| Description | Inka was the nom de guerre of Danuta Siedzik (1928-1946), one of more than 400,000 Poles from all walks of life who risked their lives daily as members of Poland’s underground armed resistance to the country’s foreign occupiers during and after World War II. Joining the Polish Home Army at age 16 as a medic operating in and around her native town of Bielsk-Podlaski in eastern Poland, she and a number of her comrades were captured the next year by the advancing Soviet NKVD. Although Inka escaped from her Soviet captors and fled to the north of Poland to continue serving as a medic in the resistance, in 1946 she was captured by the newly established Polish Communist secret police, summarily tried and executed. Inka’s story is one of thousands of similar tragic stories of courage that have come to light only since the fall of communism in Poland in 1989. This exhibit in English, co-sponsored by the UW Libraries and UW Polish Studies Endowment Committee, consists of materials prepared by the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, alongside related materials from the UW Libraries’ Polish studies collections. |
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