The Insane Story Of My Polish Grandparents During WW2 (part 1)

Adam & Mia vs Evil

The following is a rough account of my notes that I've accumulated over the years. We've been compiling this story for a very long time and it’s not quite there yet, so this is a quick summary of what we know about my grandparents and what happened to them during the war.

There are many people out there with awesome relatives, but these are mine, and it stupefies me that this stuff is real. These people caused me to happen and are the reason why I am sitting here in my pyjamas about to tell you the stories that I was told when I was young, when I thought Poland was a mythical place, a land that had ceased to exist. I never knew either of my grandfathers but I know them as I know my favourite characters in books — stories, stories all the damned way.

I’ll divide this into two parts — this is the paternal story, in which everyone is crazy and there are action sequences. I’ll write up my mum’s parents later because that story is more of a Danielle Steel.

Mia was born in Katowice , in a German-speaking part of Poland. She was the very well-to-do daughter of a banker, very well-educated and a total socialite. She was a flapper who danced, drank, flirted and according to family legend was a close friend (or cousin of, depending who you talk to) of Marlene Dietrich’s. As a teenager she was shot while out hunting: the bullet remained lodged in her leg until she died because, I quote, “why remove it, it’s happy where it is”.

She met my grandfather Adam at university in Warsaw, though we’re not sure what she was studying. He was studying engineering, and she later proved to know her way around technical equipment, so we can assume either she studied the same or that she picked things up fast. He also had a quite famous eye for the ladies and was quite a well-known figure, racing around on his motorbike; clearly he saw a Good Thing when she spangled past, so they courted, got on extremely well, and got married.

In 1939.

Three months before Germany invaded Poland and World War 2 broke out.

Things get a bit tricky to trace from here. Adam’s story is an easy one to follow but Mia stayed in Warsaw for no reason we can find, though our current thinking is that while Adam was in the air force and therefore safe, she simply did not get away from the invasion in time. What we do know is that she came very close to being sent to the camps but was saved by her fluency in German — as a result she was put to work repairing army typewriters and “general equipment”. She worked as a courier for the resistance and did her best to sabotage what she could, but she was stuck in Nazi-occupied Warsaw and never spoke much about that time, nor what she saw before or after the Warsaw Uprising.

For Mia, her story goes dark.

Adam, meanwhile, was in the air force. He brought up my dad (who also went into engineering) on the horrifically scary stories of 1930s aeronautics and flimsy plane design. Somehow — my dad knows the answer to this but I can’t get him on the phone — he ended up being part of a guard for a gold convoy. The details of this such as the route and eventual destination are all things we've been trying to find out, but I don’t speak/read Polish and my dad is incredibly busy, so progress is slow.

Point is: Adam was guarding a gold convoy, and the idiot got lost (stranded, my dad says). The gold convoys made it! Success! But Adam didn’t quite.

Imagine it. He escapes, exhausted, into Switzerland and thinks he’s okay. Unfortunately he’s so relaxed about the supposedly neutral Swiss he gets arrested and the Swiss decide they’re going to put him on a German train; just so happens he’s near a station where they’re moving prisoners of war into Germany. He’s escorted to the station and they shove him into a long, narrow, dimly-lit room between platforms with a closed door at the far end. The room is full of men who are all tired, quiet, and forlorn. The guards lock the door behind him. He keeps walking through the room, looking for familiar faces or uniforms. No one meets his eye. It’s quiet as the grave in there. Everyone is hollow-cheeked and tired — there is barely even the sound of breathing. No one notices him as he makes his way to the door at the other end. No, he thinks. One of these poor fellows must have tried this door, and who would leave a door unlocked when they’re transferring prisoners of war anyway? Adam is a scientist, though. He is thorough. He tries the door.

The jammy git walks right out of the room and onto an adjacent platform where a train is preparing to leave for France. He jumps on it and sods off.

Because of an unlocked door.

In later years he said that he knew some of the men in the room followed because he heard the door creak and heard footsteps running down the platform, but he always felt bad about leaving the rest in the room. The way he told the story to my dad made it sound like he had only minutes to make his escape, but who wouldn't feel guilty? It’s the easiest, silliest escape, but they were so tired, so dispirited, they didn't even notice.

Adam didn't have a very high opinion of the Swiss after that.

So he wanders out of Switzerland into France. This would be December 1939 or thereabouts, and it’s cold. There is no food. He may or may not be alone — whether he was joined or whether people from the railway station stayed with him, it’s unclear, but we do know that he was tramping around for quite a while before he fell ill and nearly died from pneumonia.

He slept in manure for a while to keep warm and the shit literally saved his life. (My dad wants to add that this manure was in a cattle shed. This changes nothing.)

Eventually he makes it to Marseilles, a free port. Yay! He’s delighted until he hears German spoken and realises there’s a German fleet in the actual port. He steals a camera and takes photos of the fleet, pockets the film, and jumps on a boat to Algeria, where he’s taken in by the Foreign Legion and recovers for a while. He is then able to swap the film for passage to the UK, because if nothing else my grandfather was clearly a canny bastard and it was generally accepted that after this incident the Brits had him spying for them on many occasions. More on that later.

He cheats death again while stationed in Scotland, training reconnaissance pilots. They used open top planes with seat belts in those days, and while sitting in the second cockpit he was crouching down to adjust something (one can only imagine what), his co-pilot decided with absolutely no warning to invert the plane. As in, flew upside down.

Immediately Adam sticks out his elbows so he’s jammed into his cockpit and realises that he doesn't have his seat belt on. (MORON.) He’s stuck there for a good minute or so, upside down over the wilds of Scotland, liable to fall out at any second.

Co-pilot glances around to ask a question and can’t see him. He panics and corrects the plane and looks around wildly, only for Adam to slowly rise from the cockpit, alive and well, but also incredibly pissed off.

He spends a while in Scotland, but it’s of more and more import that MI5 knew of him at this time. Adam was never allowed to fly in battle because he was considered too valuable, and Polish pilots were renowned for having a bit of a death wish. He’s later posted in London, near Victoria.

It should be mentioned here that he thought Mia was dead. He kept trying to get messages smuggled to her but Warsaw was rubble and very little news was coming out, let alone about one solitary woman who has not been seen or heard from since the start of the war. The silence was so complete that he decided she was gone, and at some point started having an affair with an English socialite. We have a photo of her, and a name, but that’s another part of this story we’re still looking into. Apparently there were actresses too, and Adam was big fan of Soho night life. He definitely enjoyed London, all while involved in reconnaissance, troop surveillance and various other things, though he was never in active service over Germany, and seems to have spent his entire war spying, running and carousing.

ADDITIONAL NOTE FROM MY DAD IN CAPSLOCK: I THINK AT SOME TIME HE ALSO HELPED WITH ENSURING THE V1 ATTACKS HIT SURREY RATHER THAN LONDON BY ENSURING THE NEWS REPORTS CONSISTENTLY INDICATED THAT THE DOODLEBUGS WERE OVERSHOOTING LONDON.

Sorry, Surrey.

Mia’s story picks up again from around here, around late 1944 or early 1945. Messages start getting through. SHE’S ALIVE! Messages are exchanged with far more ease now he’s managed to get himself in the position to pull strings, and eventually a rescue plan is hatched — they’re to meet by a particular station in Warsaw at a particular time. When I say he managed to “pull strings”, by the way, I mean he somehow managed to convince the British officers who still thought he was valuable to drop him behind enemy lines. We think he took the opportunity to, let’s say, run a few errands while he was there, but the main point was to get his wife out.

Adam literally parachutes into Nazi-occupied territory to meet the wife he has not seen or heard from for most of the war. It has been years. He thought she was dead, only to discover that by some miracle she’s survived. He’s gone through hell since he last saw her. He knows he’s been changed by his experiences, and can only imagine what she’s lived through under the Nazis. He is in disguise, because the only way to get through Warsaw unquestioned is if you’re dressed like a local.

The first thing she says upon seeing him?

“OH, YOU FOOL. YOU’RE WEARING TARTAN SOCKS.”

Bloody clever woman, Mia.

PRO TIP: do not wear tartan socks in enemy territory when you are supposed to be undercover as a local person who definitely has nothing to do with Scotland.

This is the end of the war for them, effectively. They were flown back to Surrey where there were problems bringing Mia back to the UK, meaning she was never allowed to work here. This is a woman who was once went to university, used her education, now unable to work. It was quite a blow. Neither went back to Russian-occupied Poland because various family members who tried were shot for assisting the allies, and it was generally accepted that they were never going back because the Poland they knew was gone, blasted out of existence. Adam — who later become something of a UFO expert — died of cancer in the early 1980s, while Mia died in the mid Nineties after a stroke. We found a gun amongst her belongings that she kept “just in case”. We still live in the house that my grandfather bought incredibly cheaply because it was severely bomb-damaged, and they both left huge piles of photographs, notes and papers that we've been shifting through for over twenty years now.

So, this is a REALLY rough summary. One day I’ll scan in photos of them, just because they were a handsome couple, and I'm never not delighted by them.

Tomorrow: my maternal grandmother, Colditz, the cake shop and the Gestapo.