Zyqmunt Wilk: Lived in Poland during World
War II
Zyqmunt W. Wilk was born in a small town Poland in the late 1920’s. During his early life, he lived on a farm in JodÅ‚ówka, a small village close to Krakow. From the age of five, he worked as a cowherd with his brother. At the age of eight, he and his family moved from JodÅ‚ówka to Biecz, which he knows as his hometown. In Biecz, he found that his life was much better.
On September 1, 1939, Germany had occupied Poland. During the invasion, he remembers seeing German flares landing on his roof. Zyqmunt was still in school during the war, and he had a job tending to a garden, for which he was paid in grain. Later, Zyqmunt and his brother were employed by the German military to dig trenches, and they were paid with sandwiches.
At age 14, while playing with his friend, he was captured along with two Jews who were hiding during a Jewish roundup, despite him and his friend being Catholic. They were taken with the Jews, who were shot in the head. To this day, whenever someone mentions the Holocaust, he remembers this moment.
Before the war, Zyqmunt’s father was a mailman, but during the war he served as an officer in a resistance force known as the Blue Army. The Blue Army fought against both Germany and the Soviet Union. He also organized a secret education system, because high schools were not allowed by the Germans. For two years, Zyqmunt attended this school in defiance of German law. In one instance, he was asked to remove bullets from seized machine gun magazines, so the Blue Army could use them in rifles. He and his brother buried the magazines so nobody would find it. Unfortunately, when their house was seized, the German police found the magazines, so Zyqmunt and his family were arrested, interrogated, and beaten,
but they admitted nothing. Due to the beating, Zyqmunt still faces difficulty breathing.
When the Russians advanced on Poland, his hometown was heavily bombarded; bouts of shelling lasted upwards of half an hour. His family was evicted from their house, and they had to stay in a friend’s basement. After the Soviets invaded, his father went back to work as a mailman for two months, before he was arrested by the NKWD (which was later known as the KGB) for his activity in the Blue Army, and shipped to a prison in Siberia. He died a year later in February 1946, but his family did not learn about his death until a year afterwards. Life after the death of his father was difficult. Gangs of Soviet deserters has raided Zyqmunt’s house, leaving them with nothing, they relied on
soup kitchens for food. They struggled to make a living, butthey still managed. After he and his brothers left, his sister and mother faced difficulty taking care of themselves.
After high school, Zyqmunt left home to study education in another part of Poland, but soon realized that was not for him. He was then trained as a seaman and fisherman, and worked on a passenger liner, which made voyages between Poland and New York City. He made twenty-one transatlantic voyages. In 1948, he met a woman in New York at age 20, and decided to stay there with her, despite not speaking English very well. After living on the East Coast for a while, he moved to California in 1954. He went to trade school in Inglewood and worked as an airline mechanic.