André at age 90, and nearing the end of his life, decided to write some recollections of his early years for his grandchildren and other family members. Each week for almost a year, he would send them installments, in longhand, describing his experiences during World War II. Last fall, these installments were collected and became a printed memoir of 60 pages entitled “Memories from the Time of War (1939-1945.).”

André lived in Ottawa where he his wife had emigrated long after leaving their native Poland. Writing in French, his second language, he intended the memoir for his descendants; however, his daughter Maria has allowed friends as well to read its pages and me to use the material in this column.

On September 1, 1939, André was a lawyer living with his wife and two-year-old daughter in Warsaw when German military forces unleashed their lethal attack on Poland.  In response to a national radio broadcast calling on men to join a military unit, André fled Warsaw a week later in a car owned by his father, a physician. The capital was to be declared an open city, so he and his wife thought it better for her and their daughter Maria to stay behind.

André, his sister, and his father arrived the next day in the city of Lublin where they experienced their first German air raids. From there he traveled east and south, looking for military sites where he could help defend his country. When that proved infeasible in Poland, they drove across the Romanian border all the way to Bucharest.

There he discovered Polish friends who were driving to Milan, from which city a train took him to France where he would spend the rest of the war. It was an agonizing time, filled with worry about his loved ones and marked by narrow escapes from the Gestapo.

On one such occasion, he had a nine o’clock appointment to meet his contact with the French resistance but felt so tired he needed to postpone the meeting. Later he discovered that the Gestapo had raided his contact’s apartment and took him off. “This was the first time that I felt myself saved by Providence,” he wrote.

Various jobs with the Polish Red Cross in exile enabled André to help many fellow Poles and to collaborate with the French resistance. In the war’s latter stages, he was responsible for listening to radio broadcasts from England and other countries for information helpful to the French freedom fighters. It was dangerous work but he managed to evade detection and capture.

Getting his wife and daughter out of Poland and into France in the spring of 1940 greatly helped his morale, though concern for their wellbeing continued to preoccupy his thoughts. Before leaving, his wife (whom he refers to throughout as “Babcia,” the Polish word his grandchildren always used for their grandma), had been arrested by the Gestapo but she managed to persuade her captors to let her go and even drive her back to her house!

When the liberation of Paris happens in August 1944, he describes the ecstatic scene of American and French troops at the Champs Élysées and finds himself unable to sleep much on that memorable night.

But André’s joy in the Allied victory is mixed with bitter disappointment over decisions made at the Yalta Conference. There Roosevelt and Churchill sold out to Stalin, he feels, and allowed the Soviet dictator to subjugate his beloved Poland. “All our hopes of seeing the victory of the Allies as a true liberation of Poland were evaporating,” he writes.

Despite the war and its mortal dangers, André continued to enjoy his many friendships, French cuisine, and movies. A professional interest in films was to mark his whole life and his work as a lawyer was largely oriented toward the people who made movies.

Now that André has departed this world, his children and grandchildren as adults have a document that will help keep his presence vivid. He lived courageously through times of great upheaval, and he saw his native land devastated by forces practiced in horrific brutality.

He had the gift of long life and so was given the advantage of being able to look back on the events of 1939-1945 with the perspective of almost six decades. Among other things, he lived to see a fellow Pole become pope and to enjoy friendship with him. And the eventual liberation of his native country from the stranglehold of Communism cheered his heart.

Longevity does have its advantages, especially if you learn to draw on the events of your past for perspective on the world and your own life. Old age is not just for recollecting one’s past life but it is certainly for that also. Those of us who, in whatever form, put together a record of at least some of our days almost invariably benefit ourselves and usually please other people too.

Richard Griffin