Polish WWII veteran posthumously honoured in Oxford
PR dla Zagranicy
Grzegorz Siwicki
01.07.2018 09:00
A plaque dedicated to Polish World War II hero Alfons Maćkowiak has been unveiled at Oxford University in recognition of his contribution to the post-war successes of British athletes.
Gen. Alfons Maćkowiak, twitter.com/polishembassyuk
Gen. Alfons Maćkowiak, also known as Alan Mack, died in January last year at the age of 101.
The Polish ambassador to the UK, Arkady Rzegocki, said during Saturday’s ceremony: “I hope and strongly believe that the plaque would also be a wish of General Maćkowiak, so that it would remind everyone about the many Poles who made the UK their home after World War II, when they could not come back to a free Poland.”
Peter Crawshaw, Honorary Treasurer of the Achilles Club, which brings together current and former members of Oxford and Cambridge University Athletics Clubs, said that the plaque was a tribute to an extraordinary Pole who was a hero in both war and peace.
A lieutenant in the Polish Army in September 1939, Maćkowiak was rounded up by Soviet forces but managed to escape from a moving train bound for the Katyn Forest in western Russia, where more than 20,000 Polish officers were murdered by Josef Stalin’s NKVD secret police in the spring of 1940.
Maćkowiak served in the 1st Independent Parachute Brigade, taking part in Operation Market Garden, and later became a trainer for the Silent and Unseen (Cichociemni), a Polish Army special forces unit that trained in the UK before being parachuted at night into Nazi-occupied Poland.
After the war, Maćkowiak ran a guest house in the county of Essex in the east of England, before becoming a physical education teacher. In 1964 he was hired as a coach at the Oxford University Athletic Club, a post he held for 25 years.
(mk/gs)