Stefan Kubiak

World War II During the Second World War, due to the German occupation of Poland, the sixteen-year-old Stefan was deported as a forced labourer to the Third Reich. First he worked on a farm near Memel (now Klaipėda in Lithuania), where the German landowner forced him to do the labour of two people. Then he was sent to a factory in Westphalia, where he experienced starvation.

Viet Minh and the PAVN Việt Minh soldiers launching an assault during the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ. With the goal of joining the Việt Minh's fight for Vietnamese independence against the French, the European deserters initially experienced difficulties in getting any of the locals to trust them due to their appearance and French uniforms. Eventually, they succeeded when they were led to the fighters by a Vietnamese villager boy. The right-hand man of the local insurgent leader turned out to be a German deserter from the Legion, which eased the newcomers' transition; within two weeks, they were assigned to partisan subdivisions. For his role in the fighting at Phu Tong, he earned his first Vietnamese decoration. During his time in North Vietnam, Kubiak showed his knack for fixing various kinds of captured weaponry (including cannons, grenade launchers, and mortars). His skills were utilised after the Battle of Hòa Bình in the spring of 1952, when the Việt Minh had captured cannons that they were unable to use. Kubiak was able to fix the problem, allowing the Vietnamese forces to use the ordnance and earning himself the recognition of his superiors.

Final years

After the end of the First Indochina War in 1954, Kubiak was transferred to Hà Nội – the capital city of Vietnam – and continued to work in the military, but now as a reporter for the People's Army Newspaper.

Kubiak sometimes flew to the Polish People's Republic, pardoned for his earlier desertion and now serving as translator of Vietnamese military delegations. He settled in Hanoi and, in 1956, started a family with a Vietnamese woman called Nguyễn Thị Phượng who was also Catholic; they met thanks to Franciszek Zwierzyński, who was stationed in Vietnam as part of Poland's involvement in the International Control Commission. Kubiak married Phượng and together they had two sons: Hồ Chí Thắng (born in 1956) and Hồ Chí Dũng (born in 1958). Due to recurring wounds sustained in combat and severe malaria, Stefan Kubiak fell gravely ill in 1963 and died in Hanoi, on 28 November of that year. He was 40 years of age.

Accordingly with Stefan Kubiak's last wishes, his wife and children – known in Polish as Teresa Kubiak with her sons Stefan and Wiktor – migrated from Vietnam to the PRL to live in Łódź in 1964. Stefan Kubiak's grave is located at the Văn Điển cemetery, 11 kilometres from Hanoi city centre; in addition to the Vietnamese inscription, his tombstone reads in Polish: Tu spoczywa Polak, bohater narodu wietnamskiego, uczestnik bitwy pod Dien Bien Phu ("Here lies a Pole, hero of the Vietnamese nation, participant of the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ").

As of 2015, Stefan (the son of Stefan Kubiak) lived near Warsaw, the capital of Poland.