Dancing for Anders’ Army

As I’ve mentioned before, my principal hobby is not dancing but learning Polish. Last week I discussed with my Polish tutor the differences between celebrations of November 11 in the United Kingdom and in Poland. In the United Kingdom, as in Canada, it is Remembrance Day and melancholy. In Poland it is Dzień Niepodległości, i.e. Independence Day, and merry, for it marks the 1918 end of the partitions of Poland by Austria, Prussia and Russia.

My Scottish great-grandfather (above) was a sapper during World War I, and his Canadian son (above) commanded an anti-aircraft gun during World War II. I am sufficiently old-fashioned to be proud of these facts and realistic enough to imagine my grandfather telling me to stuff my pride in my ear. If we were to argue the point, I would point to the St. Crispin speech in Henry V, which he presumably saw in film form, if not in 1944 when he was rather busy. Also, it may have crossed his 20th century mind that any future grandchildren could boast that he had done his duty unlike So-and-So’s grandchildren, who would have to borrow his medals for school projects (and, in fact, did).

My grandfather didn’t say much about the war, but he did tell my mother about being bombed by the Americans in a regrettable friendly fire incident during the Battle of the Falaise Pocket. In sharing this story with Mum, he gave me a present that I opened ten years ago when I discovered both that a night school classmate’s Polish father had been there and that my new friend Roman’s Polish father had been there, too. The Battle of the Falaise Pocket was suffered and won by combined Canadian and Polish forces, General Stanisław Maczek’s First Armoured Division having been attached to the First Canadian Army in July/August 1944.

I write all this to give due Remembrance Day respect both to my own menfolk and to Maczek’s Army, for I’m about to write about General Władysław Anders’ Army or, rather, the most unusual part of it–after Wojtek the Bear, of course. I’m thinking of the Polska Parada cabaret.

Hopefully everyone reading knows that Poland was invaded by Germany on September 1, 1939 and by Russia on September 17, 1939. Between them Hitler and Stalin smashed, inter alia, an incredibly vibrant and sophisticated musical culture. The Russians rounded up any eastern Pole in leadership or with leadership potential and shot him or marched him to Siberia or deported him and his family elsewhere. However, they were more lenient with some famous actors and musicians, like the singer Adam Aston (think: the Polish Bing Crosby) or the composer Henryk Wars (think: the Polish Irving Berlin). After Russia joined the Allies in June 1941, it released General Anders from prison and allowed him to create a Polish army from other released Polish prisoners and deportees.

Big stars like Adam Aston, Henryk Wars, Kazimierz Krukowski, Konrad Tom and Feliks “Ref-Ren” Konarski all joined Anders Army, in the Polish Second Corps, as combination soldiers-entertainers. Their “Polska Parada “cabaret was joined by such women performers as singer Renata Bogdańska (born Irena Jarosiewicz), who later married Anders himself, and dancer Elżbieta Niewiadomska. They travelled with the Polish Second Corps through Iraq, Iran, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Italy, where the Second Corps fought in three very bloody and decisive battles, including the final Battle of Monte Cassino, which they won on May 18, 1944. My Polish god-daughter’s great-grandfather was there, and so was the man who ran Edinburgh’s Leatherwork until 2021. Cześć I chwała bohaterom.

Florence was liberated by the Poles and other Allied forces in September 1944, and according to the photograph above, the Polska Parada cabaret had a concert on December 18, 1944. A pile of English-language programmes from this concert ended up in an antique shop in Falkland, Fife.

I was allowed to take two for free. I have given one to my Polish god-daughter’s father, and the other I forgot in the back of a picture frame until recently. When I had a look, I was stunned, for I realised that names “Adam Aston” and “Henryk Wars” didn’t mean the composers but the performers. They were actually there.

(To put this into perspective, my first Polish reading material consisted of 1930s tango and foxtrot songs, or as one reader once called them, “Babcia [grandmother] music”, and their names appeared rather prominently.)

It is unclear how many dance performances went along with the music during the Florence show, but the programme itself suggests the execution of a “Polish folk dance”, the Polka, a Rumba solo, and a Mazurka. I am curious to know what “Debut” was and what the “Dance Parody” looked like. I am also somewhat suspicious of the English translations–just as I now am of all English translations of anything written by St. Pope John Paul II.

The appearance of the stack of “Polish Parade 1944” programmes in Fife is less of a mystery, for the Polish II Corps’ last European stop was Britain. Some soldiers (like Henryk Wars) went on to America, and some to Australia, but many–like General Anders, Renata Bogdańska (then Irena Anders) and Adam Aston lived out their exile in the United Kingdom. By 1947, when Polish Second Corps was disbanded, it was horribly clear that thousands of returning Polish soldiers were being persecuted, imprisoned, and shot by the Soviet-controlled Communist regime in Poland. Thus, the British government did the one decent thing they felt they could do post-Yalta (never mention Yalta) and passed the Polish Resettlement Act 1947.