In the cemetery of my hometown church are 13 plain white crosses which bear the names of Polish airmen killed in World War 2.  These were boys who escaped Poland to volunteer with the RAF. It always struck me as poor reward that when Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met at the Tehran and Yalta Conferences of 1943 and 1945 that Poland was bequeathed to Russia.

 

Sleep easy, young Tadeus Makulski

Sleep easy, brave Zigmunt Kovacs too

Your torment of so many years is over

Sleep easy under English morning dew.

 

Continuing your fight against the enemy

High in foreign English cloudy sky

Not prepared to yield up your homeland

But confront the Fates, if necessary, die.

 

Forsaking kith and kin in farms and factories

Abandoning your lifetime’s peaceful path

The transience of 45’s sweet victory

The sickening bile of Yalta’s aftermath.

 

Would you have offered such brave resistance

That sacrifice should bring reward so cruel

To free your land from the heel of Hitler

For 50 years to bow to Russian rule?

 

Divided and picked over through the centuries

By masters of the Volga and the Rhine

Between the German eagle and the Russian bear

A carcass of the Oder-Neisse line.

 

But you have not fought and died in vain for Freedom

For Polska, for love of which you flew

Perhaps your spirits feared to tread your homeland

But Poland now embraces freedoms new;

Do wideja, young Tadeus Makulski

Djekuya, brave Zigmunt Kovacs too