Life
During the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Lieutenant Kowerski fought gallantly as a member of Poland's 10th Motorized Cavalry Brigade, commanded by Col. Stanisław Maczek, winning his country's highest military decoration, the Virtuti Militari.
When Soviet forces invaded eastern Poland on September 17, forcing Poland's government to evacuate south into Romania, Kowerski and his "Black Brigade" (so called after their black leather jackets) evacuated to neighboring Hungary. There he busied himself covertly exfiltrating interned Polish, and other Allied, military personnel out of Hungary.
When Kowerski subsequently worked for British Intelligence and the Special Operations Executive, he was given the cover name "Andrew Kennedy." Having lost part of a leg in a prewar hunting accident, he became the first disabled man to complete SOE's parachute training. (His lover, Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, was the first woman to pass the same course.)
Read more about this topic: Andrzej Kowerski
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind
swipe of the pruner and his knife
busy about the tree of life . . .”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)