The young volunteers were assigned to the Siberian Brigade, which consisted of trained Polish conscripts from the disbanded Tsarist Army and which had escaped from Russia via the Far East each of them was paired up with a hardened veteran, who was ordered to teach the teenager on the way to the front how to load, fire and clean their heavy English rifles. The ‘Bolshevik hordes’ were already on the march. In the summer of 1920, the young Marian Zieliński was a 16-year old pupil in the gymnasium of Tarnów, (a town well known for its recent patriotic support for Józef Piłsudski’s Polish Legions.) As the school year was finishing, he and most of the boys in his class skipped school, walked the 300 km to Warsaw, found a recruiting office, lied about their age, and joined the Army. He himself had fought in the war as a teenager and went on to describe some of his amazing adventures. He explained that the PRL’s Communist censorship was suppressing knowledge of the Soviet defeat, adding that everyone knew what had really happened thanks to the experiences of their families. An early source of information was my future father-in-law, Professor Marian Zieliński, who lived in Kęty near Bielsko. But I began to mend my ignorance on the subject as soon as I visited Poland in the early 1960s. As a student of Modern History at Oxford, I never heard a word about the Polish-Soviet War it had no place on the intellectual radar screens of British historians.
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