On October 14, 1942, German occupiers publicly hanged 15 people, almost all employees of Radom’s Arms Factory, on its premises. Their colleagues were forced to watch. The execution was part of reprisals for supplying weapons to the Polish resistance. Factory workers had secretly produced and smuggled out Vis pistols for the underground. The Germans sought to terrorize the workforce and crush its support for the resistance.

Father Maksymilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan friar who gave his life for a fellow prisoner at Auschwitz, was beatified by Pope Paul VI at the Vatican #OTD in 1971. In July 1941, while imprisoned in the German concentration camp Auschwitz, Kolbe volunteered to take the place of Franciszek Gajowniczek, whom the Germans had condemned to death by starvation. After more than two weeks in a starvation cell, Kolbe was killed with an injection of phenol on August 14, 1941.

Fearing that the Germans would liquidate the camp and murder its remaining prisoners, Jewish inmates at the German extermination camp in Sobibór rose up on October 14, 1943. Led by Aleksander Pieczerski and Leon Feldhendler, they killed SS men and launched a mass escape. Around 300 prisoners reached the nearby forest. Most were later captured and killed; only about 50 survived the war. The uprising became one of the most remarkable acts of Jewish resistance during WW2.

On 2 October 1940, the Germans established the Warsaw Ghetto, one of the largest Jewish ghettos in occupied Europe. Before the outbreak of the Second World War, Warsaw was home to the largest Jewish community in Europe and the second-largest in the world, after New York City. Approximately 350,000 Jews lived in the Polish capital. The decision to build walls around the Jewish district in Warsaw was made in March 1940. The Germans sought to completely isolate what they described as an “epidemic-threatened area” from the rest of the city. Approximately 400,000 people, initially all residents of Warsaw, were confined to an area of 307 hectares. Later, when Jews from towns surrounding Warsaw, as well as from Germany, were forcibly resettled in the ghetto, the population rose to around 450,000. Over the following months, the boundaries of the ghetto were repeatedly altered, gradually reducing its size. Under a decree issued by Governor-General Hans Frank on 15 October 1941, leaving the designated Jewish residential area was punishable by death. The same penalty applied to those who helped Jews outside the ghettos, on the so-called “Aryan side”. The Warsaw Ghetto existed for more than two and a half years, and its establishment ultimately cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

🇵🇱🇨🇦 Polish-Canadian brotherhood in arms forged on the battlefields of WW2 On 16 October, IPN commemorated the soldiers of Gen. Stanisław Maczek’s 1st Polish Armoured Division at the Monument to Polish-Canadian Military Friendship outside the Canadian Embassy in Warsaw. In August 1944, the Polish division fought under the command of the First Canadian Army in Normandy. During the Battle of the Falaise Pocket, Polish troops played a crucial role in cutting off the German retreat, holding Hill 262 (Mont Ormel) against fierce counterattacks until relieved by Canadian forces. The Polish-Canadian cooperation continued during the liberation of Belgium and the Netherlands. While Canadian forces fought to secure the Scheldt Estuary, Polish troops captured Axel and Terneuzen and helped liberate North Brabant. Together, they defended the Meuse line before advancing into Germany in 1945. 💬“The bloodshed together on the battlefields of Normandy became the foundation of Polish–Canadian brotherhood in arms,” wrote IPN Deputy President Karol Polejowski in a letter read at the ceremony by the Institute's deputy head Mateusz Szpytma. Representatives of @CanadaPoland, veterans’ families and Polish institutions attended the commemoration, honouring a shared legacy of courage, sacrifice and the struggle for freedom.