What happened at Zadwórze?
On 17 August 1920, at a railway station 33 km east of Lwów, a battalion of about 330 Polish volunteers (the Polish Army Museum gives about 350) under Captain Bolesław Zajączkowski, mostly young people and students from Lwów, ran into the 6th Cavalry Division of Semyon Budyonny's 1st Cavalry Army. They held out for about eleven hours, beating off six cavalry charges, until their ammunition was gone. 318 were killed, and Zajączkowski took his own life rather than surrender. The stand delayed Budyonny's drive on Lwów, and it is remembered as the Polish Thermopylae.2
Toward evening on 17 August 1920, by a lineman's hut on the Lwów railway, the last few dozen volunteers of Captain Zajączkowski's battalion fixed bayonets. Their machine guns had fallen silent; there were no cartridges left. Soviet riders closed in from every side, and the captain gave his men the only order he had left: to the last round. Of some 330 young men who had marched along that railway in the morning, almost none would see the night.3
Lwów in danger
In the summer of 1920 the Red Army was rolling west. While Mikhail Tukhachevsky's armies drove on Warsaw, Budyonny's 1st Cavalry Army pushed toward Lwów, the capital of eastern Galicia, in what Soviet and Russian military histories call the Lwów operation, begun on 23 July. Szymon Nowak writes that Budyonny planned to close in on the city from three sides: from the north, from the east and from the southeast.4
A gap had opened between the Polish 3rd and 6th Armies, Nowak writes, and masses of Soviet cavalry were pushing into it. The Polish command had too few troops to close it and sent volunteer and improvised units there, under the overall command of Colonel Karol Szemiot of the 11th Infantry Brigade.5
The volunteers
Poland answered the invasion with a great levy of volunteers. Over 105,000 men joined the Volunteer Army in the summer of 1920, most of them hardly trained, some learning to load a rifle on the train to the front, the historian Janusz Odziemkowski writes. In Lwów the call fell on a city that had fought for itself two years before, when its schoolboys and students, the Lwów Eaglets, held it against the Ukrainians in 1918. In the Lwów district almost 17,000 men volunteered, the most of any district in proportion to its conscripts, the historian Marta Milewska calculates.6› The Defense of Lwów, 1918
One of the volunteer battalions belonged to the group of Captain Roman Abraham. It was commanded by Captain Bolesław Zajączkowski and numbered about 330 men (the Polish Army Museum gives about 350), three rifle companies and a machine-gun company, drawn mostly from Lwów's young people and educated classes. Some, like the nineteen-year-old Konstanty Zarugiewicz, holder of the Virtuti Militari, were veterans of 1918.7
The ambush at the station
On the morning of 17 August, near the village of Kutkorz east of Krasne, the battalion came under Soviet artillery fire as it fell back toward Lwów along the railway. The detachment split: its cavalry under Captain Tadeusz Krynicki rode south toward Gliniany, while Zajączkowski took the infantry and the machine guns west along the railway, by the shortest road to Lwów, through Zadwórze.8
Around noon the column came up to Zadwórze. Soviet cavalry patrols stood on the hills nearby and the village was full of Soviet troops: the shortest road to Lwów was closed. Nowak, following the historian Michał Klimecki, writes that Zajączkowski chose to fight his way through rather than break his force up into small groups. His men went forward in three lines of skirmishers, Captain Krzysztof Obertyński's company toward Hill 222, Lieutenant Jan Demeter's against the village and Lieutenant Antoni Dawidowicz's machine-gunners against the station. A bayonet charge forced a Soviet battery to stop firing and pull back behind the village.9
Eleven hours
Then the Soviet cavalry counterattacked. The volunteers beat off six charges; the Polish Army Museum counts eleven attacks. Shellfire and machine guns swept the position for hours, and around two in the afternoon, Nowak writes, Soviet shells destroyed the wagons carrying the battalion's spare ammunition. Even so the Poles drove off the cavalry and attacked again: around four o'clock a platoon of Obertyński's company took Hill 222, which had been stormed for hours, and Dawidowicz's group took the station. The Polish Army Museum writes that the Poles organized an all-round defense around the station.10
In the lull that followed Zajączkowski gathered his men, many of them already wounded. With little ammunition left and no prospect of holding Zadwórze, he decided to break out westward toward Lwów across open ground, while the Soviets brought up reserves: Nowak writes that the whole 6th Cavalry Division of Iosif Apanasenko, about 6,000 sabers and rifles, was turned back from its march on Lwów. Around five o'clock the column set off, carrying its badly wounded on improvised stretchers. It had gone less than a kilometer when artillery and machine guns opened up and the Soviet cavalry, coming up unseen along a sunken road, fell on it in the open and cut it in two. Twice, the historian Janusz Odziemkowski writes, Zajączkowski refused to lay down arms.11
To the last round
The volunteers beat off several charges, but their last ammunition was soon gone, and the battalion, largely made up of volunteers who had never been under fire, broke up under the weight of numbers. Survivors sought shelter in the railway huts that stood every few hundred meters along the line. Only a small group with Zajączkowski reached hut no. 287, about a kilometer from the station, and there the last fight was fought, the captain urging his men on with "Boys! To the last round!" With no cartridges left they defended themselves with bayonets and rifle butts. Zajączkowski kept his last bullet for himself, and Nowak writes that Captain Obertyński, Lieutenant Demeter, Cadet Władysław Marynowski and others did the same.12
What followed was a massacre. Most of those who surrendered were cut down by the Cossacks, and near the lineman's hut the last 30 volunteers still alive were massacred; even the wounded were not spared, and the dead were hacked with sabers, robbed and stripped. Isaac Babel, a correspondent riding with the Cavalry Army, wrote in his diary that he and a commissar rode along the front line begging the men not to kill prisoners, while Apanasenko washed his hands of it. The IPN historian Marek Kozubel notes that Apanasenko, the commander of the 6th Cavalry Division, became notorious for the murder of prisoners after Zadwórze.13
When Polish troops retook the area a few days later, the Polish Army Museum writes, they counted the bodies of 318 dead; Nowak puts the dead at 318 to 325. A Polish officer serving with the Bolsheviks saved one group of prisoners from the massacre, and about 30 Polish soldiers were taken prisoner; one of them, the teenage volunteer Bronisław Mirecki, later escaped from a Soviet camp.14
What the stand achieved
The battalion did not stop Budyonny, but it held up his cavalry. Its stand let the neighboring units of the Polish 13th Infantry Division and the 12th Infantry Regiment withdraw safely and gave Lwów time to prepare its defense. Lwów did not fall. In the Soviet and Russian account, the Cavalry Army's Lwów operation simply ended on 20 August, when the army was handed over to the Western Front.15
In those same days Piłsudski's counterattack broke Tukhachevsky at Warsaw. Budyonny had to bypass Lwów and turned north, failed at Zamość and was beaten at Komarów on 31 August.16› Battle of Komarów, 1920
The graves of Zadwórze
Local peasants buried the dead at the foot of the rise by the station, though some were buried where they fell. The bodies were so badly mutilated that few could be identified. Seven identified bodies, among them those of Captain Zajączkowski, Captain Obertyński and Lieutenant Demeter, were taken to Lwów and buried with honors on 18 September 1920 in the Zadwórze quarter of the Cemetery of the Defenders of Lwów; Nowak writes that the three officers were posthumously awarded the Virtuti Militari. A PAP report speaks instead of five identified officers.17
The rest lie in a small war cemetery by a mound about 20 meters high, raised in the autumn of 1920. Its wooden cross was replaced a few years later by a sandstone obelisk shaped like a boundary post and topped with a metal cross. When a cornerstone commemorating the battle was blessed in August 1927, General Władysław Sikorski said that Lwów had bound "the formidable army of Semyon Budyonny" at its approaches while the fate of Poland was decided on the Vistula. A plaque at the cemetery is dedicated to the Eaglets who fell on 17 August 1920 fighting for the eastern borderlands.18
One of the dead was never found. Konstanty Zarugiewicz lies somewhere among the unknown. On 29 October 1925, in the Cemetery of the Defenders of Lwów, his mother Jadwiga Zarugiewicz chose one of three coffins of unknown soldiers, and it was carried to Warsaw to become the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.19
The Polish Thermopylae
Between the wars Zadwórze became a symbol of sacrifice and a place of pilgrimage, and its dead were called the Polish Thermopylae and their captain the Polish Leonidas, after the Spartan king who held the pass against the Persians. Under the German and Soviet occupations and in communist Poland, Nowak writes, the stand could not be openly honored, and Zadwórze now lies in Ukraine. Yet Polish and Ukrainian officials, soldiers and scouts gather at the mound each August; in 2018 the president of the IPN said the memory was coming back.20› Battle of Thermopylae, 480 BC
Zadwórze belongs with the battles that won Polish independence and with the great fight that was being decided at the same hour: the Battle of Warsaw.
