Wojtek

The Babe Ruth of history podcasts is The Rest of History with British historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook.  At the end of a recent series on the Nazi invasion of Poland, Tom and Dominic announced they would have a follow up episode on "Wojtek the Polish bear", something I'd never heard of.  Although doubting whether it would be worthwhile, I listened to the episode titled, "Wojtek: The Bear that Beat the Nazis" and found it to be unexpectedly moving.  You can listen to it here.

Wojtek (pronounced Voy-tek), was a bear cub adopted by a Polish army unit, recently released by the Soviets, and passing through Iran.  Wojtek eventually became officially a private in the Polish army (and act that required approval of the British High Command under which the Poles served) and saw action against the Nazis in Italy.  Though I'd never heard of Wojtek, he is a national figure in Poland and there are two statues of the bear in Scotland.  There's a lot more to the story but you'll have to listen to the podcast to find it out.

Why was there an encounter between Polish soldiers and an Iranian bear cub?

In September 1939, a defeated Poland was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union.  Over the next six years, twenty percent of Poland's population died, six million people, half of them Jews.  Both the Nazis and Communists had a deliberate policy of murdering or imprisoning what they defined, each in their own way, as Poland's leadership class.  For a glimpse of some of what happened in those years read Volunteering for Auschwitz and Warsaw Does Not Cry.

Some Polish army units escaped via Romania and made their way eventually to the British in the Middle East.  Other Polish units surrendered to the Soviets who, in March 1940, executed 15,000 Polish officers and imprisoned the rank and file soldiers, sending them to camps in Siberia and Central Asia. About 1.5 million Polish civilians either fled to, or were taken to, the USSR under terrible conditions and also sent to Siberia or Central Asia.  It is estimated that a third of those transported died.

When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Joseph Stalin's calculation changed.  The surviving Polish officers and soldiers (who did not know of the murder of the 15,000 officers) wanted to fight the Germans but Stalin did not want Poles fighting next to Russians, particularly given what he had in mind for Poland's future. However, he agreed to release many of the officers and soldiers to his new Western allies. The Polish soldiers were transported by boat across the Caspian Sea to Iran (jointly occupied by the Soviets and British during the war), which is how the encounter between the soldiers and an Iranian boy seeking to sell the cub occurred.