The sense of service, readiness for sacrifices and devotion to a cause are strictly interrelated. Service to something or someone simply implies readiness to assume costs; it is an act of subordinating oneself to the cause we serve. Sacrifices are very diverse: of one’s time, rest, plans for life, career and family life; of labor and suffering -- even of one’s life.

In the history of Poland and of the Polish language the notion of service underwent an essential transformation in both content and range. Even in the early Middle Ages there were "servant villages," constrained to provide certain services on behalf of the bourg, which was the center of power and at the same time a fortified stronghold. The services were paid in labor and natural products. Horsemen bred horses, bakers baked bread, craftsmen produced arms, etc.; these were the so called services to which a servant was obliged. Later there occurred whole groups of people who served somebody who was higher than them on the social ladder. There were various kinds of servants: maidens, manorial servants. Their works was in principle considered to be of little "respect," auxiliary in character, and these servants were strongly dependent on their masters.

Later, at least in the XVIth century, the word "service" gained another, different meaning: a respectable, honorable, voluntary, and non-compulsory service. It meant service to values, not only to people. This service, performed on behalf of great causes, universally perceived as such, endowed those who served with dignity, it elevated them in their own and in the others’ eyes. It was service to the king, the country, the church. People used to say "service to His Majesty the King"; there emerged the notion of military service, and of service to the state. This second, respectable and honorable service concerned the state and its institutions (offices, army) and the church (service to God), this was directed to others who were suffering -- to neighbors. Especially during the over one hundred year period of Poland’s enslavement (1795-1918) service gained the splendor of a fight for liberty and the good, it sublimated and became an increasingly universal moral duty, entailing sacrifices rather than honors.

A special, triple service: to God, to the country, and to man was undertaken in 1911 by the Polish scout movement, being an emanation of the English scouting accommodated to the Polish conditions of the fight for freedom at that time. The form of the scouts’ oath stated: "I have a sincere will to serve with my whole life God and Poland, to carry my willing help to neighbors and to be obedient to the scouts’ law".

Service for the country that in the period of the nation’s enslavement so easily coincided with assuming sacrifices took also a form of armed struggle in insurrections (1794, 1807-1814, 1830-1831, 1863-1864, 1905-1907), as well as of "organic labor" in the fields of economy, education, and efforts that enlarged civil awareness of large masses of the society. This will of service and readiness to bear sacrifices for the realization of the fundamental goal of regaining independence embraced wider and wider masses of the increasingly aware society. After 1918, that is, after Poland’s return on the maps of Europe, the idea of an independent Polish state that became flesh was transformed into the will of its defense at all costs, as well as of service for this state. Through Polish schools, army, and social organization it reached the majority of Polish citizens and was assimilated by a part of numerous national minorities (constituting in 1931 over 31 percent of the total number of the population). Some of them, especially territorial minorities such as the Ukrainians and Germans, were to some extent hostile towards the young Polish state, striving rather to found their own state (Ukrainians), or to join the neighboring one (Germany). But also among national minorities there were many people who recognized the Polish state as their own.

A test -- perhaps all too severe, but real -- of this attitude of service to the state, as well as of readiness to bear sacrifices, came in September 1939 and the subsequent long six years. These were years when service to the state and performance of duties towards a state apparatus that was crushed and withdrew abroad or joined the underground could not be forced in any way; on the contrary it entailed the most severe repression from the side of the states invading Polish lands. Now, even more than in the XIXth century, service to the state was related to sacrifices. Those who served it often paid the highest price -- that of life, and their deaths were preceded with the torments of prisons, German and Russian concentration camps, torture during examinations, direct confrontation and partisan struggles, continuous exposure to danger, many years of separation from their family, starvation, and diseases. Forms of service on behalf of the lost independence were numerous: from armed combat and conspiracy, through efforts to help people in danger, to tiresome everyday labor. These manifested the humane attitudes of whole groups of people and of individuals.

To get an idea of their aggregate is particularly difficult. They may be glimpsed only in facts that concerned larger communities and were clearly shaped by acts of will. Therefore only a small part of their reality may be registered. Moreover, attitudes of human groups are variable, and depend on circumstances. This state of affairs hinders broader generalizations and imposes on all statements an hypothetical character, requiring further verification. It is easier to register models of behavior than the attitudes related to them. It is easier to grasp actions of elite groups than then broader social basis that -- in spite of its extent -- leaves weaker traces on history. All that we will write in subsequent sections of this paper will therefore have only the value of a first draft, a first approximation that is intended to initiate a discussion.

The German invasion of Poland caused a whole avalanche of events. It surprised the population of the invaded country and forced it immediately to undertake actions whose previous preparation or even contemplation were simply impossible. From this period we know thousands of facts of dedicated actions of the Polish population, as well as of services provided by Poles: maintaining order, fire protection, public health facilities, security, military aid and transportation. The devotedness of the civil population was clearly proven in the cities that choose lasting defense (Warsaw, Gdynia, Lvov), as well as in those that spontaneously began such actions in a hopeless position (Grodno). Much longer than planned or estimated by the enemy numerous defense sites (the Land Coast Defense around Gdynia, Westerplatte, the Hel peninsula, the Modlin fortress) persisted in the struggle. In over a dozen cases the civil population and paramilitary formations defended their territory even when the army already withdrew (among others, in Silesia and in Pomorze). The attitude of men in the age of recruitment and young men and women about to reach this age was impressive. Many more people applied to the army than it was possible to integrate and arm. Many civilians went with the army counting on incorporation into its units; whole squads, composed of school youth formed in courses of military education reported their readiness to fight. Youth that did not reach the age of recruitment performed auxiliary service. High school students, scouts, various volunteers constituted the core of the body of defendants of Grodno (September 20-21, 1939), struggling with the Red Army which was beginning its invasion of those territories. Scouts and veterans of Silesian uprisings (1919-1921) fought with Germans in Katowice, even when the army left the city, suffering huge losses both in combat and subsequent executions. The population of Warsaw, in spite of the effects of the three weeks’ siege (September 8-28, 1939), was ready to continue the struggle. The decision about capitulation was made not as a result of pressure from the inhabitants of the capital, but because of lack of ammunition and food, as well as the general situation.

Summarizing the September campaign an eminent military historian wrote: "The Polish campaign remained a peculiar phenomenon, characterized by repeated efforts of already beaten units to reassemble in order to prolong the struggle".

The engine of action of both soldiers and civil population was a sense of the need to fulfill one’s duty (that is, one’s service), a high sense of soldiers’ honor, patriotism, and readiness to bear high sacrifices on behalf of the threatened state.

The last shots of the September campaign had not yet died away when in the West, in France, a new Polish army began to form. It consisted of soldiers who in small units passed through the Romanian and the Hungarian border, of those who already under occupation made their way to the new army, mainly through the Carpathians, but also through the territory of neutral Lithuania and Latvia, as well as of economic emigrants settled in France before the war who now joined the army. Those who found themselves in Hungary and in Romania in September 1939 were put in concentration camps. They got to the army thanks to widely organized escapes to which the countries’ authorities shut their eyes. Those who came from Poland had first to pass through a well protected border zone, then through mountain chains, dangerous especially during the hard winter of 1939/1940. A mass of future soldiers climbed over them. The sense of duty, of service, drove thousands of young people: soldiers in service and in reserves, young people who had not yet reached the recruitment age, those who -- as the poet wrote -- "escaped to arms", to undertake the highest risks in order to be able to keep serving. Those who did not manage were exposed to torture, prisons, and then German or Russian concentration camps. This process of getting through lasted through the whole year 1940, with its peak around May and June, until the fall of France. Later through hermetically tight, protected borders, using previously prepared trails, there passed only couriers, and sometimes also people who burned their bridges, loosing ground under their feet.

During the defense of France in May and June, 1940, Polish military units, more poorly armed and equipped than the French and the English, showed unusual persistence in the fight. Where defeated they got through to places where they could continue their struggle, above all to Great Britain, their last ally. They behaved in the same way later on other front lines: in Norway (April 1940), in the Middle East and in Africa (1940-1941). Polish troops that undertook to fight first in this war proved to have a feature essential to every service: fidelity. Fidelity towards their own destroyed state, towards their allies beaten in the first phase of the war by Germans, fidelity to the oath they took. They did it spontaneously and many times, even then when their allies completely failed (as in the case of France that did not fulfill its obligations in 1939 and easily yielded in 1940) or when their policy was entirely contrary to Poland (as in the case of the United States and Great Britain in the final phase of the war). Polish loyalty included even the Red Army entering Polish lands in 1944. Performing the "Tempest" (Burza) action (from Lvov to the line of Vistula) troops of the National Army (AK -- Armia Krajowa) reported to Soviet commanders, declaring their willingness to share the fight with the Germans, and posing only one condition: their status of allies, dependent on their own government in London, commanded by the Soviet military authorities only operationally and tactically, and not in questions of politics and ideology. Such situations normally ended up with disarmament and confinement.

In prisons and from executions there perished the entire leading teams of political parties, social organizations, and military associations. They were replaced by other people who, like their predecessors, were aware of the terrible risk, and yet ready to take it in the spirit of responsibility for the cause they served.

The ethos of service and readiness to bear the highest sacrifice directed leaders of the Polish Underground State when they decided, at the end of July 1944, to begin an anti-German uprising in Warsaw. They made this decision aware of their personal risk: failure of the uprising threatened death at the hands of Germans, or at least enslavement and exile. In the case of success there was a prospect of being imprisoned by Soviet authorities who, as in eastern Polish lands, might eliminate by force their contenders to political power in the resurgent country. Prepared for both defeat and victory, soldiers took the risk of death from bombs, artillery shells, or execution of the inhabitants of houses taken by German soldiers. In deciding to begin the uprising, they did so without the possibility of informing even the closest family members who also were exposed to all the consequences of impending fight. Not only lieutenants and generals from the General Command of the National Army, but also civilians from the Government Representation and other civil units of the underground country management were subject to death for consenting to the insurrection. Older gentlemen, burdened with families and duties, were at the top of the state governance and performed for six years the same service as soldiers on the front lines, risking death and torture everyday. No one of these several dozen people protested against the decision or tried to avoid its consequences. The Warsaw uprising, planned for several days, lasted 63 days.

The "Tempest" action lasted on the Polish territories from the end of January to August 1944, when guerilla troops approaching the fighting in Warsaw from the east were systematically disarmed by the Soviet army, and their soldiers carried off to the east. In spite of such an attitude of the "ally of our allies", Polish forces continued to fight with Germans in western lands until the Soviet front approached in January and February 1945. In his last order, issued from the post of the commander of the National Army, the order that dismissed the Army, General L. Okulicki wrote on January 19, 1945: "Soldiers of the National Army! I am giving you my last order. Perform your further work and activities in the spirit of regaining full independence of the State and protection of the Polish population against extermination. Try to be leaders of the Nation and to realize the independent Polish state. In this action, everybody has to be a commander to himself. . . ." And indeed, the fight for liberty was not terminated. In its form of armed struggle it lasted -- due to circumstances for which not only the "soldiers of liberty" must be held responsible -- till 1949, and in the form of political struggle – for forty some years.

Great generosity was shown by the population of the General Government in 1939 and in 1940. They received in their homes hundreds of thousands of their compatriots displaced from Great Poland and other lands annexed by the German Reich, and later over half a million habitants of Warsaw expelled from the city after the uprising. The population rescued with dedication Polish soldiers trying to avoid captivity after the September defeat. Threatened conspirators were protected. Jews, condemned to death and escaping from ghettos, were hidden in homes, though for hiding a Jew the penalty was immediate death by execution of the whole family, including children (for which reason, over 600 Polish families were killed). Poles also took care of Soviet soldiers who escaped from camps supposed to be prisoner-of-war camps, but which in reality were death camps. These were not common attitudes, but it is difficult to expect universal heroism or that it be common to put the life of strangers over that of one’s closest family threatened by death by the very fact of the stranger’s presence. At the time of the Warsaw uprising the civil population, bearing the heaviest burden of the fight, actively supported the insurrectionists and stood by their side.

Writing about dedication and sacrifices, we must stress the great role of Polish women who not only consented without protest to their sons’ exposure, but were constantly present in conspiratorial work. They took part in the underground struggles as liaison soldiers, nurses, distributors of the underground press, military staff workers. Many a time they assumed very important functions, as Janina Karasiówna, director of the conspiratorial communication department of the General Command of ZWZ/AK and other women directors of international communication. Women could be found in guerilla and in insurrectional squads, in the forests and on the barricades of Warsaw. It is above all they who created the climate of fidelity to ideals and of devotedness without which such a universal fight with the enemy, which at the same time was a fight for basic human values, could not have encompassed the whole country. It was they who made out of their homes "military barracks" of the conspiratorial army, bringing support and asylum for hundreds of thousands of conspirators; it was they who looked after those wanted by the enemy, who sent parcels to prisons and camps, and in exile fought for survival of their families, especially when they were deprived of their fathers and sons. It is women who could afford organizing the religious and cultural life in camps; it was also they who created in a horrible concentration camp in Ravensbrück a clandestine scouting group "MURY" ("The Walls"). It is they who were most form and courageous during cruel investigations and the most persevering in patiently enduring sufferings.

When we think of the "Polish" second World War, we associate with the word "service" soldiers fighting on all front lines: in Africa, in the Middle East, in France and Italy, in Norway, in the Soviet Union, and above all in our own land. When we think of the word "devotion", we see with the eyes of our soul Polish women: mothers, wives, sisters, fiancees -- liaison soldiers, press distributors, doctors, and above all those who nourished and took care of the others. It is to them that we owe the most.