Barbara Czarny-Karas tells her story of the 1944 Warsaw uprising

Barbara Czarny-Karas, who now lives in Cotham, was a teenage member of the clandestine Polish Army at the time of the Warsaw uprising in 1944.

After being taken prisoner she ended up in a camp for women, at Oberlangen on the German-Dutch border.

When the 63 days of bitter fighting was over more than 80 per cent of Warsaw lay in ruins and about 200,000 Poles, soldiers and civilians, were dead.

Barbara and her fellow freedom fighters were relieved that the Nazis classified them as enemy forces with Geneva Convention rights, but their time as prisoners of war was desperately hard.

Oberlangen was liberated by the 1st Polish Armoured Division on April 12, 1945, but Barbara still had a long way to go before starting a new life in England

This is Barbara’s story:

I was twelve in September 1939, living in Warsaw with my mother, army officer stepfather and four-year-old brother.

A week after the invasion we were evacuated, the family to Lublin and my father to several destinations before he joined the Polish army in France.

We lived with relations in various parts of Poland but by 1942 we were back in Warsaw and I was going to an underground school, where Polish was the first language once again.

I joined the clandestine army in 1943, and while I trained for a year as a nurse, I also trained as a soldier and acted as a messenger and food deliverer in the uprising.

My fiance Jerzy was also fighting.

At the end of the first day I was told by my CO that he’d been killed.

I was young and madly in love and I was just devastated.

But it turned out he was only injured and he recovered to fight for Poland throughout the war.

I was in the Old Town when it was destroyed in the uprising but we escaped through the sewers to the city centre and we fought on there until we could do no more.

I think it was the Red Cross who helped get us treated as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention.

It was certainly a challenge for the Germans.

There were 2,000 women, and they’d never had female prisoners of war before.

We went through various transit stalags: Lamsdorf and Mülberg, which were both mixed, with prisoners of several nations, then Altenburg, on a hill above a lovely town, and finally Oberlangen.

The food was terrible.

I remember morning tea which was just brown hot water, thin cabbage soup with barley poured into cups from milk churns, sometimes a few potatoes.

One loaf of bread would be for six of us – and in later days at Oberlangen for eight of us, when the Germans themselves were running short of food.

By that time we were cold, half-nourished and full of lice all over, and filthy.

Ironically, for a camp full of girls, one problem a lot of us didn’t have was monthly periods.

They had simply stopped, as a result of stress and poor nutrition.

At Oberlangen we would watch the Allied bombers coming over to blitz German cities, and we would cheer them on.

Later we would hear the guns coming ever closer and suddenly the Germans were being nicer to us!

After liberation, my fiance found me and we hitch-hiked back to Bremen to get married.

After all we’d been through, I was still only 17, and he was 21.

My father wasn’t happy.

He had wanted me to go back to school.

We said we were returning to Poland but instead we hitch-hiked to Italy and joined the 2nd Polish Corps there.

They took us in like children, and said we mustn’t be parted.

In November we got our marching orders to England, by sea from Naples to Southampton, and were discharged early in 1947