jewish family.
Imich, a supercentenarian, also became the oldest living man at age 111 after the death of almost 112-year-old Arturo Licata, of Italy, on April 24, 2014. Until his own death a little more than a month later, aged 111 years and 124 days, Imich was certified by Guinness World Records as the world's oldest living man.
Imich was also the last surviving veteran of the Polish-Soviet War.

Stefan_Wiechecki

Stefan Wiechecki (pen-name Wiech; 10 August 1896 – 26 July 1979) was a Polish writer and journalist. He is most fondly remembered for his humorous feuilletons, which chronicled the everyday life of Warsaw and cultivated the Warsaw dialect.
Stefan Wiechecki was born 10 August 1896. In inter-war Poland he collaborated with numerous Warsaw-based newspapers, initially as a court reporter. During numerous trials he documented typical personalities of the poorer, less-known part of the city with its distinctive culture, language and customs. With time he was given his own column in Express Wieczorny evening newspaper, where he published humorous sketches and feuilletons featuring personalities based on people taking part in trials he took part in. They gained much popularity and in late 1930s Wiechecki opened a chocolate shop in the borough of Praga, which became his main source of income.
During the Warsaw Uprising, he was cut off from his house on the other side of the river, in the Old Town. There he collaborated with numerous newspapers published in the Polish-held part of town, notably the Powstaniec. Sharing the fate of the rest of Warsaw's civilians, Wiechecki was forced out of the city after the end of the uprising. However, he returned soon after the town was retaken from the Germans and resumed his duties as a journalist. Some of his humorous stories were published in book form, while others continued to be published by Warsaw-based newspapers.
While criticised by linguists and Polonists for filling the Polish language with trash, he was nevertheless considered a classic of the Warsaw dialect, at that time suppressed by schools along with all other non-standard variations of the literary language. One of the scientists to defend him in numerous articles was Bronisław Wieczorkiewicz, who later published the first monograph on the dialects of Warsaw. A renowned Polish poet Julian Tuwim dubbed Wiechecki the Homer of Warsaw's streets and Warsaw's language, his feuilletons are also mentioned in the works of Antoni Słonimski, Stefan Kisielewski and Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska. He died 26 July 1979 in Warsaw, where he is buried. After 1989 one of the main pedestrian-only zones of downtown Warsaw was officially named the Wiech Passage in honour of Wiechecki.
Wiechecki's novel Cafe pod Minogą was filmed in 1956.