More Great Works from the BBC World Service

The Odyssey of General Anders
This is an extrodinary story told by men and women, now in their ninty's, who have lived in England most of their lives.  They were born in Poland, during the second republic, when the country resided further to the east than it does now. On the 17th of September 1939, the Soviet army entered Eastern Poland, two weeks after the German took the West.  If you read polish history, this crazy scenario makes more sense.  The revitalised Poland, rising from the ashes of the First World War, aspired to recreating it's old empire with Lithuania. This alarmed the Soviets who attacked then Poland in 1920. In a surprise victory, the polish army beat the Soviets at the battle of Warsaw. A pyrrhic victory. Germany and the Soviet Union had a common purpose. This was not the first time they had cooperated to removed Poland from the map.  The Prussians and Russians had done it before in 1795. This time they meant business, with both regimes getting straight to work removing anyone who presented as powerful in Polish society.  For the Soviets the answer was the gulags.  Many Poles were put on cattle trains and sent to places like Uzbekistan.  General Anders, a Baltic German by ethnic origin, ended up in the lubyanka prison in Moscow.  Then Hitler invaded the Soviet Union instead of Britain.  Churchill reminded Stalin that he had thousands of polish soldiers starving in camps doing nothing.  The Poles were quickly allowed more food, and assembled into two army's under General Anders. Poles descended on the Iranian Caspian Sea port of Bandar Anzil.  Many were too week and died in Iran, and their graveyards can be found today.  From Tehran they moved into Iraq, then Palestine, where a certain Jitzhak Rabin remained, latter to become the six prime minister of Israel. The army's most famous moment was the assault of the Monastery of Casino. But so many of the Poles featured in this programme never returned to Poland. Their bit of Poland was never to be Poland again, and the Soviets were the new masters.  Having fought under the British, they chose England.  There are poles living all over the uk, and tHe origins go back largely to this story.  Ander's first name was Wladyslaw (all you Middlemarch fans).