Climb or Crash

By Andrew Zakrzewski

Andrew is born in Poland during WWII. His father is a retired Polish army colonel and the family must leave as the country is being taken over by Soviets. Andrew describes his childhood growing up as refugees with his two older brothers in England, and then emigrating to South America for 10 years. In Argentina his family breaks up, and Andrew, his mother and brother Richard migrate to the United States. Andrew strives to adapt again to a new society, discovers his desire to emulate his father and takes steps to prepare himself for a career in the military.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781304545558

Book preview

Climb or Crash

Climb Or Crash

Andrew Zakrzewski

Climb or Crash

Second Edition

Copyright © 2013 by Andrew Zakrzewski

ISBN: 978-304-54555-8

All rights reserved.

Other books by Andrew Zakrzewski:

Captain Wedge’s School of Hard Knocks (2008)

Climb or Crash (2013)

Dive, Skyhawks! (2013)

Captains of the Nether Skies (2013)

Dedication

This story I dedicate to my old high school and college chum, my first and last Brooklyn friend and sidekick, Norman Weissman, with whom I would reunite forty years later.  His relentless spirit and yearning to escape his humble and mundane background accepted no boundaries.  Through him I perceived that I, too, could reach for adventure.  Yet I took the easy way out, joining the Marines, who would train me and prepare me and send me forth into untold places, situations and adventures, while Norman did it rather the hard way, pushing and dragging and willing himself through thick and thin, and at his own expense.

If it were not for Norman, I might have never reached for the skies.

Acknowledgment

Many thanks to our brothers Maciej and Richard and sister-in-law Barbara, especially for making available the old family photographs, as well as my wife Patricia for their support and input on this project.

Prolog

In a television interview in the 1980’s I saw Ray Bradbury, the great SciFi writer and creator of many films and TV shows, describe how he recalled the very moment of his own birth – he even claimed to remember passing through the birth canal – and how vivid were his recollections as an infant.  As for me, my earliest memory must have happened when I was about two years of age.

The train was rolling ponderously on its tracks somewhere in the European night.  Each passenger compartment could accommodate a couple of people in relative comfort and privacy, but this compartment had some half-dozen folks sitting up on the bunks, restlessly trying to sleep.  Suddenly the window shattered noisily, and everybody awoke with a start.  A shard of glass sliced into my mother’s wrist.  Someone turned off the compartment light, and I saw a middle-aged man in a military overcoat draw a large revolver from his pocket and scan the darkness outside. The train continued rolling along.My mother’s injury was slight, and the bullet that had shattered the window went unanswered, as the darkness made it impossible to discern what was happening outside.

This is my earliest remembrance, and I don’t really know how much of it is actual fact, or how much is fantasy, or how it really squares with what I know about my infancy.  My mother did have a scar across one of her wrists, straight and narrow, and I always fantasized that it must have been from that night’s occurrence.

From my mother’s telling, I was born in Warsaw, Poland, in the summer of 1943.  But Warsaw was in a constant state of occupation or siege during World War II, my father was being pursued by the Gestapo, and at the time of my birth we were evacuated out of the city itself and staying at a nearby private estate, Czaryż Mansion, where I actually was born – Mother had said that, to keep things simple in the future, she reported me as having been born in Warsaw.  The birth certificate, of which I have nothing left but an old photostatic copy, was actually recorded after the war, in 1945.  I do wear even today a small gold birth-medal with the image of the Black Madonna and Child, a renowned Polish religious icon[1].  On the obverse of the medal the engraving reads A. Z. / 20.VIII.43 / Czaryż.

Mother described how, at the end of the war, Poland was being overrun by Soviet troops now that the Germans were on the run.   In her mind, she figured the Russians would be a far worse host to contend with than even the Nazis had been.

The Nazis, as mean and bloodthirsty as they were, at least had a code of rules and regulations that you could count on, she would say.  But the Russian army, now, that was an unpredictable, lawless horde.

She would compare the ethnic traits between Poles, Germans and Soviets.

If the Germans decided to search your house, or interrogate you, you could often mislead them.  But those Russians, they were naturally cunning – they had a sixth sense about such stuff, as if they could read a Polak’s mind – you couldn’t pull the wool over their eyes, no-way.

She sensed that a new political order was about to come down, and she made haste, with my two older brothers and me, to leave the scene and seek other places.

Surely my brothers, five and six years older than I, must have been on that train ride.  Their memories should be fresher than mine, and more accurate.  As far as I know, I don’t remember them being there – and what about my father? – was he the military figure with the revolver?  He was actually 50 years old when I was born.  According to Mother, he had just been released from a concentration camp in Germany and had reappeared in Poland, at the eleventh hour, to reunite with us.

The Siren[2], with sword & shield, symbol of Warsaw’s 1944-45 Uprising.

Many of my memories are inexact and surely distorted.  I do not care so much for research and correction of the facts as they may have truly been, but I am content in relating my observations and remembrances with all their haziness and lack of precision as if these were the important components of my total life experience.  With apologies to my brothers and other contemporaries, I do not necessarily intend for this to be an accurate historical record but rather an in-depth portrait of my own identity.

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[1] The original icon is at the famous shrine of Częstochowa – some say a defect in the medieval pigment caused the skin color of the Madonna and Child to take on a dark coloring, but since it originated in the Holy Lands where folks tend to have a darker complexion, this might not be so.

[2] With apologies for the quality of the image – on bottom margin Mother writes that this Siren (or Mermaid) monument was near our last address in Warsaw, on Red Cross Street, before we left the city.

Chapter 1 – The Fighting Wyskotas

Zakrzewski is not an uncommon name in the Polish language.  Any name that ends in –ski simply refers to an origin or location.  Here the root word is Krzewo, or bush, Za krzewo meaning behind (or beyond) the bush.  Even my brother Richard, who made his career as an electronics engineer at the CBS Television headquarters in New York City, had once asked me if I had any idea who a certain Alex Zakrzewski was.  The name came up on his CBS employee roster but he didn’t know his person.  I have personally seen this name at the end of some CBS shows as the final credits scrolled on the TV screen, even after Richard had retired.  In fact, I have just recently seen that same name appear in the credits, as Director, on the recent ABC-TV series 666 Park Avenue which premiered in the fall of 2012.

When I was engaged in some militaristic cadet activities in my high school and college years, I met a cadet from the Bronx with the same surname (was he the same Alex?).  What impressed me was that when they addressed him, they pronounced his name quite correctly.  I had resigned myself to being called Zakroosky, as American folks are likely to pronounce these Polish names.  Now I realized that all I had to do was to be persistent to get people to pronounce my name properly.

The trick is to discourage them from pronouncing the W as oo and instead teach them to say it as in the German usage, sounding like a V, or even an F.  For instance, a famous German composer’s name might be spelled as Richard Wagner but is properly pronounced Vagner (or even Fagner), and the word Volkswagen, for instance, would thus correctly be pronounced Folks-Vagen.  So, the Polish W is always pro-nounced like a V.  Anyway, I would thenceforth explain to Americans (if you can get them to listen for a minute) that the name is pronounced, like, Zakx-eff-ski.  My mother, hailing from the southern part of Poland, would favor a rather silent W and would say Zakxe’sski, – but let’s discourage the Zakroosky pronunciation.

On my birth certificate it says Andrzej Bolesław Wyskota-Zakrzewski.  The W-word refers to our ancient warlord heritage dating back to the year 1058, at about which time the Polish adopted the western custom of using surnames.  Our principal ancestor of the Wyssogota clan, in 1390, came up with Zakrzewski, after the town of Zakrzewo – literally, from beyond the bush.  My father mentioned that my two brothers and I are the 17th generation of uninterrupted descent from this noble clan.  So, even though the Z surname is not uncommon, the W connection sets it out as being of noble heritage.

There is a coat of arms of the family.  The Federal-style shield is split vertically with one half bearing a checkerboard and the other a half-Fleur-de-Lis.  Over the shield is a five-barred baronet’s helmet crested with a miniature knight holding half a cartwheel in one hand and a broadsword in the other.  In my mother’s jewelry stash there was a plain gold signet-ring with this coat of arms carved in Onyx.  When we lived in Brooklyn I became fascinated with this ring and tried to cast a copy of the signet seal – I tried concrete, model airplane glue, epoxy and so forth, but I never could get a casting that would last.  I expected that Richard, being the firstborn, would eventually take claim over this family crest, although in those days he showed no interest in it.

The stone kept falling out of the setting, so one day in Brooklyn I took the ring to a local jeweler and had it reset, at my own expense – but the guy did such a horrid job of it that I doubt anyone would be willing to wear it again – but at least, he didn’t damage the stone.  When I was in the Marine Corps, Richard did have a duplicate of this ring made for me, I suppose since I was the one in the family willing to pursue a military career.  I believe he kept the ring for safekeeping when I went to war and I never got to keep it.

I don’t have any natural children of my own, brother Maciej has three daughters, two living in Argentina and one in the U.S., and Richard’s two sons, Mark and John, don’t show any rush to get married and start multiplying their species.  Richard and Barbara had done their own genealogical research, and their version of the family tree suggests that we are actually of the 15th generation.  With no male descendants, will our noble clan die out in its 17th – or 18th – generation?

Back in the 10th century, Poland began to develop its potential as a very progressive world power under its ruler Mieszko (or Mieczysław) the First.  The lord Mieszko decided he was fed up with being treated like a heathen and having to endure harassment and disdain from the surrounding powerful nations.  So, he married a Christian princess and forced all his subjects to convert to Christianity in the year A.D. 966, and to adopt western customs.  This scene of beating back paganism and substituting Christianity was a common theme all over northern Europe in those times[1].  Mieszko was thus the first Christian prince of Poland, but his son Bolko the Brave (or Bolesław, which was my middle name), was personally close to the Holy Roman Emperor Otto, who formally crowned him as the first King of Poland.  The 11th century was the heyday of Polish military might and culture as Europe emerged from the Dark Ages.  Trappings of nobility aside, to keep things simple in the new world order, Mother figured I should change my name to simply Andrew Zakrzewski when I became a U.S. citizen in 1963.

During the time of Napoleon Bonaparte, Poland had been the most important ally of the Emperor of the French, and upon his defeat at Waterloo and the subsequent Congress of Vienna of 1815, the winning powers reinstated the French monarchy with Louis XVIII as the new King of France.  Poland was punished by being partitioned into three sectors ruled by Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany for the next hundred years.  My father, coming from a long lineage of Polish warlords, had his own baptism by fire during World War I.  At the time, the Polish nation had yet to re-integrate, so since he was born and raised in Sliesia, a province of western Poland under German rule, he was thus expected to serve the Kaiser and was, in fact, a young officer in the Prussian army, a wounded veteran of the battle of Verdun in France and a recipient of two Iron Crosses.

Young Polish officer Wyskota-Zakrzewski, c. 1920.  Note the signet-ring and the traditional Polish four-cornered kepi.

Before the Armistice of 1918 that was to end The Great War (WWI), Lieutenant Władysław Bronisław von Wyskota-Zakrzewski had been put in charge of a German military armory or arsenal on Polish territory.  In response to a German and Austrian crackdown on their growing nationalistic fervor, the local people decided to jump the gun, literally, and take arms against their foreign oppressors in a conflict known as The Uprising of [the province of] Wielkopolska.  The young officer decided to support the Uprising, which, of course, would spell the end of his career in the Prussian army, but simultaneously made him a hero to the Polish folk and gave him a good boost into a new career in the future Polish army.  Now as a Polish officer, he soon distinguished himself in 1920 during the Battle of Warsaw[2] and was awarded the Virtuti Militari, Poland’s most prestigious decoration.  My mother met him at a social function when she was at university and she usually called him Władziu (same as Liberace, the flamboyant Hollywood entertainer, was called by his mother), so we’ll just call him Wład.

Wład was eventually blessed with a great opportunity to further his military career by being selected to attend a prestigious French military academy or war college.  Unfortunately while at school he received word that his father was gravely ill, and he was obliged to go back home to watch him die.  His father lingered on a while, while Wład’s prolonged absence from the war college ended up costing him his graduation.  His military career in peacetime was lackluster, and he had suffered some ill health that forced him to retire early from the Army.  He ran for political office locally, with some success.

Right after the German Blitzkrieg in 1939 Wład managed to rejoin the Army as a staff officer, but at the first skirmish his unit was immediately captured by the Germans.  He escaped by pretending he was ill and spent the rest of the war dodging the Nazi occupation forces.

After a few heroic counter-attacks, the Polish military in the west had scattered, but many continued fighting savagely in the east as far as Ukraine and Lithuania while others filtered their way through Europe to join British forces in England and North Africa.  Warsaw, however, was firmly under German occupation and there was no Polish military presence – only bitter underground civilian resistance.

Initially the Soviets to the east had a non-aggression pact with Hitler and should have stayed out of the conflict, but the rich farmlands of eastern Europe that had been ceded to Poland twenty years previously in the Treaty of Versailles were too powerful of a lure to resist, so the Russians saw a chance to claw back some territory.  The remnants of the Polish forces thus had to fight two foes – the Nazis as well as the Soviets – but were soon engulfed by the enormous Russian army and had to give up the fight.  By then, Hitler had broken his non-aggression pact with the Soviets and was moving on Russia.  The Soviets were now thrown into alliance with the Allies, but for a couple years the old Polish army had simply disappeared.  Eventually the Allies demanded an accounting of the whereabouts of this huge ragtag force, and grudgingly the Soviets allowed the Polish units to re-emerge under the leadership of Polish General Władysław Anders.  Shoddily re-armed, they were sent to Iran to watch over the Persian oil fields.

In 1943, German forces moving into Russia discovered mass graves of over 20,000 Polish men, mostly army officers and NCOs, but also intellectuals and local civic leaders, in the forest of Katyń Woods.  The Soviets had cleverly framed the Nazis, as the NKVD, or Russian secret police, had used German ammunition in the killings, but the Germans blamed the Soviets.  International commissions investigated the situation, as much as could be done in the middle of a world war.  40 years later, during the Soviet Détente, the Russians finally admitted that the Polish officers had been murdered on orders from Josef Stalin.

By 1944, General Anders and his Polish Corps had moved out of the shadow of the Russians and had regained some muscle on their Soviet-starved frames, later to fight bitterly alongside British and American forces in Africa, then Italy.  Eventually the Polish managed to dislodge the crack German paratroopers holding the monastery at Monte Cassino, but they suffered heavy casualties.  The songs say that the red poppies that grow on those Italian hills are born of Polish blood.

As for Wład, he had merged into the Warsaw underground.  Much later, in Argentina in the late 1970’s, he had been compiling a book about the resistance efforts by the AK – Armja Krajowa – or underground resistance force that continued opposing the German occupation.

During the winter of 1944-45, sensing that the Germans were soon to lose the war, the Warsawians strived to throw them off before the allied Russians swept in.  The AK made a huge effort to stage the Great Warsaw Uprising[3], but their desperate requests for support from the American and British allies fell on deaf ears.  Some emergency air-drops of weapons and food for the Warsawian AK were scheduled, but for one pretext or another, the deliveries were canceled.  By then, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill had already forged a deal with Stalin to let the Soviets march all the way through Poland and into Germany to claim victory against the Nazis.  The Warsaw Uprising failed that winter and many were killed and starved.

My mother said that, besides having been starved by the famine in Warsaw, I was an infant sickly with the red diarrhea and folks kept wondering why she just wouldn’t let go of the skinny little semi-corpse she insisted in carrying around – under the circumstances, no one would have batted an eye.  Once she got ahold of a ripe tomato and saw me make a grab for it and try to eat it.  I knew then that you had the will to live, she would tell me, many years later.  Older Polish folks who remember those days have no love for American – or British – politicians.

As my mother tells it, Wład’s contribution during the Warsaw Uprising and other resistance activities actually were minor, as there was some concern that he wasn’t particularly street smart and might unwittingly compromise the secrecy needed to conduct those underground operations.  He was, in fact, captured more than once, and even shot, on the streets of Warsaw by Gestapo operatives.  I saw that bastard Gestapo agent aiming for my leg – he wanted to take me alive, so they could torture and interrogate me, wrote Wład many years later.  The Nazis had a file that related to his gallant service in the Kaiser’s army in WWI, and he could speak German perfectly – which accounted for his being interned in a death camp instead of being summarily executed on the streets like any common underground activist.

The death camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau and others identified with the Jewish Holocaust have become a rallying symbol for pro-Jewish and Israeli sentiments during more recent times.  Unfortunately, it seems that the other atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis against other ethnic and nationalistic groups seem to have been eclipsed in the process of promoting holocaust museums and such.  It must be remembered that there were many other concentration and death camps, like Wład’s camp in Dora, Germany, where millions of other non-Jewish but Polish, Gypsy and other peoples have also perished.

At war’s end, as the Germans retreated deeper into their