The Horse Adjutant

Stephen Shooster The first thing they did was to recruit postmen whose job it would be to apply surveillance to the correspondence of families suspected of cooperating with bandits. The Polish underground, considered bandits by the State, became aware of this threat and went into hiding. They built a bunker in the forest near Rybów. The security teams were using deten- tions and interrogations in an earnest attempt to find them. November 30, 1950, Edmund M. (code name Leszek) was recruited as an agent of the Office of Public Security(PUBP). His task was to find out where the underground platoon was hiding. It only took him a few days. December 2, 1950, Leszek contacted the PUBP command and informed them of the location of a bunker in the forest near Rybów. Forty-Eight members of the NKVD internal security force approached that bunker from a distance of 150 meters. According to the article, they were commanded by Leon Schagrinski. It went on to state that they surrounded the bunker and, with two soldiers, Leon crawled close enough to the hiding place to throw a grenade towards the bunker. The grenade landed nearby, resulting in a flurry of rifle shots towards the se- curity forces. Leon threw a second grenade, causing the bunker to light up and forcing the defenders to surrender. This action led to the arrest and disarmament of The First Assault Platoon of the Home Army of Greater Poland. Ten members were detained. Trials against them took place in April 1951. Most received life sentences. However, Zygmunt Góralski and two prisoners were still at large. They escaped that day and remained in hiding. The need to find him reached the highest levels of State security organs. May 19, 1952, he was arrested in his own home by officers of the PUBP. The charges against him included: participation in a criminal union attempting to change the state system by violence, leaving the service and taking a gun, helping in the release of prisoners and providing them with weapons, and dissemination of information in detention during the stay in the alliance of The Polish People’s Republic with the Soviet Union. October 8, 1952, the case went to the Military District Court in Poznań. It only took two days for the judge to conclude a death sentence. Considering the accusations against Zygmunt Góralski, probably the worst of them from the point of view of the Soviet-infused authorities was the dissemination of in- formation about the Katyn massacre carried out by the Soviets in a series of killings during the spring of 1940. Approximately 22,000 soldiers, police officers, and intel-

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