Polish Underground Movement Study Trust - Studium Polski Podziemnej

A photograph from the PUMST archive of Maria Tarnowska (centre figure), Polish countess, Home Army Major and Vice President of the Polish Red Cross, during bread distribution in Warsaw, 1944.

Countess Tarnowska was born in Milanów on 6th July 1880 into an aristocratic family, the House of Światopełk-Czetwertyński. She married Count Adam Tarnowski, a diplomat in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1902. Count Tarnowski’s diplomatic career took Maria all over Europe, and in 1913 she found herself in Sofia at the height of the Balkan Wars. Her journey into nursing began in Bulgaria and she completed several nursing courses in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In WWI she worked as a nurse in Krakow and Lublin, close to battles being fought on Polish territory.

With the restoration of Polish independence in 1918, Maria began work with the Polish Red Cross and was at the forefront of its activity during the Polish-Soviet War (1919-21). She directed medical units at the front, at one point leading nurses serving in Tadeusz Komorowski’s regiment (Komorowski would later become the commander of the Home Army and authorise the Warsaw Uprising in 1944).

By 1939 she was head of the Red Cross’s Nursing Corps and during the German occupation became vice president of its management board.

Countess Tarnowska and her husband were involved in underground activity from the beginning of the German occupation in 1939. An entire floor of their home on Warsaw’s Pius XI Street was provided to the Home Army as a training school. Maria was also a key member of the Central Welfare Council (RGO), one of the only Polish social organisations that was allowed to operate under N**i rule, and assisted with the provision of shelter, food and medical care to the population of occupied Poland.
In November 1942, Countess Maria was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Pawiak prison. She was detained because she protected Andrzej Jałowiecki, the head of the RGO in Warsaw, who was being investigated for suspicious transfers of foreign currency. Jałowiecki passed US dollars to Countess Maria for use by the Red Cross. Maria told the Gestapo they were for the creation of an orphanage. She received a three-month sentence and was released in February 1943.

Upon release, Countess Maria was inducted into the Home Army and given the rank of Lieutenant. Her pseudonym was “Stanisława”.

During the Warsaw Uprising, Countess Maria worked as a commander in the Women’s Military Service, organising first aid provision and setting up field hospitals for the insurgents fighting in the city.

The German response to the uprising was ruthless. One district after another was bombed, shelled, mortared and stormed by SS and Wehrmacht troops. The civilian populations of Wola and Ochota were massacred by the SS and its collaborators. The Germans laid siege to the Old Town. By September 1944, organised resistance had crumbled. Civilian morale began to plummet as families cowered in basements and bunkers and there were severe shortages of water, food and medical supplies. Amid the deteriorating situation, Countess Maria approached Home Army leadership (under Komorowski, whom she knew from the Polish-Soviet war) to discuss the possibility of negotiating the evacuation of Warsaw's civilians.

Her social standing, nursing experience and position in the Red Cross meant that she was delegated to negotiate the evacuation of civilians with the Germans. Her delegation spoke with the SS commander of German forces supressing the uprising, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski. An agreement was made for civilians to be allowed to leave the city between 8th and 10th September. Between 10 and 20,000 people were evacuated to Dulag 121, a transit camp west of Warsaw. Most people remained in Warsaw however, owing to a lack of trust in the Germans and the uncertainty of what their fate in German hands may be.

Countess Tarnowska was later promoted to Major in the Home Army. She also negotiated on behalf of civilians during the capitulation agreements that ended the uprising in October 1944. As a member of the Red Cross, she inspected conditions in the Dulag 121 camp at Pruszków and assisted in the running of hospitals outside of Warsaw.

Countess Tarnowska survived the war, left Poland in 1946 to live with her son in Switzerland and Brazil. She returned to Poland in the late 1950s, dying in 1965. She was living in a one-room apartment in Warsaw provided by the Polish Red Cross.

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By Harry Denton for PUMST

All rights to the photographs are vested in the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum and the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust of London.

On behalf of the Committee & Volunteers of the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust Archive and the Board of the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, we warmly invite you to a Holy Mass on 2nd August 2026 at 12pm to commemorate the Participants of the Warsaw Uprising on its 82nd Anniversary.

The Mass will be held at
St. Andrew Bobola RC Polish Church,
1 Leysfield Road, London, W12 9JF.

We hope to see you there.

PUMST Insurgent Spotlight - Stanisław Jankowski "Agaton"

(Part 2 of 2)

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When the Warsaw Uprising began on 1st August 1944, Jankowski went into action as a platoon commander. Under the codename “Agaton”, Jankowski led a platoon of the same name in the “Piesc” battalion of the “Radosław” group.

Jankowski fought in Wola (notably during the defence of the Wola cemeteries) and in the Old Town before evacuating to Żoliborz and linking up with the Home Army’s “Kampinos” group in the Kampinos forest, west of Warsaw. Agaton and the Kampinos group then took part in the unsuccessful assault on the Gdansk railway station between 19th and 21st August 1944. Following this defeat, he escaped through the sewers from the besieged Old Town to the city centre at the end of the same month.

The photographs from the PUMST archive depict Agaton with members of his platoon at various locations in Warsaw. A photograph of the platoon marching single file on Kazimierz Wielki Square has become one of the most famous of the uprising, and is featured on the back cover of Alexandra Richie’s 2013 book, “Warsaw 1944”.

A great many of these photos were taken by Stefan Bałuk “Starba”, a photographer who was also deputy commander of the Agaton platoon.

With the capitulation of the Home Army in Warsaw in October 1944, Jankowski became a prisoner-of-war. He was held in several Oflag camps in Germany, including Colditz castle, with other senior members of the Home Army. At this time, he was also an adjutant to General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski.

After liberation, Jankowski returned to architecture. He became one of the foremost architects in the Warsaw Development Planning Office, where he worked to help reconstruct the capital city after its destruction in WWII. His talents as an architect saw him collaborate on development projects across the world, from Vietnam to Peru.

Stanisław Jankowski “Agaton” passed away in 2002, aged 90.

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(FOT_03277) - Jankowski tasting soup from a ladle
(FOT_03289) - Jankowski (to the right) with members of Agaton platoon
(FOT_03295) - Jankowski with members of Agaton platoon.

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By Harry Denton for PUMST

All rights to the photographs are vested in the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum and the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust of London.

PUMST Insurgent Spotlight – Stanisław Jankowski “Agaton”

(Part 1 of 2)

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The PUMST archive contains photographs of Stanisław Jankowski, codenamed “Agaton”, during the Warsaw Uprising in the summer of 1944. He wears his distinctive white forage cap in each photograph.

Stanisław Jankowski was born on September 29th, 1911, in Warsaw. He studied at the Warsaw University of Technology’s Faculty of Architecture, gaining his diploma in 1938. Jankowski was on his way to a promising career as a leading Polish architect. 1939 and the outbreak of war would change the course of Jankowski’s life.

Aside from his work as an architect, Jankowski joined the Reserve Artillery Cadet School and earned the rank of reserve second lieutenant. In September 1939, after the German invasion of Poland, Jankowski was mobilised and assigned to the Light Artillery Reserve Centre in Wilno. He was stationed there when on 17th September the Soviet Red Army invaded Poland from the east. Jankowski was interned by the Soviets in Lithuania but managed to escape and reach France, by way of Latvia, Estonia and Sweden.

Whilst in France in early 1940, Jankowski was assigned to an artillery regiment defending the Maginot Line. By 7th May, however, he was on his way through Paris for training at the Polish Training Centre in Brittany. Just three days later, the Germans launched their offensive on the low countries and France. Jankowski was evacuated to Britain by ship after the fall of France, reaching Plymouth on 21st June 1940. He spent several months thereafter in St. Andrews, Scotland with the Polish 1st Light Artillery Division.

The following year Jankowski was sent to undertake the Military Administration Advanced Intelligence Course. This deliberately innocuous title acted as a cover for the newly formed Intelligence Officers School. The course also marked the start of Jankowski’s enrolment as a member of the Silent and Unseen (Cichociemni), the elite special operations paratroopers of the Home Army who were parachuted into Poland from the UK to organise resistance, conduct sabotage and gather intelligence. Jankowski was among the first cohort of Cichociemni.

On 3rd/4th March 1942, Jankowski was parachuted back into Poland and landed near Wyszków. He made his way to Warsaw and was assigned to the Home Army’s HQ, where he was to build its Legalisation and Technology Department. The primary task of this department was to produce forged documents, passes and travel permits for the Polish resistance. The conditions of the German occupation meant that a vast number of complex documents were required for travel across occupied Poland. Between 1943 and 1944, Jankowski’s department was producing approximately 1,000 forged documents per month for the Home Army.

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(FOT_03359) - "Looters will be shot!" - Stanisław Jankowski, Warsaw, 1944
(FOT_03275) - Jankowski with members of the "Agaton" platoon, Warsaw, 1944
(FOT_03276) - Jankowski with members of the "Agaton" platoon, Warsaw, 1944

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By Harry Denton for PUMST

All rights to the photographs are vested in the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum and the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust of London.

Photographs from the archive of the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust show the liberation of Gęsiówka concentration camp, known as KL Warschau, by the Home Army (AK) during the Warsaw Uprising on 5 August 1944.

The Gęsiówka camp was established on land that was previously part of the Warsaw Ghetto, which had been destroyed after the Ghetto Uprising in 1943. The man who had led its suppression, SS Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop, proposed to SS leader Heinrich Himmler that Warsaw’s Pawiak prison should be turned into a concentration camp. Whilst Pawiak remained as it was, the Gęsiówka camp was built on nearby Gęsia Street, using buildings from a pre-war Polish prison that remained intact after the Ghetto’s destruction.

Whilst the first 300 prisoners to arrive in July 1943 were German criminals sent from KL Buchenwald, Gęsiówka housed mainly Jewish prisoners. These were not Warsaw Jews, but Jews from all over Europe, including Hungary, Greece and France, transported there as forced labour. Their task was to clear up the site of the Warsaw Ghetto, build the camp that they were living in, recover bricks for German construction and cremate the corpses of the thousands of people who had perished in the 1943 Uprising.

With the advance of the Red Army in the summer of 1944, the Germans began an evacuation of Warsaw and sent the majority of the camp’s prisoners on a 120 km death march to Kutno in central Poland. Those who survived were transported to Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

There were approximately 350 Jewish inmates in the camp when the Warsaw Uprising began on 1st August. For the next four days they were held in a single barrack, awaiting ex*****on by their SS guards.

On 5 August, the Home Army’s elite ‘Zośka’ Battalion, led by thirty-year-old Ryszard Białous “Jerzy” and consisting largely of the Grey Ranks (Polish Boy Scouts), attacked the camp in a bid to free the prisoners and secure a strategic route between Wola and Warsaw’s Old Town. He was assisted by Wacław Micuta “Wacek”, who commanded a captured German Panther tank for the battalion. At 10:00, the tank began firing and destroyed the watchtowers and bunkers. The AK then forced their way into the camp. The SS defenders were taken completely by surprise and the majority fled or tried to hide. Several were killed in the ensuing firefight. The ‘Zośka’ battalion managed to liberate the remaining prisoners of the camp, losing just 2 insurgents in the process.

The story of the liberation is one of the great achievements of the Home Army in the Warsaw Uprising. Many of the liberated prisoners, such as Henryk Lederman, joined the ranks of the AK and continued fighting in the Uprising.

The Gęsiówka liberation is significant as it is one of the few occasions where a German concentration camp was liberated by resistance forces as opposed to the Allied armies during the Second World War.

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(FOT_03293)
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Written by Harry Denton for PUMST

All rights to the photographs are vested in the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum and the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust of London.

Dziękuję bardzo to everyone who attended our open house in Ealing yesterday! It was wonderful to welcome so many visitors and to share our history, collections and activities with you all. We appreciate your support!

Please like and follow our pages on here and on Instagram () to keep up to date with news, future events and activities.

Tomorrow! We will be holding an open house at Studium Polskie Podziemnej/Polish Underground Movement Study Trust between 11 and 5pm.

Discover our archive at Ealing Common and explore the history of Polish resistance in WWII. Take a guided tour (12 and 3pm), speak with archivists, see some of the treasures in our collection and new digitised access.

Contact [email protected] to register interest.

The Polish Underground Movement Study Trust is a few minutes walk from Ealing Common Underground station on the Piccadilly and District Lines.

11 Leopold Road, London, W5 3PB

All welcome!