It was Józef Mackiewicz who first drew attention to the numerous Jewish names among Polish Army officers identified during the exhumation in the Katyn Forest in the spring of 1943. The distinguished Polish writer, author of the reportage "Ponary Baza," which Hanna Krall wrote was the best she had ever read about the Holocaust, found himself at the site of this communist atrocity that spring, at the German suggestion but with the consent of the Polish Underground State authorities. He testified to what he saw in his book, " The Case of the Katyn Murder ," published several years later —the first book written on the subject.
There, among the numerous names of Polish officers, he also listed those who were Polish Jews and buried in a common grave, murdered by the NKVD on the orders of the highest Soviet authorities. The largest group among them were doctors. Many had served in the Polish Army since the war with the Bolsheviks, and some had already received officer ranks by then.
Let us remember four of them, contemporaries, born in 1896 in Warsaw, still under Russian rule, who lived there, studied in secondary schools, and then, in independent Poland, graduated from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Warsaw, ran a medical practice and left their loved ones in Warsaw when they went off to war in 1939.
Oak for Second Lieutenant Arcichowski
Jews who studied at the University of Warsaw in that fateful November of 1918, like their Polish colleagues, volunteered for the emerging Polish Army. Most were assigned to the 36th Infantry Regiment of the Academic Legion, whose units were sent to the front near Lviv in the first days of 1919, where fierce fighting was raging against the Ukrainians. Not everyone could cope with the arduous service due to health reasons. This was the case with Mieczysław Arcichowski, a young second-year medical student. A sense of duty compelled him to volunteer for the Academic Legion, but he was assessed as unfit for military service. Only after several months was he assigned, as a medical cadet, to the position of battalion physician of the 13th Infantry Regiment of the 8th Infantry Division, with whose ranks he fought against the Bolsheviks on the Lithuanian-Belarusian front. In the early months of 1920, he attended a medical course in Warsaw, then returned to the front to fight in the Battle of Warsaw in August, including one of the decisive battles in the defeat of the Red Army, near Ossów, and then in the pursuit of the retreating Bolsheviks as far as Volhynia. Demobilized in January 1921, he continued his studies at the University of Warsaw. After graduating in 1927, he worked as an internal medicine physician in Warsaw. He was a member of the Union of Jewish Participants in the Struggle for Polish Independence.
In 1927, Arcichowski was promoted to second lieutenant. Two years later, he was assigned to the 8th Medical Battalion, and later to the Reserve Staff of the 8th District Hospital. In the spring of 1930, he underwent training at the Air Force Non-Commissioned Officer Training Center, where he received a good grade: "An officer with a high sense of honor, a refined character, balanced, fair towards his subordinates, not harsh, caring for his soldiers, dutiful, diligent, ambitious, a good colleague with highly tactful social skills," the justification stated. Two years later, after further training at the 8th District Hospital, the medical chief of the 8th District Medical Command, Colonel Czesław Wincz, recognized him as a very good officer. Second Lieutenant Arcichowski took part in the war against Germany in September 1939, was taken prisoner by the Red Army, imprisoned in the camp in Kozelsk and murdered in Katyn in the spring of 1940.
Many years later, on September 8, 2017, in the Municipal Park in Zielonka, at the initiative of the teaching staff, students from local schools, and other educational institutions, seven Katyn Oaks were planted in honor of seven Polish Army officers. As the project implementers wrote, their goal was to "restore and guarantee their collective, generational memory through planting oak trees. […] Since these heroes came from the eastern borderlands, where it is impossible to commemorate their execution, the most appropriate place to commemorate this tragic event is the area where they fought for Polish identity in 1920." One of them was dedicated to Second Lieutenant of the Reserves, Mieczysław Arcichowski. And perhaps just for the sake of accuracy, and without any grudge against the authors of this noble project, let us note that he, in fact, did not come from the eastern lands of the Republic of Poland, but was a native Varsovian.
"Very conscientious. Hard-working."
Leopold Rafałowski gained such a reputation during the war with the Bolsheviks as deputy commander of the mobile workshops of the 1st Legions Infantry Division, thanks to which his superiors considered him a very good non-commissioned officer, adding to his qualities: "very good-looking, very pleasant in manner."
Like Arcichowski, he joined the Polish Army as a medical student in November 1918, but was assigned not to the 36th Infantry Regiment, like most, but to the 21st Infantry Regiment, which less than two years later earned the nickname "Children of Warsaw." Quickly transferred to the General Command Staff of District No. 1 Warsaw, he attended the Cadet School for the Taborowe Troops from June 1919. After graduating, he was assigned to the 1st Legions Infantry Division in early October 1919, with which he participated the following year in months-long battles against the Bolsheviks, for which the fighting began in early 1920.
After being discharged from the army as a second lieutenant, he returned to his studies at the University of Warsaw, graduating in 1926. He later worked as a surgeon at the Bersohn and Bauman Hospital in Warsaw. He lived with his wife, Balbina, and daughter, Janina, on Senatorska Street. It's worth noting that he spoke three foreign languages: French, German, and Russian.
As a reserve officer, he remained in the wagon train for a long time, assigned to the 9th Wagon Division. In the spring of 1929, he requested a transfer, consistent with his education, which was granted the following year. In 1936, he completed a reserve officer training course at the Sanitary Training Center, obtaining good grades. The evaluation he received stated: "Not very energetic and independent. Very ambitious, dutiful, obedient, and loyal. Physically quite well-developed, but not very durable. Sufficient military aptitude. […] Suitable for the position of junior regimental doctor." Like the other subjects of this sketch, he was in service in September 1939 and perished at Soviet hands the following year.
His wife, Balbina, and daughter, Janina, survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and returned to Poland after the war. Janina was a neurologist and professor of medical sciences. She died in 2017 in Warsaw.
"Due to his moral qualifications, he is worthy of being accepted as an officer of the Polish Army"
A little later, in May 1919, another of the heroes of this story, Hieronim Brandwajn, joined the army. A graduate of the Second Secondary School in Warsaw, where he passed his final exams on the eve of World War I, he immediately left to study at the Psychological Institute in St. Petersburg, but returned to Poland probably in 1915. He began teaching mathematics and Latin in Warsaw's Jewish secondary schools, later combining this with his studies at the University of Warsaw.
In the Polish Army, Brandwajn first served in the 1st Telegraph Battalion, from the autumn of 1919 as an officer cadet. Later, he spent short periods at the spa in Skolimów near Warsaw and in the hospital in Modlin. In March 1920, during the decisive phase of the war with the Bolsheviks, he served as a doctor in the 31st Kaniv Rifle Infantry Regiment, participating in battles with the Red Army on the Lithuanian-Belarusian front. He performed his duties so brilliantly that on July 14, 1920, the officers of the battalion in which he served issued a statement stating that "due to his moral qualifications, he is worthy of being accepted as an officer in the Polish Army."
In early 1921, he was released to the reserve. He returned to his studies at the University of Warsaw, graduated the following year, and began working at the Orthodox Jewish Hospital in Czyste. Later, he was also employed in the health service of the Government Commissariat for the Capital City of Warsaw, in the Jewish emergency service, and ran a private practice. He specialized in gynecology and also attended births. He was active in the professional movement as one of the co-founders of the Association of Jewish Physicians in Poland, representing it in the Association of Physicians of the Polish State. Growing anti-Semitic attitudes within the association led him to resign from it two years before the outbreak of the war.
Hieronim, as his daughter Janina recalled, was "tall, with lush dark hair and brown eyes," which all her friends admired. He was well-educated and spoke five foreign languages—English, French, Hebrew, German, and Russian. However, according to his daughter's recollections, he had learned three more by the outbreak of the war. He lived with his wife, Mira, and their children, Janina and Aleksandra, at 46 Długa Street in Warsaw, near the Old Town. He sympathized with the Zionist movement and planned to emigrate to Palestine, which was prevented by his wife's illness and, later, by the outbreak of the war.
In 1924, he was commissioned a reserve second lieutenant and assigned to the 3rd Sanitary Battalion. Four years later, he undertook training with the 19th Light Artillery Regiment, receiving a very good grade. In 1936, he participated in a reserve officer training course at the Sanitary Training Center. Although his military skills, like those of Leopold Rafałowski, who participated in the same course, were considered average, he achieved good results and was assigned to become a junior medic in the infantry. The course commander, Major Józef Piechura, characterized Second Lieutenant Brandwajn as follows: "Very even-tempered, calm, and composed. Tactful. Quite energetic, yet not very decisive. A friendly man with a developed sense of professional solidarity. Very dutiful and punctual. Obedient, loyal. Physically not very fit, but mobile and resilient."
Shortly before the German invasion of Poland, Second Lieutenant Hieronim Brandwajn was mobilized; "On August 31, 1939, we accompanied Father to the station. Elegant, in a freshly pressed uniform, with a tuberose in his lapel (he received it from a grateful patient – MG), he joked with us, leaned out of the train car window, and that's how he remained in my memory," wrote his daughter Janina years later. He was assigned to Field Hospital No. 303 in Sokółka, later withdrawn to Wołkowysk. There, he was captured by the Soviets and sent as a doctor to the Gorki POW camp, but after indignantly rejecting an offer to become a Soviet citizen, he was deported to Kozelsk. On May 10, 1940, he sent a telegram to his family that he was alive and well. The next day, together with other officers, he found himself on a train destined for the Gniezdowo station, near the Katyn Forest…
Three years later, during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Hieronim's younger brother, Maurycy, also a doctor, was killed. In September 1939, he was one of many who, following an appeal by Colonel Roman Umiastowski, left Warsaw for the east to seek military service. In the Lublin region, he joined Colonel Stefan Hanka-Kulesza's "Dubno" Group, which included various ad hoc Polish Army units, and participated in battles against the Germans in the final phase of the 1939 campaign, including the largest one at Kamionka Strumiłowa.
The Brandwajn brothers fell victim to communist and Nazi totalitarianism. Their wives were killed by the Germans during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. But their daughters abandoned them in the first months of 1943, and all three, hidden from the Germans by Poles, survived the war.
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The character and sense of duty of these Jewish officers, who joined the Polish Army as young men and, many years later, defended Poland against the Germans as adults, only to perish at the hands of the Soviets, whose repulse they helped to achieve in 1920, is perhaps best symbolized by the attitude of the fourth of these Warsaw doctors, Second Lieutenant of the Reserves Szymon Lewinson, born in 1896. A urologist from the hospital in Czyste, where his colleague was Hieronim Brandwajn, learned of the mobilization during his vacation stay in Truskawiec, a borderland town.
In the last days of August 1939, returning to Warsaw by train was no longer possible. So he hired a taxi. "We traveled all day and all the following night, stopping only briefly to eat when the opportunity arose," recalled his daughter, Janina, who accompanied him. She remembered that her father's uniform from the war with the Bolsheviks "hung in the closet among the civilian clothes, and I sometimes looked at it. There were also two medals in the house, a faded photograph of a slim, handsome officer [...] and a rifle bullet that had once wounded my father in the leg. These mementos from his military past were preserved with great care." This care allows us to understand the source of this understanding of duty—as Second Lieutenant Brandwajn's daughter wrote, her father "was a Jew, proud of his nationality, a Zionist, which did not prevent him from faithfully serving the country in which he was born and of which he was a citizen."
Marek Gałęzowski – PhD, graduate of the Institute of History of the Jagiellonian University, employee of the Institute of National Remembrance Archives, member of the Biographical Commission of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences; from 2015 to 2022 he was a professor at Lazarski University. The author of numerous books and articles, his research includes the biographies of participants in the struggle for Poland's independence in the first half of the 20th century, including Polish Jews. He recently devoted the latter topic to the books: Jews Fighting for Poland (Znak Horyzont) and "Tam, gdzie niestrasz, włady przez Pierwszy" (Where the Greatest Danger Was, the First to Go). Profiles of Jews – Participants in the Struggle for Poland's Independence and Borders in the Years 1914–1921 (IPN).
