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Their Story in a Nutshell
Anna was a 12 year old farm girl when the Russians invaded Dzisna in September of 1939. Surviving that occupation and
the German occupation that followed in 1941, she was eventually taken by the Germans during their retreat from the advancing
Red Army in 1944, to a Chemnitz aircraft factory for slave labour. She managed to escape with 2 brothers during
an Allied bombing raid and fled to Italy via Austria. At one point on the journey, younger brother Andrzej, starved and weak, fell
into a coma and was given up for dead but revived to witness the sight of his sister grieving his death.
Bronislaw was a teacher in Drohobycz and a reserve artillery officer who first engaged the German
army during the blitzkrieg of September 1939. Surviving capture by the Germans, he was able to return to teaching but
was eventually deported on the 10th of Fenruary, 1940 to a labour camp in Siberia by the Soviets. While there, he spent
5 months in prison for "counterrevolutionary" activities. Freed, he joined the Polish Army in the southern U.S.S.R. and fought
in Italy under General Anders.
With the Soviet occupation of Poland in 1945, the war did not end for him and his comrades. Now living in Canada, they
kept busy raising funds for the Polish Government in Exile in London and lobbying on behalf of a free Poland. He was
awarded the "Kawaler Polonia Restituta" for his patriotic devotion to Poland.
Bronislaw Sokolowski (r) with cousin Stanislaw Pola
These men have just re-joined the Polish army in Guzar, Uzbekistan in June of 1942 after having escaped slavery and
imprisonment in Soviet Siberia.
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