Swastika tattoo on Polish resistance fighter's chest?

There were a few different groups of "Armia Krajowa" (Home Army) soldiers. Some were people fighting for Poland, others were "bandits" and would run through the countryside raping and killing.

Then you had the "cursed soldiers" "Żołnierze Wyklęci" who were Home Army Soldiers who fought the Germans and then kept fighting the Soviet occupiers AFTER the end of the war and were persecuted for not being communists.

I'd bet that your friend was a Bandit.

In post-communist Poland, there is an obsession with renaming streets, especially streets that had been named by communists either after communist party officials or some kind of communist slogan, to a new name after some kind of war hero.

The kink in the plan is that quite often those "heroes" in the AK turn out to actually have been "bandits" so then they have to change the name again.

The name of the street where I live is some kind of communist slogan, and one day when I walked out of my apartment, I noticed the name of the street had been changed. Turns out it was named after some second-Louie in the home army (I guess they ran out of generals and captains... couldn't even muster up a 1st Lieutenant or something...). Evidently it pissed everyone off, and so a few months ago they changed it back to its original communist name.

Nestor said:
Also battle of Falaise, Market Garden, Tobruk, Italian Campaign, Narvik. Good to remember about Katyn massacre as well. Enigma code contribution and V2 rocket Intel.
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I live not far away from the base where the Polish mathematicians cracked the enigma code in the early 30s. Then there is Witold Pilecki who tried to warn the world about Auschwitz.

enefgee said:
Could have been for good luck, could have been in the SS. After the Germans left Auschwitz the ovens kept going for days, run by the locally sourced labour. That's first hand information from someone who was there.
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The Germans blew up the crematoriums before leaving. Crematorium IV was blown up in October 1944 during an uprising, while II and III were blown up on January 20, 1945, while crematorium V was blown up on January 26, 1944, the day before the Red Army arrived.
 
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Dad had a friend who ran a farm around St Catherines. This man was a Ukranian Canadian with his wife who I think was also Ukrainian Canadian. Save for the swastika on his chest, he sounds like a contemporary of the Polish chap. This man was a rough guy. He and his wife were foster parents. They were rough on the adopted children. I do not know how he came fron the Ukraine after WWII From what mom said, the man had done some sort of work for the UK. I don't know where dad met this man. It could have been in the Canadian Army around 1956. Mom being mom, she had no further details. My (less likely, fanciful) guess is he was one of the Ukraine combattants who were secreted out of Europe by taking a circuitous sneaky route in the late 1940's My other guess is that he and his wife may have been stateless Volkesdeutsche caught up in the great expulsions of 1944 and onwards. This man had a German given name and surname.He would have been brought up in a rough and ready world & would have seen a lot of horrors and brutality along the way. A grisly schooling in the ways of the world.
 
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Some were anti-semitic and most were not. The Poles had an actual organization "Zegota" for helping Jews and as listed in Yad Vashem, more were saved by Poles than anyone else.
 
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