Arnhem

He learned to fight. But against whom would he go to war? Knowing the Poles were deeply antagonistic to them, the paranoid Stalin and his Soviet military authorities became suspicious of these potential vipers they had taken into their nest. They resolved to get rid of them, one way or another. Butchering them was an option – as it had been in the massacre in the Katyn Forest back in 1940. Instead they did a deal to move them to British command in neighbouring Iran. The Poles, to their delight, were to be allowed to leave Stalin’s inhuman empire, though not without another hellish journey. This ragbag Polish army, accompanied by thousands of family members and dependants, many of them old and sick, were taken by truck hundreds of miles to a port on the Caspian Sea.³ There, stripped of all their equipment by brutal secret policemen, they were pressed on board a cargo ship and set sail, many still fearing that a Russian submarine might be waiting to sink them with a torpedo in one last act of Stalinist revenge. The boat went unhindered, but was so overcrowded that there was every chance it might sink under the weight of its human cargo as it ploughed its way across 300 miles of open water. ‘People were lying so thickly on the deck you could not move,’ Szmid recalled. ‘In the heat, dysentery forced many to relieve themselves over the railings or on the floor. Those who died were tossed overboard and their bodies followed us, pulled along in the ship’s wake. But when we arrived at our destination and disembarked in Iran, many of us were so happy to be out of the Soviet Union that we kissed the ground.’

Tehran was the next staging post, reached after a treacherous truck-drive through single-track mountain passes and across precarious wooden bridges over ravines. Then they moved west to the sandstorms and dry heat of the deserts of northern Iraq to defend its oilfields from possible attack. ‘We had gone from one extreme of climate to another – from snow and minus 40ºC in Siberia to cloudless blue skies and temperatures of plus 40ºC.’ From there, Szmid volunteered for the Polish parachute brigade being formed in Britain. The pay, he would later admit, was his main reason. By a miracle, he had managed to locate his mother and sister, who, victims of those chaotic times, had somehow wound up in the British colony of Uganda in East Africa, penniless refugees. He needed money to send to them, and a paratrooper was paid £2 extra a week. For a boy-man who had stared danger and death in the face for so long, the extra risk involved must have seemed of little consequence. Another long journey now ensued – via Palestine and the Red Sea, down one side of Africa, round the Cape, across to Buenos Aires, back to West Africa and then up to the North Atlantic and the British Isles. Travelling in the liner Ile de France, which was converted to a troop ship, was a more comfortable passage than any of those before, even sleeping in hammocks twenty to a room, and safer, too, despite the constant alerts for enemy submarines. Eventually, he arrived in cold, bleak but welcoming Scotland.

The brigade with which Szmid now went into rigorous fitness training was an elite outfit under its founder and commander, Major-General Stanislaw Sosabowski – known to his men as ‘Pops’ – a tough and charismatic Polish officer who had fought against the Germans in the defence of Warsaw but managed to escape to the West when his country surrendered.⁴ ‘He was like a father,’ Szmid soon discovered as he came under this man’s wing. ‘He would not let you down, and we had complete trust in him.’ He felt at home in this company of peasants and nobles, barely literate labourers and university professors, men of differing backgrounds but with their Polish patriotism in common. ‘This was my place and I felt good about it. I knew that these men around me would help in an hour of need and I was prepared to help them. There was not the severe strictness as in the British army. Our officers were firm but fair. They were extremely sympathetic because of what we had all been through.’