u/Definition_Novel

Photo 1: Halina Sadowska-Wasilewska (later years)

Photo 2: Bohdan Czeszko (photo taken sometime before 1950, likely in 1948 or 1949.

I must also mention that some leftists even joined AK because sometimes it was the only resistance group in their respective areas, not all AK engaged against Soviet forces militarily, and leftists of the Syndicalist Brigade within AK refused to drop the red-and black flag on orders of reactionary Polish leadership of the AK, and the Syndicalist Brigade was even militarily honored by the USSR and incorporated into People’s Poland’s government structures. It is important to understand these nuances regarding the AK and their relationship to the communist movement.

Throughout my research of Lithuania, I have taken special interest into the Polish contribution to the Soviet struggle in the country. Poles who actively fought in partisan ranks were relatively small in Lithuania. In total, Poles were only around 3-5% of Lithuanian Soviet partisans, so a significant minority, but not many compared to other ethnicities, even to Lithuanians. Poles had a much larger role in the Red Army itself. In 1944, many Poles were recruited into the 16th Lithuanian division, about a thousand or more from Vilnius alone. Part of this is because, in Lithuania, other generally pro-Soviet ethnicities like Russians were extremely small in population there, and many of Lithuania’s Jews already perished in the Holocaust. So, Poles were one of the few lifelines Soviet Lithuania had left.

Among the most noted Polish-Lithuanian revolutionaries was the woman pictured here in both photos, Józefa Pszewalska (sometimes the surname is also spelled Przewalska). By all accounts, she was a leading figure in the underground Vilnius Soviet resistance against Nazism, and was the wife of Soviet partisan leader Jan Przewalski. Her husband Jan was 2nd in command of all Soviet partisans in Vilnius, behind the Lithuanian Juozas Vitas; both were among Lithuania’s most prestigious Soviet partisans, including Jòzefa also. Her husband Jan was born in Warsaw, Poland on December 5th, 1901, but like Józefa, Jan spent much of his young adulthood in Vilnius.

Her husband, Jan, is described as universally being ethically Polish everywhere. I have already included documentation of him in other posts. Soviet history contends they were both Polish and used their non-Jewish backgrounds as a way to discreetly enter Jewish ghettos and rescue and recruit Jews into Soviet partisan ranks. This is well documented even by non-Soviet sources.

However, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), one of many institutions which also endorses not only the entity known as Israel, but also supports Zionism, labeled her in a photograph described as “3 Jewish partisans”.

Now, to be fair, it may just be a terminology issue. Perhaps the term “Jewish partisans” in the context of the photo is simply referring to the wartime faction the individuals in the photo are a part of.

In Lithuania during war, 4 factions existed:

Soviet people
Fascists (Nazis and collaborators)
Polish nationalists (Home Army)
Jewish partisans (mostly socialists in Lithuania, although some were Zionists)

Clearly it is obvious she associated with the socialist Jewish partisans. She went into the ghetto to recruit them to safety with Soviet help.

So again, they may just be referring to the fact that she is being represented by the faction she was in during war, not necessarily conveying her ethnicity as anything particular. But given Zionist common focus on hatred of Poles due to the fact that some Polish collaborators unfortunately existed, and trends to downplay actual non-Jewish allies to Jews during the war, I can’t help but think that some of these publications not mentioning her Polish ethnicity are deliberate. Zionists have obsession with singling out Poland for the fascist collaborators of its history, while being silent on the far more numerous Ukrainian or Baltic ones. Zionists often also down play the role of other ethnicities in Lithuanian Soviet military. They often claim that only Jews fought patriotically against fascism in Lithuania. Not the case. On both sides of every ethnicity, there were freedom fighters and fascists.

On the contrary, both Soviet and Polish sources often list her and her husband Jan as Polish Soviet agents and partisans from Vilnius who rescued Jews from the ghettos. That is well established. This makes perfect sense. The Soviet underground administration often needed to use Poles and others to rescue Jews from the ghettos, simply because it was virtually impossible for Jews to enter and exit freely due to tight surveillance from the Nazis. Non-Jews could easily enter either with a permit or undetected in some cases.

So who was she?

Jòzefa was born sometime around the 1910s. I do not know which city she was born in, but, she spent much of her young adult years in Vilnius, so it is likely her birthplace, if not there, elsewhere in Lithuania or Poland. She was already part of Lithuania’s Communist Party and Komsomol and the wife of Jan Przewalski, during the time of German occupation. During the Nazi occupation, her and her husband co-founded the Vilnius Anti-Fascist Committee.

On May 8th, 1943, she, Jan, and other Lithuanian communists formed an underground committee for the Communist Party of Lithuania. The delegation included Lithuanian and Polish communists as well as escaped Jewish communists of the Vilnius ghetto.

At the same meeting, she was appointed the party treasurer, and tasked with providing financial support to the families of Soviet partisans killed in battle.

She also became a Soviet partisan herself. Ib Vilnius amongst the Soviet partisans, she was affiliated with the “Bičiuliai” (ENG: “Friends” in Lithuanian) partisan detachment. She was also affiliated with the Adam Mickiewicz partisan detachment of partisans in Lithuania, although not a member in combat of that detachment, rather she helped the detachment create a Polish language newspaper with another Pole named Witold Sienkewicz, with the paper being titled “Za Wolność” (ENG: Polish for “Freedom”). The Adam Mickiewicz detachment consisted of Lithuanian citizens fleeing the Nazis; they hid in the Rudnikai Forest and the detachment included escaped Jews from the ghettos, Lithuanians, Poles, and other ethnicities. Amongst the Jewish partisans of Vilnius, she was affiliated with the “La Nitzachon” (ENG: Hebrew for “To Victory”) partisan detachment. Her first photograph is from her wartime partisan and early underground party days, probably around 1942 or 1943. The second photo is from July 1944, after the Vilnius liberation. She is pictured with 2 other members of the La Nitzachon battalion. To the left of her is Joseph Harmatz, to the right of her is Avraham Sabrin, the last of several commanders of the battalion. The photo was owned by Joseph Harmatz and donated to the USHMM.

During her time in resistance, she used several aliases; she disguised herself from the Gestapo with the false identity of Wanda Szarska, in Soviet circles, she had an alias code-name of “Wala” and to Jewish partisans, she was known with her code-name as “Valia”.

She also wrote a compilation of partisan memoirs, a manuscript of 52 pages, currently preserved by Polish historians. It was written under the name of “Wspomnienia” (ENG: literally the Polish word for “Memoirs.”

For her and her husband’s work in rescuing Jews, they were honored with the “Righteous Among Nations” award by Yad Vashem in 1966. Which makes the “mistake” from the USHMM seem all the more a deliberate distortion of the background of a communist partisan hero. The “Righteous Among Nations” award itself is an award given to non-Jews exclusively, by Yad Vashem on behalf of the entity of Israel. Yad Vashem is essentially the entity of Israel’s attempt at honoring non Jews who helped Jews during the Holocaust, which clears up the confusion. Jòzefa was an ethnic Pole, so was her husband. She spoke Polish, made Polish newspapers and memoirs, and was known in Soviet AND Polish documents as Polish. So why wouldnt the USHMM mention it? A mistake by the USHMM? Maybe an error of lack of specificity of ethnicity. But honestly, given this is a western anti communist organization, I’m certain it was a case of deliberate distortion on their part. Just something to think about. Her award was numbered at issue 232. I do not know if her husband and her got one single award together or separately numbered awards, but I was able to determine that she also accepted her husband’s award posthumously, as her husband Jan had died sometime in the Great Patriotic War as a Soviet partisan, most likely dying sometime in 1944. In 1955, according to the Polish publication “Monitor Polski”, Józefa received the “Medal 10-lecia Polski Ludowej” (ENG: Medal of the 10th Anniversary of People’s Poland.”)

Lastly, the remaining piece of information I found on her is this; it appears that sometime after the war, she left Lithuania voluntarily to help assist in the rebuilding of revolutionary Poland, moving to its capital of Warsaw. This isn’t exactly surprising, and population exchanges happened in both directions; many Poles from Lithuania left to Poland to take offers from the Polish government, and many Poles from Western Belarus moved to Lithuania to take job offers from the local government of the Lithuanian SSR. The Belarusian SSR local government also supported these economically-minded migrations. She died on December 20th, 1984, and was buried in the Cmentarz Wojskowy (ENG: “Military Cemetery”) in Warsaw.

Photo 1: Józefa Przewalska, early Lithuanian underground communist party photo.

Photo 2: Photo with Jewish partisans.

Photo 3: Her husband, Lithuanian Soviet partisan leader and husband Jan Przewalski.

Zofia was born into a working class Polish family in Guzów on October 2nd, 1887. She worked in a sugar factory in Żyrardów for her first job. Then, she worked at the Kipra shoe factory in Warsaw. She joined the revolutionary faction of the Polish Socialist Party. This was a faction that was friendly to many early Polish socialists, such as Rosa Luxembourg. This faction of the PPS is not to be confused with the nationalist, more right-liberal party of a similar name of PPS. Jagodzińska was a leftist in every sense of the word. On August 18th, 1906, Jagodzińska and two associates, Wanda Krahelska and Albertyna Herbertówna, hatched a plot to kill the Tsarist governor-general of Warsaw, Georgy Skalon. Jagodzinśka and company had ties to Polish leftists in other cities such as Vilnius and Lviv (today Lithuania and Ukraine). Krahelska is also especially notable, for being an early founder of the Zegota society, founded by Poles for the mutual aid of Jews during the German occupation of Poland.

Skalon was also known, but for reactionary, insidious reasons. Skalon was born in St. Petersburg in 1847 to Anton Skalon (originally Scallon, later changed to Skalon) and Yuliya Sievers. His father was a French Huegenot who fled France to Sweden and later Russia, joining the Tsarist military. His mother Yulia was a Baltic-German of the prominent Sievers family, which were one of many notable colonial nobility families in the Tsarist military of the Russian Empire. Skalon was particularly brutal in his repression both of Polish aspirations for independence as well as of Polish leftists in particular. He also possessed proto-Nordicist beliefs, believing that Baltic Germans should become the dominant ruling class of the Russian Empire and enter into a military alliance with Prussia. Despite being half French and having Russian national citizenship, he also maintained a German ethnic and cultural identity, to the point of ethnic nationalism, as well as practicing Lutheran Christianity like most Germans. He also stacked much of his administration in Poland in the Vistula region with other Baltic Germans , and kept especially close ties to another Russian Baltic-German general, Sergei Witte, and even maintained ties to the German consul in Warsaw, August Brück. According to his deputy, a Russian named Alexei Brusilov, he even expressed that not only should Russia enter an alliance with Germany, but that the Germans should rule all of it. Disgusted by this, Brusilov reported Skalon’s comments to the Tsarist Minister of War, Vladimir Sukhomlinov. However it had no consequences for Skalon; Sukhomlinov was already friendly with him and took his side, and demoted Brusilov to a lower post job and forcibly transferred him to Kiev.

Skalon remains one of the most brutal Russian Empire figures in Polish history. In a letter from July 4th, 1906 addressed to the Tsarist Minister of internal affairs, Skalon wrote “Fighting revolutionary terrorist attacks, in my opinion, is possible only with the help of even stronger terror on the part of government authorities, that is, the way of full realization of Article Twelfth Martial Law, up to the application of the death penalty without a court sentence. This drastic policy contributed to the gradual elimination of the revolutionary boil in Polish lands.”

Skalon also believed in prominent anti-Semitic theories in the Russian Empire, including believing that socialist parties, trade unions, and Polish liberation movements were all created by Jews. Between 1905 to 1908, Skalon ordered executions of roughly 1,000 people in the Vistula region. About 300 were executed in Warsaw. On November 1st 1905, Skalon ordered a demonstration broken up, and dozens were killed and hundreds injured. Robotnik (“Worker”), a Polish socialist magazine, blamed Scalon personally, claiming Skalon ordered a Cossack garrison to disperse the protest and shoot those who ran. This claim was later established to be correct, as per documented secret instruction, Skalon ordered garrisons “to consider the crowds of demonstrators as gangs of insurgents and to fire to complete extermination, not to allow any rallies and rallies, if detected, to disperse with firearms.”

With all of this, Jagodzinśka and company knew something had to be done about Skalon to liberate the people. On August 18th, 1906, in Warsaw, on 9 Natolinska Street, Jagodzinśka and her team placed two bombs into his carriage. When he entered, the bombs detonated, and he was badly injured with a head injury, but not killed. However, this proved a point, as, fearing possible assassination, Skalon later decided to decline handing out death sentences to activists. A few months later, she attempted to kill him again in Vilnius, failing again. This time, she was caught and imprisoned for life in the Warsaw citadel, later transferred to the notorious Butyrka prison in Moscow. She was later freed in the February Revolution by the Bolsheviks and returned to Poland. She lived the rest of her life outside of prison, marrying a fellow Polish leftist revolutionary whom she met in activism, whose name was Piotr. She unfortunately died in Nazi occupied Warsaw in 1940, never living to see Poland be free of fascism and liberated by socialism.

Photo provided by Lyavaizdai Archyvai.

1. Alfons Pilarski, known by the aliases of “Kompardt” and “Rylski”, Polish. Anarcho-Syndicalist and Libertarian Socialist activist and Great Patriotic War anti-fascist partisan.

He was born in the town of Leśnica in Opole Voivodeship in the region of Upper Silesia in Poland, in the German-occupied zone, on July 6th, 1902. He attended high school in the city of Wrocław (then known as Breslau). In 1918, he joined the Communist Party Deutchsland (KPD) chapter within Upper Silesia (then known as Spartakusbund), during the time of the Sparticist Revolution. In October of 1919, during a political meeting of leftists known as the Heidelberg Conference, he left the KPD, as during this time, the anarcho-syndicalists had left the KPD, Pilarski included. He later then joined the Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschlands, or FAUD, a trade union, working as a draughtsman and trainee under leader Fritz Kater, from 1921 to 1927, becoming a skilled propagandist. Before his departure in 1927, he also produced its periodical, “The Worker’s Voice”, from 1925 until then.

In 1928, he edited for the anarchist paper Befreiung (ENG: “Liberation”). It was an openly revolutionary paper, and at the time, one of the few of such to exist in the Silesian cities of Wrocław and Raciborz, both of which where the paper was distributed. The paper called for armed revolutionary action and called for fighting fascists in the streets, and as a result, German occupation authorities forcibly confiscated two of its first seven issued copies, as well as banned the paper for a month. At the height of its underground distribution, it sold roughly 7,000 copies amongst the 2 cities of its distribution, impressive for Silesian politics at the time. Along with fellow activists Franz Nowak and Theodor Bennek, Pilarski was especially feared and hated by German police within Poland, who viewed Pilarski as the “intellectual leader” of the FAUD Union, seeing him multi-layered as a tactical militant, an experienced journalist known for his oratory skills, as well as passion for revolutionary-themed art. All of these attributes led to the Prussian German occupation authorities to arrest him several times between 1919-1932, for which he served 19 months in prison total. One of his greater accomplishments was being a key organizer in establishing the Schwarzen Scharen (ENG: “Black Bands”), a revolutionary group of anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists aimed to physically combat the early NSDAP movement. Members of the Schwarzen Scharen wore all black with black beret caps, with a logo of a broken rifle on their berets. The broken rifle symbolized their critique against the Prussian German military, recognizing it as a fascist institution. Pilarski, despite breaking with the KPD earlier, was one of few leaders of the German left at the time (along with Ernst Thalmann and several others) who correctly predicted the seriousness of the growing NSDAP movement threat. Due to this, Pilarski attempted to push for a left national front against fascism, stating that, if the NSDAP were to gain power, they would “set back Germany’s worker’s rights by 30 years.” He also had great experience as a street fighter, having previously battled the Freikorps of the Prussian regime, and urged Black Band members to fight similarly again against the NSDAP. He went about preparations to for a two-fold strike attack against the Prussian government and the Nazis, purchasing a machine gun and several pistols in Ratibor and distributing the guns to Black Band members, and establishing a secret warfare training camp for the Black Band in the Silesian city of Bytom (then Beuthen, Germany, now Bytom within Poland.) The camp was raided by Prussian police within the same month, with 4 members being arrested and each were later sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in March 1933. After the raid, a warrant for Pilarski was put out by Prussian authorities in September of 1932, so he fled to Poland. 3 other leading Black Band activists managed to escape to Spain, later fighting in the Spanish civil war in anarchist regiments against the Franco regime. Through the remainder of the 1930s, he lived in Warsaw and worked closely with Swedish anarcho-syndicalist Helmut Berner (then also living in Warsaw, Poland.) Pilarski and Berner had direct ties to the German anarchist resistance movements against Nazism in Germany, with underground anarchists being assisted directly through them. Pilarski also led metalworkers unions in Poland and helped smuggle leftist literature to educational facilities for children in Republican zones of Barcelona during the war in Spain against Franco. In 1938, after learning of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, he called on leftists to create mutual aid for Czechoslovakian armed defense. From 1937 to 1939 onward, he led the anarchist underground trade union organization of the ZZZ (Związek Związków Zawodowych, ENG: Union of Trade Unions). In April of 1939, under the alias of “Jan Rylski”, he published the leftist “Worker’s Front” periodical in Poland. Due to the German occupation of Poland, he was determined to ideologically combat it, when in May of 1939 he broadcasted German-language radio broadcasts for the underground station of “Radio Katowice”, where he called out both the entire Nazi regime and Hitler by name. His leadership in the ZZZ and anti-Nazi activities caused him to be wanted by the Nazi regime for execution. After the defeat of Poland by the Nazis in September of 1939, he fled to Mažekiai near Vilnius, in Lithuania, then under Soviet administration. He remained connected to both leftists as well as other Polish allies in the ZWZ (Union of Armed Struggle) within Vilnius. He worked as a clerk for the ZWZ, making forged documents for resistance members.

In 1942, he returned to Warsaw, becoming a member of the underground Syndicalist organization “Wolow” (ENG: “Freedom”) publishing an underground magazine for the group. His apartment was a secret delivery location for mail of the Polish resistance forces. He also took part in “Action N” in which Polish resistance members committed acts of sabotage and political disinformation against the Nazis across the Eastern Front. He took part in the Warsaw Uprising, fighting as a partisan group of the Polska Armia Ludowa (PAL), an underground leftist partisan group, not to be confused with the AL (Armia Ludowa) of a similar name. Both groups were different, although allied with each other jointly in battle against the Nazis, and recruiting resistance members from both groups of PAL and AL for operations. He also joined the Syndicalist Brigade, a merger of leftist organizations of the ZSP (ENG: Union of Polish Syndicalists), and his own organization of Wolow (ENG: “Freedom”). The ZSP was significant, being the creators of the 104th Company of Syndicalists, the only autonomous leftist and largely pro-Soviet organization in the otherwise conservative-Polish nationalist dominated Home Army. He was wounded during the uprising but survived. After the war, he was awarded military awards and given veteran status by the Polish & Soviet governments, but respectfully declined the awards due to his anarchist beliefs. The governments instead preserved the awards. He eventually served a short amount of jail time for a a deviationist demonstration, later becoming politically rehabilitated, instead working to document members of the Anarcho-Syndicalist movement in Poland & Lithuania & writing his own anarchist literature through Polish government publishing companies. He died in 1977.

2. Jadwiga Dudziec, Polish. Born on March 19th, 1912, in Jawory Stare, Masovian Voivodeship in east-central Poland in the partition zone of the Russian Empire. She was a teacher in a Warsaw Polish Catholic seminary, later finding work in Oszmiana, (then Lithuania, now Belarus) in 1931. 3 years later in 1934, she moved to Vilnius, Lithuania. She then worked with Jewish scout organizations, becoming acquainted with Polish scouts in the process, joining the 13th Girl Scout Troupe of Vilnius. She later studied mathematics and natural science at Stephen Bathory University, joining the Catholic Academic Youth Association, also known as “Odrodzenie” or “Rebirth” in Polish. It was a secularist, liberal Catholic organization combining Polish Catholic identity with intellectual ideas popular in academia; many of its members specifically ideologically campaigned against the larger camp of clericalism present within the Polish Catholic Church. In 1939, Jadwiga graduated from university, receiving her degree in mathematics.

During the German occupation of Vilnius, she was then a workshop manager in a clog factory. She became a friend of Yehiel Sheinbaum, Jewish partisan of the FPO partisan group of Jewish Marxists. Sheinbaum also led the Jewish Combat Organization, an umbrella group several partisan organizations of Jewish Marxists and conservative Jewish nationalists. Jadwiga owned an apartment directly above the workshop, to which FPO and Jewish Combat Organization members used as a covert base of operations. Jadwiga also had connections to Polish Home Army partisans. She also helped secure hiding places for Jews as well as forged “Aryan” documents that Jews would use to remain safe from authorities. Possibly due to fear of local collaborators surveilling her, Jadwiga frequently moved between 1941 and 1944. In an effort assisting the Soviets and Jewish partisans in the battle to liberate Vilnius in July of 1944, Jadwiga was wounded by bomb shrapnel and taken to a military hospital, where her leg had to be amputated. Unfortunately, still suffering from the injury, she died on July 17th, 1944 at only 32 years old. She was buried in the Nowa Rossa cemetery in Vilnius. In the memoirs of Lithuanian-Jewish partisans Abraham Sutzkever and Rozhka Korczak, they admired her, describing her as a devout Catholic whose humanity and heroism was inspired by her faith. A friend named Wala Sulimowicz recounted after the war:

“She went to Jewish partisan units, brought weapons and documents to Warsaw. From one of these trips, she brought from Warsaw Alexander Kamiński's sheets of Kamień na shaniec (ENG: “Stones for the Shade”, a Polish partisan memoir and sabotage instruction book) , pasted into the bottom of the suitcase. I remember moments of excitement and emotion when we carefully took out this secret, shockingly reading”.

Another friend of hers, Gabriela Kosińska, spoke of her resistance activities:

"Pinning the yellow star to her clothing, she entered the ghetto, and took out the young Jewish women to hide them in the countryside. She also saved small children from extermination. If she failed to give the child to someone in the countryside, she would go to the monastery of the Sisters of Szarytek at Subocz street in Vilnius, who ran the Orphanage, and she was never met with a refusal there.”

She also was a liaison of the Archdiocese of Vilnius: the building was used as a secret base for both Jewish and Polish and Home Army partisans.

Although not explicitly a Marxist or Soviet hero, her defense of Jewish Marxists as well as her assistance in the Soviet war effort gives her a place among Soviet heroes of Lithuania.

3. Leopoldas Baužys, Lithuanian. Born on December 12th, 1923 in Klaipeda. Served as a jr. lieutenant, and later lieutenant in the 6th Guards Army, 167th Rifle Regiment of the 16th Lithuanian Rifle Division of the Red Army. Received the “For Victory over Germany” and “Order of the Red Star” medals.

4. Abram Levinas, Lithuanian-Jewish, born in Klaipeda, Lithuania. Called to the Soviet Army in August of 1944. Joined the 11th Guards Army, and the 212th Army Reserve Rifle Regiment, serving as a lieutenant. Received the “For Victory over Germany” and “Capture of Königsberg” medals.

5. Isaac Zaidshnur, Lithuanian-Jewish, born in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1902. Served in the 8th Medical Reinforcement Company, also in the 3rd Belarusian Front Military formation of the Soviet Army. Received the ranks of major & lieutenant colonel of the medical service. Received “For The Defense of Moscow”, “Capture of Königsberg” medals. Received the ranks ”Order of the Red Star” medal in 1943.

6. Igor Vatatsi, born in Vilnius, Lithuania on May 31st, 1911, of Russian ethnicity. Worked for the GU (abbreviation for Main Directorate) of Defense Construction, specializing in building military infrastructure in the Soviet Army, often in construction battalions. Joined the Soviet Army in June of 1942. Worked in the Department of Military Field Construction #15, achieving ranks of engineer-captain, military engineer (3rd rank), and military technician (1st rank). Received the “Order of the Great Patriotic War 2nd Class” and “For Labor Distinction” medals.

7. Abram Gefen, Lithuanian-Jewish. Born 1923 in Trakai, Lithuania. Called to the front in February 1942. Served in the 395th Rifle Regiment, reaching rank of Guards Sergeant. Received “Order of the Great Patriotic War 2nd Class” and “For Victory over Japan” medals.

8.Anton Sambor, Polish, born in Šiauliai, Lithuania on May 3rd, 1901. Served as an engineer-lieutenant colonel in the 4th Artillery unit of the Red Army. The unit was placed in Moscow during the war. Sambor received the following medals:

“For Victory over Germany”

“Order of the Red Banner”

“Order of Lenin”, and Order of the Great Patriotic War 2nd Class.

9.Julionas Knepa, Lithuanian, born in Narkūnai, Lithuania, on January 25th, 1926. Conscripted into the Soviet Army on August 15th, 1944. Served in the 156th Rifle Regiment of the 16th Lithuanian Division. Later served in the 938th Rifle Regiment of the 306th Rifle Division. Achieved rank of senior lieutenant.