Anna Szatkowska

Anna Szatkowska , later Anna Rosset-Bugnon , (born March 15, 1928 in Górki Wielkie ; † February 27, 2015 ) joined the uprising of the Polish Home Army at the age of sixteen , which wanted to liberate Warsaw from the German occupation. She served as a medic . Sixty years later, she decided to write a book about her experiences during the Warsaw Uprising .

life and work

Anna Szatkowska was the daughter of the Polish Catholic writer and resistance fighter Zofia Kossak-Szczucka . In Górki, on the southern border of Poland, she lived with her brother, parents and grandparents in a mansion that was relatively prosperous. That changed suddenly with the beginning of the war on September 1, 1939, when the Górki family had to leave in search of a safe place.

At first Anna was able to continue her education in a girls boarding school with great difficulty, but in the summer of 1944 she enlisted in the Polish underground army and was accepted into the Ewa-Maria patrol , which consisted of seven young paramedics. The Warsaw Uprising began on August 1, 1944 and lasted sixty-three days before it was put down by the Germans while the Red Army waited on the other bank of the Vistula.

In October 1944 Anna began to write down her experiences from memory with the former head of her patrol, Ewa Orlikowska. Sixty years later, these notes served as the basis for her memory book.

After the end of the war, a communist regime began to establish itself in Poland under Soviet rule. In June 1945 Anna's mother, Zofia Kossak, received a summons from the new Polish Interior Minister Jakub Berman . He was of Jewish descent and urged her to leave the country with her daughter Anna as soon as possible. This was for their protection; for the minister knew what his government was planning to do with non-communists, and he knew from his brother, Adolf Berman , what Zofia had done personally and within the framework of Żegota to save thousands of Jews. So he saved her and Anna's lives.

Anna began her university studies in Ireland and completed them in Friborg, Switzerland. She became a teacher. In 1951 she married the Swiss Jean-Marie Rosset and had four children. Jean-Marie Rosset died in a traffic accident in 1960. In 1971 she married Jean Bugnon. The couple last lived in Cugy in the canton of Friborg.

For decades Anna did not talk about her Warsaw war experiences, but the recurring questions her grandchildren asked her eventually led her to write down her memories in French. She then translated her book into Polish; other translations are planned.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ La maison brûlée ( German : The burned house ). A sixteen year old volunteer in the Warsaw Uprising. Les Éditions Noir sur Blanc, Lausanne 2005, ISBN 978-2-88250-202-5 ( French )
2. ↑ Byl dom . Wydawnictwo Literackie, Krakow 2006, ISBN 978-83-08-04589-3 ( Polish ).