The ninety years of Eugeniusz Cydzik’s life encompassed the defense of Grodno in September 1939, underground resistance in the ranks of the Home Army, daily struggle for survival in the Vorkuta labour camp, and in later years, tireless battles for the preservation of Polish monuments and cemeteries in Lviv and neighbouring area. Scout, soldier, and guardian of national memory — Cydzik passed over to eternal rest on 17 September 2012. His life is a ready-made film screenplay, being loaded with so many dramatic twists and turns alongside its love story subplot.
He came into the world on 28 December 1921 in the hamlet of Misiewicze just outside Grodno. His spiritual character was shaped by his family home and the scouting movement. He was a member of the V Sea Scout Troop named after Romuald Traugutt in Grodno, proudly wearing his Scout Cross for the remainder of his days. As part of the Polish Scouting Association (ZHP), he went through a full military training course. Following the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, he volunteered without hesitation for military service, enlisting with the auxiliary defense forces in Grodno. When the Soviet Union subsequently invaded, he took an active part in the city’s defense against the Red Army.
In February of 1942, he joined the Union of Armed Struggle (Związek Walki Zbrojnej), after which he was to become a solider of the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa). He served in the Bureau of Information and Propaganda, and later in the Directorate of diversion (Kedyw). Even when approaching the age of ninety, he was still able to stand to attention and recite the oath he had faithfully sworn to his commanders in 1942:
“I shall faithfully and unbendingly guard the honour of Poland, and I will fight for her liberation with weapon in hand. Victory shall be my reward; and death the price of treason.”
He went on to complete officer cadet training in intelligence, earning the rank of cadet corporal. Trained in sabotage, he gathered weapons, carried out reconnaissance, and dealt with communications and the distribution of underground press materials.
In August of 1945, he was arrested by the NKVD and sentenced by a Military Tribunal to fifteen years hard labour with an additional five years’ deprivation of civil rights for affiliation with an “anti-Soviet armed organization.” His sentence was served in the far north, where he arrived in Vorkuta (Vorkutlag Corrective Labour Camp of the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic) by train, along with his fellow prisoners, on Christmas Eve, 24 December 1945. After spending three days in quarantine he was sent off to perform forced labour. In temperatures reaching below –30°C amid several-metre-deep snowdrifts, his brigade was ordered to build a stadium. Completely unused to such backbreaking physical work, he struggled to shovel snow and carry out earthworks on the frozen ground of the tundra. When it occurred that he possessed the ability to operate a surveying level, he was transferred to a brigade responsible for taking measurements. Over time he was assigned to the construction of a coal mine — from April 1949, he was part of the so-called Rechlag, namely the Special Camp No. 6 for political prisoners. Later he came to find work as a surveyor and electrician, even managing to complete technical studies during his imprisonment.
He later recalled:
“I can say only one thing — I survived. Perhaps I did not deserve it. I was raised in the Catholic faith; we prayed together at home. My mother was very devout, and she prayed — she prayed that I would survive, and she prayed for the wife I would one day have.”
Indeed, it was in Vorkuta that came to meet Czesława Hnatów, a young woman from Lviv arrested in March 1945 by the Soviet counter-intelligence service SMERSH for her Home Army activities. Sentenced to twenty years hard labour, their shared fate brought them together in a touching love story. They were later joined in marriage in the camp on 11 November 1956 by a priest imprisoned there.
Eugeniusz Cydzik had been granted early release a few months previously, in March 1956, “with his sentence overturned and his civil rights restored.” He remained in Vorkuta as a free worker until 1957, thereafter leaving with his wife upon her release. After considering a return to Poland, they ultimately opted to settle in her native Lviv — a decision that was not made lightly, but out of deep attachment to family heritage and ancestral memory.
In Lviv, the couple devoted themselves to preserving Polish national remembrance sites. They helped to restore damaged graves, military cemeteries and memorials in and around the city. In February 1984, Eugeniusz Cydzik founded the Polish Society for the Preservation of Military Graves, serving as its president for three terms, later becoming its honorary chairman. Together with his wife, in the 1980s he initiated the clean-up and restoration of the Cemetery of the Defenders of Lviv. The Cydziks, aided by local Poles, cleared away heaps of rubble and rubbish, thereby rescuing surviving architectural details. Czesława Cydzik created small hand-made commemorative bricks, the sale of which helped to fund the restoration works — something which over time, came to be carried out more officially.
In 1993, on the Wuleckie Hills — the site where Polish professors from Lviv universities had been executed by the Germans — the Cydziks erected a concrete monument topped with an iron cross. The list of military graves Eugeniusz Cydzik had a hand in restoring is a long one, and to name but a few: the military quarters at Lviv’s Janowski Cemetery, the graves of 1939 soldiers in Jaśniska, Malechów, and Zboiska, and the war cemeteries of 1920 in Busk and Zadwórze (known as “the Polish Thermopylae”), where he was responsible each August for the organization of annual commemorations, which were well attended by delegations from Poland.
Despite years of effort, he was unable to achieve the exhumation and commemoration of the Polish soldiers who fell during the Soviet entry into Lviv in 1939 and who were later buried on the grounds of the Lviv Polytechnic gardens and Iron Water Park. His dream was to establish just a modest museum display at the Cemetery of the Defenders of Lwów (Cmentarz Orląt Lwowskich).
In recognition of his lifelong service, he was awarded numerous Polish state decorations, including the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta and, posthumously, the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.
Until his final days, Eugeniusz Cydzik fought to preserve the national memory. He was laid to rest at Lychakiv Cemetery, at the foot of the Insurgents’ Hill. In Lviv, visible traces of the Cydziks’ legacy remain — their home was a true bastion of patriotism. Their daughter, Krystyna, was one of the co-founders of Polish Scouting Movement in Ukraine.
Ewa Ziółkowska
Translated from the Polish language by Jan Dobrodumow