The “Feminine” war is more terrible than “male”. Men hide behind history, behind facts, war attracts them as action and conflict of ideas, interests, and women appear from feelings. They can see what is hidden for men," wrote Svetlana Alexievich in her celebrated study "War has nothing of a woman." Agreed – war is an antithesis of womanhood, but without women it would be a 100 times horrendous...
At the beginning of February 1945, the russian 2nd Armoured defender Army entered German positions on the Oder and captured a dock under the village of Chelin – hence it was only a fewer twelve kilometres to Berlin. To this 2nd Army were assigned Polish bomb squads 6 Motorized Pontoon-Bridge Battalion. It was a selection unit, seasoned in battles, which turned out to be peculiarly hard and bloody at the Chelinianhead. The Soviets stressed that only Stalingrad was so terrible. The Germans besides threw their elite here at Waffen-SS, but 1 of the heaviest attacks of Polish bomb squads and russian armadillos experienced not from the SS, but... 2 battalions of widows by airmen and sailors. Each of the women serving in them wore an armband with the inscription, “Revenge for her husband”. And no of them went back in conflict – they all died in the fire of the cocaine and tank guns... "Women come out of affection" – totalitarian power thus utilized female love and attachment and female anger after losing a family...
The war from a woman's position is crueler than from a man's, but undeniably and paradoxically 2 planet conflicts in the 20th century, which marked the culture and civilization of humanity, accelerated the emancipation of women, their equality and meaning in the modern world. The very fact that it took a terrible war for women to receive electoral rights, to survey or to simply decide their fate, is meaningful... Suddenly, the “sex weaker” place of men called on the front took the men's place in the factories, behind the wheel of cars, in the offices, and most of all became irreplaceable in the wellness service – not only in the back, but close to the war activities, in front hospitals. Women were found in various types of auxiliary but besides militant formations. It was already visible on the front – especially the east – of planet War I, and in planet War II, which became a full conflict, women frequently carried the death of their enemies on an equal footing with men – as snipers, assault aircraft pilots or diversions in the conspiracy fight. Polish people, through our tragic history, have been at the forefront of the planet in all respect since the 19th century in uprisings against the invaders, in Legions and Polish Military Organization during the large War, after September ’39 in auxiliary formations of the Polish Armed Forces, as physicalists in the 1st Army women's battalion, yet – in the Home Army, among others, in Kedywa, on the barricades of the Warsaw Uprising...
Let's look at the photograph on the cover – it's touching, charming and scary at the same time – surreal even if you think about what this beautiful girl might have survived before she died or was enslaved in the summertime of 1944... And then read the article Agnieszka Kubała about women in the Warsaw Uprising, an interview with prof. Olga Barbasiewicz about the price of fear that nipponese women had to pay for their war emancipation, and about the price of fear of AK liaisons Józefa Rybak, who told us what it was like to run distant from the hands of Gestapo torturers respective times... We tried – without losing sight of the minute of Polish experience – to show a female in the war in a broad perspective. A war that has nothing of a female in it...
A young plaque, sending her front image to a parent who remained in Siberia, signed it: “Mom, I live!!!, a photograph with a firearm due to the fact that I am at war!”
Feel free to read.
