Warsaw Resistance Fighters Unite

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A Documentary About The Warsaw Uprising Brings Them Together In Bloomfield

http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc...tory?track=rss

Both grew up in Poland. One was a Roman Catholic farm boy, the other a Jewish boy from the city of Lodz.

They both joined the underground Polish resistance against the Nazis when they were just teens during World War II, and hid from the Germans near the same farming estate outside Krakow at almost the same time. After the war, they joined the Polish army in Italy.

But Joseph Kleszczynski, a retired West Hartford postal worker, and Stanislaw Aronson of Israel, one of the most decorated heroes of the 1944 Warsaw uprising, never met - until Monday.

Kleszczynski, 79, recently read in a Polish American newspaper that Aronson would be visiting the United States to appear at screenings of a new documentary on the role of Jews in the uprising. He invited Aronson to show the film here, and it was screened Monday night at Beth Hillel Synagogue in Bloomfield.

The West Hartford man proudly introduced Aronson before the film. "We both share our war memories and Polish heritage - he as an Israeli, and me as an American," he told the audience. "I believe profoundly it was God's will that by a miracle we met for the first time in our long life, today."

The two men then embraced in a bear hug and drew applause from the other resistance veterans, Holocaust survivors, friends and synagogue members who had come to watch a documentary about Polish Jewish fighters who took part in one of the most savage urban battles of World War II.

The uprising began on Aug. 1, 1944, and ended with the surrender of the badly outgunned and outnumbered Polish forces on Oct. 2, while the Soviet Red Army, pausing its advance against the Germans, stood by on the outskirts of the city. Polish casualties, mostly civilians, numbered some 200,000 people and about 25 percent of Warsaw's buildings were destroyed by the Germans; by 1945 nearly the entire city was reduced to rubble.

Aronson, now 82, remembers on the first day of the uprising helping to capture a German stronghold that the SS used as a transit point to send Jews to death camps. He is featured in the documentary, and a photo of Aronson appears in a book about the battle, "Rising 44, The Battle for Warsaw," by Norman Davies.

However, he plays down his own sacrifices - he was severely wounded in the lungs and a leg by mortar fire - and says that city dwellers who harbored Jews in Warsaw from the Nazis were the greatest heroes. Anyone caught hiding a Jew faced an immediate death sentence, he said.

Before joining the resistance, Aronson had escaped from a train carrying his family and other Jews headed to the Treblinka death camp. He never saw his family again.

He rose to the rank of lieutenant in the Polish Home Army of resistance, then fled the Soviet occupation after the war and made his way to Italy, to join the Polish Army commanded by Gen. Wladyslaw Anders.

While Aronson fought in Warsaw, Kleszczynski was serving in the resistance in the countryside near his father's 1,100-acre farm near Krakow.

Kleszczynski also fled the Russians after the war, making his way to Germany and finally, like Aronson, to Ancona, Italy, in 1946 to join "Anders' Army," which was under British command. Kleszczynski went to England when the Army disbanded and came to America in 1951, moving to Waterbury and then West Hartford in 1954. He worked at the Bishops Corner post office for many years.

Aronson went to Palestine in 1946 and served in the Hagannah, the Jewish underground fighting for the creation of the state of Israel. He then served in the Israel Defense Forces and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the reserves.

The two old Polish resistance fighters, who will share a breakfast this morning before Aronson departs for Israel, think their paths might have crossed in 1944 while they were teenagers hiding out in the farming countryside near Krakow. They both seem to remember the same two beautiful girls from a farm.

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I never tire of these stories of brave men and women. Glad that they were granted long lives.