HENDERSON
Local professor looks back at life in Nazi-occupied Poland
Crawling on his belly through a sewer pipe beneath the streets of Warsaw, Poland, with a battle raging overhead, 16-year-old Lucjan Krause could scarcely have imagined he would survive the fighting, let alone go on to build a globally admired atomic physics program at the University of Windsor.
Now 92 and still in full command of a razorsharp intellect, Dr. Krause is hunkered down like the rest of us, waiting out the pandemic at his Windsor home with lots of books, music and TV programs while family members do the shopping. He’s taking it all in stride, and little wonder, given the horrors he’s witnessed.
With this weekend marking the 75th anniversary of VE Day, when Nazi Germany capitulated, I asked Krause about his recollection of that day.
His candid answer? “Nothing. I don’t remember anything about it.” His one certainty is that there was no celebration at the American army base in scenic Bad Harzburg in Central Germany where he was a welcome asset because he could speak English and German. His war had effectively ended weeks earlier when he and other Polish teens, captured following the
1944 Warsaw Uprising, walked away from a tiny, loosely guarded prisoner-of-war camp.
“I’m pretty indestructible. And I had good luck. I managed to get through it,” said Krause of his life-and-death experiences in Nazi-occupied Poland, detailed in his memoir, From the Vistula to the Canadian Great Lakes: A Life’s Journey. Krause, the son of a chemistry professor, was 11 when the German invasion of Poland began, igniting the Second World War. He remembers playing in the garden when he heard planes overhead, followed by explosions.
The family fled by train for Warsaw. The journey was repeatedly disrupted by bombing and strafing. At one point the passengers, trapped in the midst of a battle, had to lie in a potato field for hours while bullets whizzed overhead.
Life was hard. The universities were closed and academic education banned. Yet the Poles persevered. Clandestine classes were held in homes. Krause learned English, which proved invaluable, from a tutor who had worked in the U.S.
In 1942, Krause joined a secret youth organization associated with the resistance movement. Given the code name Leonidas, he progressed through the ranks of this patriotic, Catholic scouting movement. On Aug. 1, 1944, with the Soviet Red Army nearing Warsaw, the Polish Home Army rose against its Germany occupiers. Krause was in a courier platoon assigned to deliver messages between units. The sewer tunnels, some as low as two feet in height, were claustrophobic but the safest means of bypassing German positions.
Krause was uncannily lucky. Ordered to take shelter during a bombing attack, he returned to find a huge concrete block where he had been sitting. In another attack, a bomb landed two metres from his mattress, but failed to explode.
His battalion’s worst moment came when an abandoned German tank, loaded with high explosives and timed to explode, was driven by Polish soldiers into a crowded square where it blew up. An estimated 300 to 500 died.
“As I emerged ... I was faced by a scene of indescribable horror. The courtyard and street outside were full of dead corpses, grievously wounded people and body parts, and blood was literally flowing in streams.”
He believes that scene affected him for the future, in that he tends “not to show any outward emotion in the face of adversity or tragedy ... however difficult to bear, something for which I have been occasionally criticized.”
The outgunned Poles surrendered after 63 days of bitter fighting and Krause and his comrades were marched into captivity.
Those wartime experiences might have traumatized many. But for Krause, armed with determination and a formidable intellect, it was onward and upward.
He was commissioned as an officer, won scholarships to universities in Britain where he married Margaret, the love of his life, and they immigrated to Canada.
In 1958, the Krauses moved to U of W where he built an atomic and molecular physics program that attracted global talent, especially from his native Poland, and made him a coveted lecturer. He put Windsor on the map.
Sadly, his legacy was allowed to expire.
Krause lost his wife to cancer in 2006, but is immensely proud of his six highly successful offspring, 12 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
Life is sweet, even at 92 and in a pandemic.