Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Poland


August, 1944: Jan Walcuch "Gwido" and Hanna Pruszkowska "Baska" with a dog called Kropka.  Photo by Eugeniusz Lokajski "Brok" 

This card from the Warsaw Uprising (or Warsaw Rising) Museum is another lightly colorized version of a photograph taken during the Uprising of 1944.  

The man in the photo is Jan Walcuch (November 26, 1908 - December 22, 1962) and apparently worked for the headquarters of the AK (Home Army) in the office of information and propaganda and publishing.  He was taken prisoner at the end of the Uprising by the Germans.  

The women holding the dog in the photo was Hanna Irena Pruszkowska aka "Baśka" or "Murmańska".  Born on August 17, 1921, she would have been about 23 years old when this photo was taken.   She also worked in the same office as Walcuch and appears to have had a degree "of plutonium" according to the translation of her Uprising Museum biography page.  She was taken captive by the Germans at the end of the Uprising and died on January 23, 1995 in Argentina, 

Numerous photos of her and the dog appear on her biography page.  

The photographer was Eugeniusz Lokajski, code name"Brok", born December 14, 1908 .   Before the war he was an athlete and even competed in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin for Poland.  According to his Uprising Museum biography page, on September 25, 1944 he was assigned to take photos for troops to make fake papers.  Out of supplies, he attempted to get some at a camera store located at Marszałkowska 129 in Warsaw when he was caught in an artillery blast and killed.  Many of his photographs can be found here on his bio page.


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