They helped secure the freedoms we all enjoy today – but their stories of courage, loss and sacrifice mean nothing to the vandals who attack their final resting place. Tucked away in a dark and damp corner of St Joseph’s cemetery in Moston is a collection of about 100 graves whose crypts hide stories of barely-conceivable suffering, unimaginable loss and incredible bravery. This is the Polish section. Many of these tombs are official war graves of decorated soldiers, pilots, resistance fighters and nurses who fled the twin tyranny of Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s ‘red army’ of Russia which, one from the west and the other from the east, invaded Poland at the start of World War II in 1939. Some became underground fighters in the resistance. Many fled west and fought shoulder-to-shoulder with the British. Others were captured and put on cattle trucks to work in Stalin’s labour camps in Siberia. In time, all of them would start new post-war lives in Manchester, a city with a proud history of welcoming immigrants. (…) It appears the vandals have used a saw to cut through a metal bar which had secured a cross to the war grave of Piotr Filistowicz . The headstone reveals he, like many Poles, fought for the Allies in Battle of Monte Cassino in Italy during World War II. There is more to his story. Then 39, he was part of the Polish II Corps which famously erected the Polish flag after its soldiers were the first to finally depose the Nazis who had set up positions amid the ruins of Monte Cassino, an abbey in the hills south of Rome. An estimated 55,000 Allied troops and 20,000 German soldiers lost their lives in the bloody four-month campaign. Many of those who perished were Poles.
via manchestereveningnews: They were heroes who fought the Nazis and fled Russian tyranny. Their graves now lie desecrated – we won’t forget them