Marian Bernaciak

Marian Bernaciak (nom de guerre "Dymek" (Little Smoke) or "Orlik" (Little Eagle)) (March 6, 1917 – June 24, 1946) was a lieutenant in the Polish Army, a member of ZWZ and the Home Army, a major and a legendary leader of an underground partisan unit of WiN in the Lublin region.

Early life Marian was born to a peasant family, as the son of Michał and Maria (née Bliźniak). In 1937, he finished the Czartoryski gimnazjum in Puławy. In August 1944 Bernaciak, together with about 350 partisan soldiers began a march in an attempt to aid the insurgents fighting the Nazis in the Warsaw Uprising, on the orders of AK central command.

In the anti-communist resistance

In 1944/45 he was in danger of being arrested by the Soviets and as a result decided to disband his unit and go into hiding.

In the fall of 1945 he was made the commander of all WiN units operating in the Regional Inspectorate "Puławy". The anti-communist partisan group led by him, one of the largest in the Lublin region (between 160 and 200 soldiers) carried out many military actions against the communist authorities, the communist secret police (UB), units of Polish People's Army and the Milicja. According to released NKVD documents, as well as an investigation by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance in 2006, Bernaciak was considered sufficiently dangerous by the Soviets that they refused to let Polish communists "handle the problem on their own" and insisted on becoming involved themselves. in the north of the Puławy region, while the second, operating in the south was under the command of Zygmunt Wilczyńsk, "Żuk" (Beetle).

The source of Bernaciak's successes at this time lay in his leadership ability and the willingness to change his tactics in response to a changing situation. Thanks to his efforts, his patrols and diversion squads, in addition to military actions, also carried out intelligence work, gathered information on the political and social situation in the world and in the region, and published informational pamphlets, communiques, and political manifestos. The best known of these were Orlik's appeal to the public on the occasion of the 1946 referendum and the pamphlet "The Pulawski Katyn" (a reference to the Katyn massacre).

Legacy

Bernaciak never married or started a family because, according to him, "there was no time for that".

In his home village of Zalesie, a monument was erected after the fall of communism in 1989, commemorating him with an inscription, a cross and a symbol of "Poland Fighting".

On 25 June 2006, in Piotrówek, the President of Poland, Lech Kaczyński led a ceremony honoring the memory of Marian Bernaciak, "Orlik" and awarded him the Grand Cross of Polonia Restituta posthumously.