HERE is a recent column from European Voice, with an uplifting story for the weekend

In early 1986 I bought a flimsy paperback in a dusty émigré club in west London. “Wojtek spod Monte Cassino: opowieść o niezwykłym niedźwiedziu” (“Wojtek from Monte Cassino: the tale of an unusual bear”) seemed to be aimed at children, which suited me fine (I was learning Polish in the vague belief that it might somehow help topple communism).

At first sight the story seemed implausible, if uplifting. Some children had adopted a bear cub somewhere on their travels, which had then become a Polish army mascot in the Second World War. I mentally named it ‘Winnie the Pooh goes to war'.

But I soon realised that this was not propagandistic fiction for patriotic young émigrés. It was fact. The children were part of the extraordinary exodus of up to 300,000 Poles, ragged, starving and traumatised, from Stalin's gulag to British-occupied Persia in 1941.

Wojtek grew huge, while behaving like a human: he shared the soldiers' beer and cigarettes and even helped carry ammunition. His story stretched from the Caucasus mountains to Monte Cassino (one of the fiercest battles of the Allied liberation of Italy) and ended in Edinburgh zoo in 1963. To the last, he was visited by his former comrades in arms, and reacted eagerly to their familiar Polish greetings.

The neglected hero of a forgotten slice of history enthralled me. But as a student in Poland a few months later, I found my new friends in Cracow mystified by my laboured attempts to explain the soldier-bear's story. The official history of People's Poland had no room for those – human or ursine – who had fought alongside the Western imperialists. Just as many Polish military heroes had become ‘unpersons', Wojtek was an ‘unbear'.

Belatedly, that has changed. I have just been to the London premiere of a film about Wojtek, partly sponsored by Polish television. The little girl who first cuddled him, Irena Bokiewicz, is still alive and features in the film. So does the last surviving member of his unit, Wojciech Narebski. Now aged 86, he was at the premiere, in neat but faded Polish army uniform. Others with first-hand memories of Wojtek were there too.

Telling the history of the 20th century is hard. I was recently trying to explain the Soviet deportations of 1940 from the Baltic states, Poland and what is now Ukraine to an intelligent teenager. I explained how the NKVD banged on your door in the middle of the night, barked “collect your things” and a few minutes later marched people–mainly women, the elderly and children, because the men were already prisoners elsewhere–to cattle wagons that would take them to Siberia.

My young friend's eyes widened. She asked: “Why didn't someone call the police?” The Wojtek film (produced by Animal Monday and Braidmade films) answers that question with a compelling mixture of interviews and animation. It is also a poignant reminder of how the Poles who won the war lost their homeland: Wojtek ended up behind bars in Edinburgh; many of his fellow-combatants who returned to Poland ended up in nastier captivity.

Wojtek is an ally in the struggle of memory against forgetting. But his story is also about human kindness and ingenuity. An online family of Wojtek fans (disclosure: my brother is a leading light in it) stretches from Poland to New Zealand, via Iran, Israel and Scotland. The idea of a bear who behaved like a human, and could guard his gigantic strength so carefully that he would wrestle with his friends without hurting them, is bewitching. You can get a glimpse of the loved and lovable Niedźwiedźhere.