Olson Lynne - A question of honor: the Kościuszko Squadron: forgotten heroes of World War II

Table of Contents

For the people of Poland

There is one helpful guide, namely, for a nation to keep its word and to act in accordance with its treaty obligations to allies. This guide is called honour.

Winston Churchill

A Few Words About the Polish Language

To non-Polish eyes, written Polish, with its agglomerations of consonants, can seem daunting. It isnt quite as bad as it looks. The common combination sz, for example, is simply pronounced sh. And cz is ch. Joined as the startling but also very common szcz, the pronunciation, predictably, is sh-ch as in the Russian name KhruSHCHev, or the English words freSH CHeese. Otherwise, with a few exceptions, those letters in the thirty-two-letter Polish alphabet that have English equivalents are pronounced more or less the same as in English, albeit somewhat more softly (a, for instance, is pronounced as in waft.). As for the exceptions and extra letters, here is an abbreviated and somewhat simplified pronunciation guide:

or (as opposed to the a with no tail) stands for a somewhat nasal awn sound, as in awning.

c is ts as in cats (the Polish spelling of tsar is thus car).

is ch as in church (only a Pole can tell the difference between the ch of and the ch of cz).

ch is a guttural kh sound, as in the Scottish loch.

or is a somewhat nasal en, except before a b or p, when it becomes em.

i is ee as in feet.

j is a y sound, as in yellow.

or is pronounced like the w in warm.

or is a soft n that often sounds almost like ing with the g nearly silent.

or is oo as in soot (not oo as in boot).

or is sh (again, the difference between this and the sh of sz is discernible only to Poles).

W is v (thus, in Polish, Warsaw, which is spelled Warszawa, is pronounced var-SHA-va). At the end of a word, w is pronounced as an f.

or is a zh sound like the s in leisure or the j in soup du jour.

In Polish, virtually all multisyllabic words are accented on the penultimate syllable. For that reason, Katyn, which seems to be more a Ukranian word than a Polish one, is pronounced KA-tyn in Polish and ka-TYN in Ukranian and Russian.

Here is the correct pronunciation of a few of the other words and names that appear in this book:

Wadisaw is vwa-DIS-waf.

Lww is lvuf.

Krakw is KRAK-uf.

Gdask is gdainsk.

Pozna is POZ-nine.

Sejm is seim.

Lech Wasa is lekh va-WEN-sa.

Dblin is DEM-blin.

Wojciech Jaruzelski is VOI-tsiekh yar-u-ZEL-ski.

And, most important for our purposes, Kopciuszko is kosh-TSYUSH-ko or, if thats a little awkward, just kosh-TYUSH-ko will do.

One final note: The family names of Polish women often have endings different from those of their husbands or male relatives. In most cases, a females name ends in a (ah) or owa (ova). Thus, Zdzisaw Krasnodbskis wife is Wanda Krasnodbsk a.

Mirosaw Feri (mee-RO-swaf FEH-reech)

Witold okuciewski (VEE-told wo-ku-TSIEV-ski)

Zdzisaw Krasnodbski (ZDEE-swaf kras-no-DEMP-ski)

Jan Zumbach (yan TZUM-bach)

Witold Urbanowicz (VEE-told oor-ba-NO-veech)

Prologue

THEY MARCHED, twelve abreast and in perfect step, through the heart of bomb-pocked London. American troops, who were in a place of honor at the head of the nine-mile parade, were followedin a kaleidoscope of uniforms, flags, and martial musicby Czechs and Norwegians, Chinese and Dutch, French and Iranians, Belgians and Australians, Canadians and South Africans. There were Sikhs in turbans, high-stepping Greek evzoni in pom-pommed shoes and white pleated skirts, Arabs in fezzes and kaffiyehs, grenadiers from Luxembourg, gunners from Brazil. And at the end of the parade, in a crowd-pleasing, Union Jackwaving climax, came at least 10,000 men and women from the armed forces and civilian services of His Britannic Majesty, King George VI.