HANNA DRELA (POLISH- Giselle's grandma)

HANNA DRELA

WRITTEN BY HER GRAND DAUGHTER, GISELLE GIGIERA (ARGENTINA) 6 June 2020

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hanna Drela a remarkably brave lady who survived the outbreak of WW2, and personal tragedies in Warsaw, Poland, in September 1939.

This is the grandma to my half cousin's daughter, Giselle in Argentina.

Giselle tells Hanna's story:

Hi Kath

You asked me about Hanna Drela, she was my grandma on my mother's side of the family.

Hanna was born on June 15th of 1926 in Warsaw. She lost her parents and her older brother when she was a little girl, they were sick. They had an illness, tuberculosis. Somehow her sister, older than her, and she survived and they went to live with an old aunt.

When the Nazis attacked Warsaw for the first time, in September 1939, she lost her aunt in a bomb attack. Days after that, the Soviets took her sister away, after they finished with her, they killed her. Hanna was lucky again because her sister hid her in a building before the Soviets took her.

Hanna was only 13, she was alone and I 'm not sure how she could survive and become a battlefront nurse. She was in the Red Cross. She was short and little bit chubby but she could drag wounded soldiers through the battle camp.

Hanna is in 2 books, one of them I took a photo of it. A friend sent it as a present for my Mum. In the book the journalist/writer talks about my grandma and her bravery and there are some comments from some soldiers that they said that "if Hanna comes with us today so I'm going to return".

Hanna was also in the Armia Krajowa, AK (Armia Krajowa see *1* below) The Polish Home Army or resistance movement. She was probably captured by the Nazi during the Warsaw Uprising.

Hanna was sent to a Nazi detention camp (OBERLANGEN CAMP in Holland, see *2* below), she went there for a few months and then the insurgents released her. After that she went to Italy, where she got married with my Granddad (also polish from Krakow). Then they went to England They stayed there for a year, then my Grandma got pregnant with my oldest aunt They then came to Argentina. She was a fabulous grandma! I loved her so much, and I miss her too. She was quite, polite, a very nice lady and very bright.

Hanna received medals for her work during WW2

Armia Krajowa
For being in the
Polish Home Army

For enduring the

German POW camp Oberlangen

A memento from The Warsaw Uprising

GISELLE (nee Gigera)

*1*  Armia Krajowa, AKPolish pronunciation: [ˈarmʲa kraˈjɔva])  The Polish Home Army

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Army

was the dominant Polish resistance movement in Poland, occupied by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, during World War II. The Home Army was formed in February 1942 from the Związek Walki Zbrojnej (Armed Resistance). Over the next two years, it absorbed most other Polish underground forces. Its allegiance was to the Polish government-in-exile, and it constituted the armed wing of what became known as the "Polish Underground State".

Estimates of the Home Army's 1944 strength range between 200,000 and 600,000, the most commonly cited number being 400,000. This last number would make the Home Army not only the largest Polish underground resistance movement but, along with the Soviet partisans, one of the two largest in Europe during World War II.^[a] The Home Army was disbanded on 19 January 1945, after the Soviet Red Army had largely cleared Polish territory of German forces.

The Home Army sabotaged German operations such as transports headed for the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union. It also fought several full-scale battles against the Germans, particularly in 1943 and in Operation Tempest in 1944. The Home Army tied down substantial German forces and destroyed much-needed German supplies.^[vague]

The most widely known Home Army operation was the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. The partisans also defended Polish civilians against atrocities perpetrated by other military formations.

Because the Home Army was loyal to the Polish Government-in-Exile, the Soviet Union saw it as an obstacle to Communism in Poland. Consequently, over the course of the war, conflict grew between the Home Army and Soviet forces. During the Soviet occupation of Poland thousands of former Home Army operatives were deported to Gulags and Soviet prisons, while others—including senior commanders like Leopold Okulicki and Emil August Fieldorf—were executed.

Following the war, the official propaganda line in communist Poland was that the Home Army was an oppressive and reactionary force, at least in the 1950s and 1960s. Following the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the image of the Home Army has been more positive.

*2*  OBERLANGEN CAMP

http://www.polishresistance-ak.org/16%20Article.htm

 

In December 1944 the Germans started sending AK women prisoners to Strafflager (Penal Camp) VI C in Oberlangen. 5,000 women took part in the Warsaw Uprising, 3,000 of them were interned as POWs and 1,721 of these ended up in Oberlangen.

 

The camp had already had a dark history. Situated in the marshy Emsland area of northwest Germany, it had been one of the many concentration camps set up in the years 1933-1938 to hold opponents of the Nazi regime. After the outbreak of World War II the camp was taken over by the Wehrmacht and began to hold POWs from the occupied countries of Europe. The harsh climate, slave labour, hunger and disease turned the camp into a place of death.

 

In October 1944 Oberlangen Strafflager VI C was struck off the POW camp register on account of totally inadequate living conditions. Therefore the International Red Cross in Geneva was unaware of the fact that women POWs were later to be interned there.

 

The Germans continued to regard the Oberlangen facility as a penal camp and started to send women members of the AK there as a punishment for being obdurate rebels who had refused work as civilians in the German war industry.

 

The conditions in which we had to endure the winter of 1944-1945 were very difficult: two hundred prisoners in each rotten wooden barrack, draughty doors and windows (some lacking windowpanes), three-tier bunks, thin palliasses and only two cast-iron stoves burning damp peat that produced more smoke than heat. In one barrack there was a row of metal troughs with taps from which water, when there was any, barely trickled, and behind it two rudimentary latrines, all of which amounted to the camp’s entire sanitary facilities. Eight barracks were designated for the healthy inmates, while at the front of the camp there was a hospital barrack, the camp kitchen, a sewing workshop, a bathhouse and a delousing station – of which I do not remember the last two ever functioning. One barrack was used as a chapel, while two more were left empty. These we exploited as an extra supply of fuel: we took out planks from the bunks, pulled up floorboards and even removed door and window frames until the camp authorities started imposing severe penalties for destroying government property.

 

The food was the same as in other camps: in the mornings and evenings a tepid herbal tea, frequently mouldy bread, the occasional piece of margarine or a spoonful of beetroot marmalade. At midday we would receive soup from bitter cabbage or grubby peas with two or three jacket potatoes.