OBITUARY - Jozef Garlinski

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
01/12/2005

OBITUARY - Jozef Garlinski
--------------------------

Jozef Garlinski, who died on Tuesday aged 92, was a member of the Polish 
underground and an historian of ramrod integrity in defence of Poland's 
role in the Second World War.

While Communists maintained that they constituted the key opposition 
inside the concentration camps, and an American lobby bridled at 
suggestions that others shared the sufferings of the Jews, Garlinski wrote 
with the undeniable authority of one who had been held at Auschwitz and 
had spent two years in the sub-camp of Birkenau.

In the best-selling Fighting Auschwitz (1975), written in his west London 
exile, he recounted the story of the resistance in the camp from its 
creation. Although unable to set foot in his homeland since 1945, he drew 
on German, Jewish and Polish documents as well as survivors' 
recollections. Most strikingly, he established the importance of Witold 
Pilecki, the army officer who had himself arrested in order to set up a 
military organisation inside the camp and co-ordinate a rising with an 
outside attack that never came; Pilecki later escaped and survived the 
war, only to be executed by the Communist government.../snip/


...Jozef Garlinski was born at Kiev in the Ukraine on October 14 1913 and 
after the Russian Revolution moved with his family to Poland. He went to 
school at Kalsz, then did military service at the cavalry school at 
Grudziadz before starting to study Law at Warsaw. There he met Eileen 
Short, the daughter of a Liverpool Irish sea captain.

They communicated mainly in French and German, and were married on 
September 3 1939, two days after the Germans had started to pour over the 
border. His father attended the ceremony, but was never seen again by his 
son, as he was executed by the Russians at Katyn. As the service came to 
an end, an air raid siren sounded; the couple had already agreed that, if 
separated, they would both head for Ireland after the war..../snip/


...Garlinski's books included Poland, SOE and the Allies (1969), dealing 
with the small number of successful parachute drops of arms during the 
Warsaw uprising and the use made of them by the Home Army. "INTERCEPT" 
provided a detailed account of the vital Polish contribution to the 
cracking of the Enigma code; while his Poland in the Second World War 
summed up the Polish contribution to a victory which left her under 
Soviet occupation.../snip/


...Jozef Garlinski's wife died in 1990, and he is survived by their son 
Jarek, who was the first Pole to teach at Eton.


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