Wanda Gutowska-lesisz
Polish Home Army soldier who took part in the Warsaw Uprising and endured months as a POW
WANDA GUTOWSKALESISZ, who has died aged 92, was among some 5,000 Polish female fighters of the Warsaw Uprising, a horrific yet largely forgotten episode of the Second World War.
It began at 17:00 hours on August 1 1944 (“W-hour”) when, encouraged by the sound of Red Army artillery in the east, the youthful, ill-equipped Polish underground Home Army, the Armia Krajowa or AK, launched coordinated attacks on German occupying forces.
Wanda Gutowska was 19 when the uprising began and greeted W-hour with relief. “I wasn’t afraid because, frankly, one had little to lose. The occupation was awful. Anyway, we expected the Bolsheviks to help and the British to drop supplies, and we thought the Rising would end quickly.”
The uprising was intended to last a few days until Soviet forces arrived. This never happened and the Polish forces had to fight with virtually no outside assistance. Code-named “Kite”, Wanda Gutowkska was posted as a nurse in Platoon 202 in part of the Żoliborz sub-district of north-west Warsaw. She survived several military confrontations, including an assault on Gdansk Railway Station, between Żoliborz and the Old Town, where German units had gathered.
The Polish fighters aimed to break through to the old quarter but met fierce resistance, and scores died. Wanda loaded guns, heaved ammunition and held dying boys. “The things I saw and did astonish me now. Was that really me? Youth and stupidity saved me from madness. Nowadays, I jump at the sound of a car alarm,” she told a Telegraph interviewer in 2004.
The rising failed and Hitler exacted a brutal revenge. Special SS divisions proceeded through the capital, blowing up buildings and killing insurgents and civilians with appalling savagery. “What went on was monstrous,” Wanda recalled. “The SS seized the director of a printing firm and his pregnant wife. They raped her in front of her husband, ripped out the unborn child with a bayonet, held it up for the father to see and finally killed him.” The stench of burning bodies lingered for days. Wanda’s sweetheart, Andrzej, bled to death on the last day of the rising.
The partisans resisted for 63 days, deploying everything from captured German tanks to scythes and old socks stuffed with nails and explosives. The Red Army, meanwhile, watched Warsaw burn from the other side of the River Vistula. On October 2 1944, fearing annihilation, the AK capitulated. Their once great city lay in ruins and a quarter of a million people, mainly civilians, lay dead. In January 1945 Soviet troops would walk unchallenged into a ghost city.
In late August 1944 London and Washington had granted the AK combatant rights, which the Germans honoured – albeit reluctantly. Wanda joined 3,000 other women Pows in Wehrmacht custody. “Throwing down our arms was so sad,” she recalled. “I’ll never forget the clash of metal piercing the strange silence of the city.”
She was imprisoned first at Stalag XI-A in Gross Lubars, then transferred to Stalag VI-C at Oberlangen, 10 kilometres from the Dutch border. There, 1,721 Polish women endured four months of freezing temperatures, dilapidated barracks, brutal guards, hunger, rats and lice until, on April 12 1945, the sound of gunfire heralded the arrival of troops sporting whiteand-red “Poland” insignia.
Men of the 1st (Polish) Armoured Division, who had fought under British command, ran to embrace the women soldiers of the Warsaw Uprising. And in 1947 Wanda came to Britain with the Free Polish Forces.
Wanda Gutowska was born on July 15 1925 and joined the AK in 1940 while still a schoolgirl, completing a course as a medical orderly and in liaison duties. Her father, an army officer, had been captured by the Red Army after the fall of Poland in September 1939 and was executed at Katyń along with 22,000 other Polish prisoners of war.
During the German occupation, and despite having a German officer and his orderly billeted on them, Wanda, her mother Leonia and her sister Janina risked their lives by sheltering Irena Palenker, the Jewish fiancée of a Polish army officer; Piotr Teichner, a seven-year-old Jewish orphan who hid in the attic of their house for three years, and – briefly – an RAF pilot. The house was also used as a weapons store and venue for conspiratorial meetings.
Wanda delivered clandestine leaflets, and in the run-up to the Warsaw Uprising was engaged in moving weapons from her house to AK units across the north of Warsaw.
In 1947 Wanda Gutowska arrived in Britain where she was supported by the Polish Resettlement Corps. Her first year was spent in hospital in Penley. In 1956 she married Tadeusz Lesisz, an architect and former naval officer, settling in Cheadle, Cheshire, and went on to become involved in the Polish community in Manchester.
She was chairman of the Manchester branch of the Home Army Association, secretary of the Polish Aid Committee, and raised funds for the Polish Sikorski Institute in London.
While Wanda was being held as a POW, her mother, forced from her home after the rising, smuggled her “son” Piotr Teichner out of danger, swathed in bandages to hide his Semitic features, using her remaining jewellery to buy food and silence. Piotr survived and eventually joined relatives in Israel. Years later he traced Wanda to her home in England, and in 1988 the two embraced on Israeli soil where Wanda, her late mother and her sister were honoured as Righteous Among the Nations.
Wanda Gutowska-lesisz published many articles in the émigré Polish press. She was involved in initiatives aimed at strengthening ties between the British and Poles living in Britain and deepening the knowledge of Poles’ participation in the Second World War. In 1989 she published a memoir, Oberlangen Stalag VI-C, 1944-45: Diary of a Female AK Soldier.
During the war she had been awarded the Cross of Valour and the Bronze Cross of Merit with Swords by the Polish Government-in-exile. After the war, she received the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, the Golden Cross of Merit, the Cross of the Home Army, the Medal of the Polish Army, the Memorial Cross of the 1st Armoured Division and the War Medal.
Her husband Tadeusz died in 2009. She is survived by their two daughters.
Wanda Gutowska-lesisz, born July 15 1925, died July 16 2017