Rafał Gan-Ganowicz - great Polish patriot
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — History
Teriyaki sauce — 2 months ago(January 19, 2026 06:34 PM)
Asked once how it felt to take human life, he replied: "I wouldn't know – I've only ever killed communists."
Rafał Gan-Ganowicz's life reads like a Jason Bourne script. At the end of World War II, he was a 13 year old orphan surrounded by ruins. His mother was killed in the 1939 invasion while his father died in the Warsaw Uprising.
Yet with the incredible resilience and patriotic spirit displayed by so many of his generation, he didn't resign himself to misery, instead finding purpose in his difficult circumstances. "With the N@zis annihilated," he said, "it was one's duty to defeat the other enemy of humanity: the communists."
Rafał founded an underground group that distributed leaflets, defaced communist propaganda and painted anti-Soviet graffiti. In 1950, as the communists ruthlessly hunted down all remaining opposition in Poland, Rafał escaped to West Berlin. He then moved to France, completed commando training, and graduated from an officer's school of the Free Polish Armed Forces in Exile.
He received the rank of 2nd Lieutenant from Poland's wartime general Władysław Anders. Rafał hoped to be parachuted back into Poland as part of Operation Rollback – a clandestine operation to undermine the Soviet occupation through sabotage and paramilitary activity. It never materialized, however, so Rafał took his fight against communism elsewhere – all the way down to Africa.
In 1965, he enlisted to fight for the State of Katanga during the Congo Crisis. There, he commanded his own battalion (containing other notable Polish mercenaries) against communist forces. Rafał then traveled to Yemen to train local insurgents against Soviet-backed rebels during the civil war.
There, he shot down the MiG of the head of the Red Army's military mission; obliterated a convoy of tanks in a mountain canyon ambush; and flattened the Soviet embassy with his mortars.
When martial law was imposed in Poland, Rafał helped raise awareness of the plight of imprisoned activists by co-organising demonstrations and reporting for Radio Free Europe. He finally returned to Poland in 1997 and lived there until his death. (Post from @polish_history)
