At about half past six on the morning of September 22, 1939, someone knocked at the door.

It was the adjutant, Captain Strzemeski. He reported that it was time to go.

The two people inside had slept in their clothes. Alfreda later recalled that within five minutes, maybe less, they were out of the house and getting into the car. Stepping outside, she was surprised: there was not a single vehicle left in the yard, no car, no truck. Glancing around uneasily, she asked her husband whether they were really going on their own.

He answered in a few words: "That's how it turned out."

Her husband was Brigadier General Józef Olszyna-Wilczyński, commander of Poland's Corps District III at Grodno. They were in Sopoćkinie, a small town northwest of Grodno, and the car was heading for the Lithuanian border.

They had been driving for perhaps five minutes when two Soviet tanks loomed up ahead.

I. Two Documents

Five days earlier, on the morning of September 17, Moscow handed a note to the Polish ambassador.

The note said that the Polish-German war had exposed the internal bankruptcy of the Polish state. Warsaw, as the capital of Poland, no longer existed; the Polish government had disintegrated. That meant the Polish state and its government had in fact ceased to exist, and the treaties between the USSR and Poland had lapsed with them. The Soviet government had therefore ordered the Red Army to cross the frontier and "take under its protection the life and property of the population of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia." It was signed by the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Molotov.

The day before, September 16, the Military Council of the Belorussian Front had signed Order No. 005 in Smolensk, to be read out to every company from four o'clock that afternoon. The Polish landlords and capitalists, it said, had enslaved the working people of Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine, and had now thrown "our Belorussian and Ukrainian brothers" into the meat grinder of a second imperialist war.

"We are coming not as conquerors but as liberators," the order went on, and it commanded the troops to smash the Polish army of lords and bourgeois with a lightning, crushing blow.

On September 17 the Red Army crossed the border.

II. Red Flags on the Road

That day Olszyna-Wilczyński was on the road.

Born in Kraków in 1890, the son of a master bricklayer, he had fought in the First Brigade of the Polish Legions in the First World War, became a brigadier general in 1927, and took command of Corps District III at Grodno in February 1938. On September 14 he had driven with his closest staff to Pinsk to see General Kleeberg, commander of Independent Operational Group Polesie. When the news of the Soviet crossing came, he turned back.

The road home was not quiet. The historian Marek Wierzbicki, drawing on his wife's recollection, writes that at the edge of the village of Gnojno, in Słonim county, a group of men with a red flag stopped the general's car, and moments later a band of armed young men with red armbands opened fire. The general and his officers forced their way through.

Alfreda remembered that from Wołkowysk to Mosty they had to keep to back roads, because "Bolshevik tanks were already moving along the highway toward Wilno, and bands of local communists were setting ambushes." Before Grodno, in the town of Skidel, which pro-Soviet rebels had seized, someone tried to stop the car again. This time the driver did not stop; he sped up and broke through the cordon of armed men.

Who were the men at the roadblocks? After September 17, Wierzbicki writes, armed groups large and small sprang up in nearly every county of the northeast. Their leaders were usually former members of the Communist Party of Western Belorussia, and most of the members came from the poorest Belorussians and Jews. They set up "revolutionary committees," swept away what was left of Polish local authority, and sometimes carried out lynchings. The Polish authorities put them down under martial law; a man caught with a weapon in his hands was as a rule sentenced to death. On September 19 a punitive expedition from Grodno had to fight a regular battle to retake Skidel.

To some people the Red Army's arrival was liberation; to others it was an invasion from behind. On the same highway, both views had men ready to prove them with guns.

On the evening of September 17, near the Romanian border, the Polish commander-in-chief, Marshal Rydz-Śmigły, sent out a general directive: "The Soviets have come in. I order a general withdrawal to Romania and Hungary by the shortest routes. Do not fight the Bolsheviks unless they attack or try to disarm units."

III. The School at Sopoćkinie

On September 19, the day before the Soviet 15th Tank Corps attacked Grodno, Olszyna-Wilczyński left the city with his district headquarters and set up quarters in a school at Teolin, on the western edge of Sopoćkinie.

Grodno did not give up. On September 20 and 21 an improvised garrison of about a thousand men, including members of the pre-military training corps, met the Soviet 15th Tank Corps and 6th Cavalry Corps in the city. They burned tanks with bottles of incendiary liquid. The Soviet corps commander, Yeremenko, later wrote that he climbed into the lead tank himself to rush the bridge over the Niemen; when it was disabled he had to change tanks three more times. Fighting in the city went on until the next morning.

Units pulling out of Grodno gathered around Sopoćkinie. The general planned to form them into a division near Sejny on September 24.

His officers kept urging him to go to Lithuania, and he kept putting it off. Alfreda begged him too. She later wrote that from the day they reached Sopoćkinie she simply knew he was in mortal danger. Each time, he gave her the same answer:

"Leave it. If I go, it will be only when there is nothing left to do."

IV. Chuvakin's Detachment

On the other side, the Soviet files kept their own record of the march.

The Russian historian Mikhail Meltyukhov, working from Soviet military archives, writes that on September 21 the Red Army's 2nd Tank Brigade, at Sokółka, formed a detachment to operate toward Augustów and Suwałki under Major Chuvakin: 470 men, 34 BT-7 tanks, 6 armored cars and 34 trucks.

At about five in the morning of September 22, near Sopoćkinie, the detachment caught up with Poles withdrawing from Grodno. The fight lasted until ten. By the Soviet count, eleven Red Army men were killed and fourteen wounded, and four tanks and five trucks were knocked out. The Poles made heavy use of incendiary bottles. On one vehicle the ammunition blew up; three Red Army men who jumped from it were surrounded by Poles, taken prisoner and shot. One of them, Satkovsky, was missed; he played dead until his comrades arrived.

In Polish accounts, this was the hard fight of the 101st Reserve Uhlan Regiment at Kodziowce.

The general's car set out as that fight was ending. His headquarters had already left two hours earlier with Colonel Chłusewicz.

V. Two Tanks

Alfreda told what happened next in a statement dated November 30, 1939.

When the two tanks appeared, rifle shots came from behind and in front. There was no way back. Soviet soldiers swarmed around them with grenades and rifles at the ready, shouting: "Stop, get out, or we'll kill you on the spot!"

Resisting from inside the car was impossible; it all happened too fast. The captain got out first, then she, then her husband, the driver and the driver's helper. In front of each of them stood one soldier holding a grenade at their face and another aiming a rifle. Two commissars began searching them, first her, then the captain and the general. They took everything: clothes, money, every small item, even the captain's broken lighter.

Several times they asked the general who he was and what he commanded. He said he was an officer and commanded troops. Then they asked whether there were many troops nearby. To that they got no answer.

So the soldiers ordered the general and the captain to go left, toward the tanks, and told her to go right, into a barn.

She would not leave her husband. She begged the two commissars not to separate them, saying she had gone to the front with him and wanted to share his fate, whatever it was. She said it several times and even seized one of them by the hand. They refused, saying there was no question of her staying, and one of them added that there were already refugees in the barn.

Her husband then turned to the commissar and asked that she not be sent far away, but kept close by.

VI. Two Dark Shapes in the Field

A few minutes later the machine guns opened up.

Then everything went quiet, except for the sound of tanks driving away in the distance. Ignoring the guards' protests and threats, Alfreda ran out of the barn. From far off she saw two dark shapes in the field, under the bushes.

She knew it was her husband and his adjutant, yet she still hoped they might only be wounded. When she came closer she could hardly go on. Her husband lay face down, his left leg shot through below the knee by machine-gun fire. Beside him lay the captain, his head shattered. She was afraid to turn her husband over, afraid of finding the same thing.

Captain Strzemeski was forty-four that year. Born in Tiflis, he had retired on health grounds in 1932, never married, and lived on the family estate in the Wilno province. Mobilized in August 1939, he was recalled to serve as the general's adjutant. He had been at the general's side for only a few weeks.

VII. Another Version in the Reports

In the Soviet reports, the event looked different.

Years later, Poland's Institute of National Remembrance found three entries in copies of Soviet documents kept at the Central Military Archive in Warsaw. The combat report of the Dzerzhinsky Cavalry-Mechanized Group under Boldin, covering September 17 to 26, listed among Polish losses on September 22 near Sopoćkinie "one general, assistant to the commandant of Grodno." The motorized detachment's report for the same period said that in fighting around Sopoćkinie many Polish officers were killed, among them a general named Wilczyński. A document of the political directorate of the Belorussian Front stated that General Wilczyński had been captured with the participation of Comrade Grigorenko and was shot during a fierce enemy attack.

Meltyukhov, working from Soviet archives, tells it differently again: the general was trying to reach Lithuania by car with his family, ran into Chuvakin's detachment, and on the orders of the detachment's commissar, Grigorenko, the general and his adjutant were shot. The general's wife was let through to Lithuania.

Alfreda herself wrote that she had been shut in a barn.

VIII. The Russian Reply

By the end of 1939 Alfreda was in an internment camp at Kalvarija in Lithuania. The Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London holds her statement of November 30.

More than sixty years later, the Institute of National Remembrance opened an investigation in Białystok. The prosecutors obtained a copy of her statement from London and questioned more than a dozen witnesses. The driver and a resident of a nearby village had both told others how the shooting happened. The Institute concluded that the Soviet documents stood "in obvious contradiction" to the accounts of direct eyewitnesses: the two officers had been shot immediately after being taken prisoner and were not fighting the Red Army at the time. It was a war crime, not subject to any statute of limitations.

On September 26, 2003, the Institute asked the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation for legal assistance in identifying, from Soviet records, the crews of the two tanks and where they lived. The Chief Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation sent the request back. The killing of the two officers, it said, had been an ordinary crime, and the time limit for prosecuting it had long expired.

The Polish side did not accept this. The Institute held that the two Polish officers were prisoners of war captured by Red Army soldiers, and that shooting them violated the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907 on the laws and customs of war on land. Because Russia refused to help, the investigation was discontinued on May 18, 2004, for failure to identify the perpetrators. The Institute noted that it would be reopened at once if information on the perpetrators came to light.

Epilogue

The general is buried at Sopoćkinie, in the parish of Teolin. Captain Strzemeski's grave is at Teolin as well.

In Kraków's Salwator Cemetery the general has a symbolic grave. On September 22, 1991, the fifty-second anniversary of his death, a black marble plaque was placed in the cloister of the Capuchin friary in Kraków.

That morning left several records behind. In the front's report he is "one general" on a list of losses. In the political directorate's document he died "during a fierce enemy attack." The Russian prosecutors called it an ordinary case whose time had run out.

Only Alfreda's statement remembers the broken lighter the two commissars took during the search.

Sources and editorial boundaries 1. Alfreda Olszyna-Wilczyńska's statement (November 30, 1939), as excerpted in the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) teaching materials on German and Soviet crimes against Polish elites, September 1939 to June 1941, section 1 (from Czesław K. Grzelak, ed., Wrzesień 1939 na Kresach w relacjach, Warsaw: Neriton, 1999): https://archiwum.ipn.gov.pl/download/1/73562/02elityzbrodniesowieckie.pdf . The knock at about 6:30, sleeping in their clothes, the five minutes, the empty yard, "going on our own" and "that's how it turned out," the two tanks about five minutes later, the shout, the grenades and rifles, the two commissars' search, the broken lighter, the questions, the separation left and right, her pleas, the barn, the machine guns "a few minutes later," and the two dark shapes and the wounds all come from this excerpt. The full statement and the London original were not read. 2. The incidents on the way back to Grodno on September 17 (Gnojno, the detour from Wołkowysk to Mosty, Skidel), the local armed groups and the Polish suppression of the Skidel revolt follow Marek Wierzbicki, "Stosunki polsko-białoruskie pod okupacją sowiecką (1939–1941)" (Internet Archive capture of June 23, 2008): https://web.archive.org/web/20080623073822/http://www.bialorus.pl/index.php?secId=49&docId=60&&Rozdzial=historia ; the words in quotation marks there are Wierzbicki's quotation of Alfreda's recollection. 3. Soviet documents: the Soviet government's note to the Polish ambassador of September 17, 1939, Russian text on Wikisource: https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/Нота_правительства_СССР,_врученная_польскому_послу_в_Москве_утром_17_сентября_1939_года ; Order No. 005 of the Military Council of the Belorussian Front, September 16, 1939 (Russian State Military Archive f. 35086, op. 1, d. 4, l. 8), from the Alexander Yakovlev Foundation document library: https://www.alexanderyakovlev.org/fond/issues-doc/1007726 . The composition of Chuvakin's detachment, the fight on the morning of September 22 and its losses, the three Red Army men captured and shot (Satkovsky surviving), "on the orders of Grigorenko" and "the wife was let through to Lithuania" follow M. I. Meltyukhov, Sovetsko-polskie voiny, section on September 22 to October 1 (based on Soviet military archives): https://document.wikireading.ru/13737 . 4. IPN investigation: summary of the decision to discontinue investigation S 44/04/Zk (earlier S 6/02/Zk), Białystok branch, including the three Soviet archival entries, the witnesses, the statement held in London, the request of September 26, 2003, the reply of the Russian Chief Military Prosecutor's Office, the Fourth Hague Convention and the discontinuance of May 18, 2004: https://olsztyn.ipn.gov.pl/ols/sledztwa-i-lustracja/sciganie-zbrodni-przeciwko-nar/sledztwa/oddzialowa-komisja-w-bialymsto/177807,Sledztwa-zakonczone-wydaniem-postanowienia-o-umorzeniu.html ; earlier summary: https://web.archive.org/web/20050107121610/http:/www.ipn.gov.pl/sled_bialystok_9.html . 5. Full text of the commander-in-chief's directive of September 17 from the IPN's Przystanek Historia: https://przystanekhistoria.pl/pa2/tematy/edward-smigly-rydz/78670,Z-bolszewikami-nie-walczyc.html . The defense of Grodno (about a thousand defenders, incendiary bottles, Yeremenko changing tanks) follows Stanisław Przyjemski, "Historia est magistra vitae," Palestra 1994, no. 5–6, pp. 49–51, quoting Eugeniusz Kozłowski: https://bazhum.muzhp.pl/media/texts/palestra/1994-tom-38-numer-5-6437-438/palestra-r1994-t38-n5_6437_438-s49-51.pdf . 6. People and other details: the general's life (born November 27, 1890, in Kraków, son of a master bricklayer; Legions service; brigadier general 1927; commander of Corps District III from February 9, 1938; to Pinsk on September 14; left Grodno on September 19 for the school at Teolin; the plan to form a division on September 24; the 101st Reserve Uhlan Regiment at Kodziowce; headquarters leaving two hours earlier with Colonel Chłusewicz; grave, symbolic grave and the 1991 plaque; his widow in the Kalvarija internment camp at the end of 1939) follows the Polish Wikipedia article "Józef Olszyna-Wilczyński" (its bibliography includes Polski Słownik Biograficzny vol. XXIV, Jaskulski's 2013 biography and the 1993 publication of Alfreda's account): https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Józef_Olszyna-Wilczyński . Strzemeski's life (born December 1, 1894, in Tiflis; retired 1932; unmarried; family estate in Wilno province; recalled August 1939; buried at Teolin) follows kresy1939.pl, "Kapitan Mieczysław Strzemeski – zapomniana ofiara zbrodni" (2020): https://kresy1939.pl/blog/2020/10/31/kapitan-mieczyslaw-strzemeski-zapomniana-ofiara-zbrodni/ . 7. Boundaries: (1) The adjutant's name is spelled Strzemski in the IPN summary and Strzemeski elsewhere; the text uses the latter. (2) Wikipedia has the general leaving Grodno on September 19 for the Teolin school; the IPN's early summary places him "in Sopoćkinie on September 21"; the text gives the September 19 departure and no arrival date. (3) The departure time follows Alfreda's "about 6:30 knock"; Wikipedia gives departure at about 6:30 and the shooting at about 6:45; the text uses only her account. (4) The Soviet account has the fight running from five to ten in the morning; Polish Wikipedia says the Poles were attacked after 2 a.m.; the text uses the Soviet account and says so. (5) Whether Alfreda was "let through to Lithuania": Meltyukhov says so; she says she was put in a barn, as does the IPN summary; her presence in the Kalvarija camp at the end of 1939 appears only in Polish Wikipedia, and how she reached Lithuania is not recorded, so the text does not say. (6) Whether she rode in the car on September 17: Wierzbicki says only "as his wife recalled," so the text does not say she was there. (7) Whether Grigorenko "took part in the capture" or "ordered the shooting," and whether the shooting happened in battle, differ among the documents; the text sets them side by side and gives the IPN conclusion separately. (8) The size of the Grodno garrison and Yeremenko's change of tanks come from Kozłowski's paraphrase of Yeremenko's memoir, which was not read. (9) The description of the wounds follows the excerpt and is abridged. No invented dialogue, inner thoughts or sensory embellishment; everything in quotation marks comes from the sources above, translated by the editor. 8. Key original wording: Alfreda "Około godz. 6.30 zapukał do naszego pokoju adiutant męża, meldując, że trzeba już jechać." "zapytałam męża, czy zmów jedziemy tylko sami, na co mąż odpowiedział mi krótko: »Tak się złożyło«." "Daj spokój, jeżeli odejdę, to dopiero wtedy, gdy już nic nie będzie do zrobienia." "Stój, wylezaj, a to ubijem na miestie." "a nawet zepsutą zapalniczkę kapitana" "Odpowiedział, że jest oficerem i dowodzi wojskiem." "poszłam z nim na front i chcę dzielić jego los, wszystko jedno, jaki będzie"; as quoted by Wierzbicki, "szosą szły już czołgi bolszewickie na Wilno, a bandy miejscowych komunistów urządzały zasadzki"; the note, "Варшава как столица Польши не существует больше." "взять под свою защиту жизнь и имущество населения Западной Украины и Западной Белоруссии"; Order No. 005, "Мы идем не как завоеватели, а как освободители наших братьев белорусов, украинцев и трудящихся Польши." "Молниеносным, сокрушительным ударом разгромить панско-буржуазные польские войска"; Meltyukhov, "По приказу комиссара отряда Григоренко генерал и его адъютант были расстреляны. Жена генерала была пропущена в Литву."; the directive, "Sowiety wkroczyły. Nakazuję ogólne wycofanie na Rumunię i Węgry najkrótszymi drogami. Z bolszewikami nie walczyć, chyba w razie natarcia z ich strony albo próby rozbrojenia oddziałów."; the IPN, "Okoliczności śmierci generała Józefa Olszyny-Wilczyńskiego w radzieckich dokumentach stoją w oczywistej sprzeczności z relacjami bezpośrednich świadków" "zabójstwa obu oficerów były przestępstwami pospolitymi, których ściganie uległo przedawnieniu". 9. Rights: Soviet official documents are state papers; the statement excerpt, research articles, investigation summaries and web pages are used for facts and brief quotation only; the narrative is original.