Janina Lewandowska

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Janina Lewandowska

Janina Antonina Lewandowska (born Janina Antonina Dowbor-Muśnicka April 22, 1908 in Charkiw , Russian Empire ; died April 22, 1940 near Katyn ) was a Polish pilot in World War II and was a victim in the Katyn massacre .

Life

Janina Dowbor-Muśnicka was one of four children of the Polish professional soldier Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki , who had been promoted to general in the Imperial Russian Army during World War I. In the Republic of Poland he was a general in the Polish Army and stationed in Poznan . Janina Dowbor attended grammar school there and, against her father's will, pushed through her career aspiration as a singer. At the airfield in Poznan she trained as a glider pilot and as a parachutist . She was the first woman in Europe to parachute from a height of five kilometers. She was trained in Morse code and telex with the Polish Air Force . In 1939 she did pilot training and was incorporated into the Polish Air Force Reserve. On June 10, 1939, she married the pilot Mieczysław Lewandowski (1911–1997).

After the outbreak of war in September 1939 , Lewandowska became a sub-lieutenant in the Polish Army . She went on the third day of the war during the chaos of war in the west to the III. Polish Air Force Regiment near Tarnopol in Eastern Poland. On September 22, 1939, she was shot down on a reconnaissance flight and was taken prisoner by the Soviets . She and several officers from her regiment first came to the Ostashkow special camp run by the NKVD secret police . From there she was transferred to the Koselsk special camp on December 6, 1939 , where she was the only woman among the prisoners-of-war officers. There she helped with the organization of secret services and religious discussion groups; so she baked hosts . She slept apart from the men in a shed under a staircase.

By decision of the Soviet leadership under Josef Stalin , the majority of the captured Polish officers were murdered in 1940, a total of over 20,000 people. Around 4,400 Polish prisoners from the Koselsk camp, the overwhelming majority of them officers, were shot in the neck in the Katyn forest in April 1940 . The Danish coroner Helge Tramsen , who came to Katyn with an international medical delegation in 1943, reported on the exhumation of Lewandowska's remains in 1952 before an investigative commission of the US House of Representatives : “The head was covered in a kind of sack, the hands were tied with a rope, and that too around the neck. "

Lewandowska was the only woman among Katyn's dead. However, the official German report on the exhumation of the bodies from spring 1943 did not contain their names. Her death was not officially confirmed until 1992, when the NKVD lists of Katyn's victims were published.

After the political change in Eastern Europe , her remains were transferred to the family grave in Lusowo on November 4, 2005. On October 5, 2007, she was posthumously promoted to lieutenant .

Her sister Agnieszka Dowbor had joined the Polish resistance in the part of Poland occupied by the Germans , she was arrested by the Gestapo in the AB-Aktion in April 1940 and shot on June 21, 1940 in the Palmiry forest .

Lewandowska's husband was arrested by the Gestapo after the start of the war, but after a short time he was able to flee the General Government via Romania to Great Britain, where he took part in the Battle of Britain . After the war he stayed there, later remarried and started a family. He died in Blackpool on November 24, 1997 .

literature

  • Timothy Snyder : Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin . CH Beck, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-406-62184-0 .
  • Reina Pennington: Fighter Pilots: A Biographical Dictionary of Military Women . Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2003, Vol. 1, p. 257.
  • Krzysztof Mroczkowski, Lotniczka w za duźym mundurze ... - Janina Lewandowska, in: Katyń 1940. Walka o prawdę. Ed. Wojciech Lis. Toruń 2012, pp. 373–385. [ The aviator in the too big uniform ... - Janina Lewandowska ]
  • Christopher Dowbor-Musnicki announced a dissertation on Janina Lewandowska at the University of Brighton in 2011 .

Web links

Commons : Janina Lewandowska  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. in Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands , p. 163 her name is Janina Dowbor
  2. ^ Piotr Bauer: General Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki 1867–1937 , Poznań 1988
  3. Zbrodnia katyńska w świetle dokumentów. Z przedmową Władysława Andersa. London 1948, p. 31.
  4. a b Krzysztof Mroczkowski, Lotniczka w za duźym mundurze ... - Janina Lewandowska, in: Katyń 1940. Walka o prawdę. Ed. Wojciech Lis. Toruń 2012, p. 380f.
  5. The Katyn Forest Massacre Part 5, p. 1465.
  6. Lusowo in the Powiat Poznański see Polish Wikipedia pl: Lusowo (województwo wielkopolskie)
  7. Ernst Probst: Queens of the Skies in Europe , Munich: GRIN 2010,
  8. Mieczysław Lewandowski , at niebieskaeskadra (pl)