A villager from near Bialystok tried to prove to Belarus that he helped Soviet partisans. When that didn't work, he "remembered" that he belonged to the Home Army
Poland has definitively refused a 98-year-old resident of Podlachia compensation for political repression, as there were no repressions against him.
The District Court in Bialystok denied 98-year-old Podlachia resident J. B. nearly 60,000 euros in compensation for political repression. After four sessions, the court recognized: there was no struggle for independence in his biography – there was a post-war village quarrel and the grandfather's talent for inventing stories.
The facts that the court did recognize: on July 30, 1946, 20-year-old J. B. was detained by employees of the district security department and held in a pre-trial detention center in Bialystok along with a village neighbor. A month later, he was released – and immediately offered... to join the very same security body that had held him.
Everything else – membership in the Home Army, service in a partisan detachment, interrogation under an article about belonging to the AK, a meeting with a judge who allegedly came to the scene to announce his death sentence, and even an order to dig his own grave – the court recognized as fiction.
A historian-expert from the Institute of National Remembrance meticulously dismantled the grandfather's version: the commander he referred to never used the stated pseudonym and did not command a detachment in that area; the organization J. B. allegedly belonged to operated in completely different communes; and the cellmate, who, according to the grandfather, was also a "partisan," joined the militia himself three months after his release – which, as the expert noted, is impossible for a person with an underground past.
The document the applicant referred to as proof of his activities in the AK turned out not to be an official paper, but a note on a warehouse inventory form.
However, the court established: in his youth, J. B. did indeed cooperate – but with Soviet partisans during the German occupation, which contradicts the goals of the AK. Later, he sought veteran status both in Poland and even in Belarus – on the basis of participation specifically in the Soviet partisan movement. But it didn't work out there either.
The villager's children admitted that he had not told them about his exploits. His wife also stated that she knew nothing about her husband's struggle for independence.
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