By Guest Column Chuck Konkel——Bio and Archives--December 10, 2007
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They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.And we answered solemnly: We will remember them! In Then, in the somber tradition of all Poles and dutiful sons from time immemorial, I retrieved some soil from the graveside to keep as a remembrance. *** There are new Poles among us, thousand upon thousands of them in this land we call Canada, for whom the stories of the Western Front and struggles of the Polish armies of Maczek and Sikorski, the airmen of the Battle of Britain, bombing raids in Europe and mariners who sailed the frigid North Atlantic convoys are fresh and new and invigorating and yet, at the same time, strange and foreign as if a whole generation of Polish youth had traveled to some far off planet to do battle with aliens Yet for these new age Poles also, the legend and sacrifice live on. For the true Poland is more than a political party or a geographic land mass. It is a common bond of loyalty to virtue and faith and courage and, I must tell you, it is a grand place to be in the mind and spirit of mankind. For it is not only a mystic Polish soul, but the real Polish spirit that unites Poles everywhere. *** In the mid 1990s I traveled to Warsaw on Canadian government business. The Polish capital was a city my father barely knew in his lifetime. It had proved far too urbane for his taste, for he was a mariner who lived for the salty tang of the Baltic following the hand of General Haller to the sea and to the waters that meant the New Poland. Shortly before, a truly remarkable Pole with the birth name of Karol (Wojtyla), a vigorous man who loved skiing and God and life, and who lived in an apartment on the third floor of a Vatican’s palace overlooking St Peter’s Square in the city of Rome, had single-handedly succeeded in sweeping back Stalin’s hated Curtain, that creaking edifice of injustice and intellectual and moral inhumanity. So it was that sullen day that I found myself wandering about the cobbled Warsaw streets. The buildings were grimy and soot covered, as if reluctant to shed their proletarian mantel. Somber people scampered about everywhere, heads hunkered down in a March chill which had captured the city in its grasp, brisk and determined yet seeming directionless, somehow caught between what was and what could be and, yet, not altogether certain of what they would do in the between time with this strange new thing called Freedom. But I knew. In my inner self I knew. There was no other way. I found the monument in the centre of Warsaw close to the so-called historic Royal Way on the edge of a huge, shiny paved square dedicated to Marshall of Poland - Joseph Pilsudski. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Its history is worthy of note. In 1923 a stone tablet was placed before the Saxon Palace and adjacent Saxon Garden to commemorate all unknown Polish soldiers who had fallen in World War One and the Polish-Soviet War that immediately followed. In 1925, the Polish government selected a battlefield from which the ashes of an unknown soldier would be brought to Warsaw. Of the forty battles, Lwow was chosen. Three coffins were exhumed, those of an unidentified sergeant, a corporal and a private. The coffin selected was chosen by the mother of a soldier whose body had never been found. After a solemn high mass at Warsaw’s St. Johns cathedral, and carried to the site by eight recipients of Poland’s highest military honour the Virtuti Militari, the coffin was buried with 14 urns containing soil from as many battlegrounds. Since then, except for the brutal Nazi occupation, an honour guard has continually stood before the Tomb. After the Warsaw Uprising, in December 1944 the palace was completely demolished by the Wehrmacht. Amazingly, the only part of the building to survive was the fragment standing directly over the Tomb. Soil from 24 additional battlegrounds was added to the urns, as well as tablets with the names of battles in which Poles had fought in World War Two. However, communist authorities erased all traces of the Polish-Soviet War of 1920 and included only a few of the battles of the Polish Army of the West. In 1990, after Poland regained its political autonomy, this grevious error was corrected. On this day, the soldiers guarding the Tomb seemed so terribly young. Wearing khaki great coats and spit-shone high top boots and four pointed czapki (military caps). Ram-rod straight with freshly scrubbed faces and too-short bristled hair a drill sergeant would be proud of. They stood upright as virtue, transparently true to their essence as honour. I paused then to consider the generations that had gone before them. How young, after all, can one be to die for the ideal of one’s country? Flower urns surrounded the perimeter of the edifice. In my pocket was a small plastic pouch containing clumps of soil from a Canadian graveside. I walked purposefully to one of the outer urns and completely emptied the pouch so that the soil settled in the urn. In that moment the spirit of my father was reunited with that of his ancestors and of his heritage. He was home again. And so was I. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Edward Konkel’s Biography Edward Joseph Konkel was born on 17 October 1905 in Mosty Poland. He was a mariner and qualified ship's machinist who served in the Polish Army in France in 1940. Captured by the Germans he was incarcerated in a POW camp. He fled and worked with the Allied underground in France and Netherlands. Recaptured, he spent some time in the infamous Orange Hotel.. the Gestapo Prison outside of the Hague in the Netherlands and was then placed in a concentration camp as a political prisoner because he refused to renounce his Polish heritage. When the war ended, Edward could not return to Poland because of Soviet occupation, He worked for UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association) helping refugees in camps and moved to the Netherlands where he found work and married, having one son. The family immigrated to Canada in 1951. Edward Konkel was active in his church, his community and his Royal Canadian Veterans Legion. He has received numerous decorations including a medal of honour from the Government of France for safely navigating a fleet of Polish trawlers through hostile minefields off La Rochelle. The trawlers were then given to the French navy for their use against the Nazis. Edward Konkel was most proud of selling the most poppys to commemorate Remembrance Day (November 11th) of any veteran in Canada. He held this honour for a number of years. He died a proud Canadian and a proud Pole. Chuck Konkel is an experienced Canadian police officer serving in one of Canada’s principal police forces. Prior to that he was an inspector in the Royal Hong Kong Police. He is the creator of Canada’s Hate Crime Law and is an acknowledged expert in Asian and Eastern European Organized Crime; training the National Police of Poland and travelling to Moscow to execute a search warrant. He is a book reviewer for a major Canadian newspaper and was for twelve years a lecturer of corporate communications at a community college. He has a masters degree in international relations and is the author of two best selling novels. He is currently at work on a third.
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