Under the Liberator

To the Warsaw Uprising Museum for the launch of Bankowe Szańce by Edmund Baranowski and Juliusz Kulesza, both teenage participants in the rising. The book (in Polish only for now) tells several wartime stories with a common thread - banking and finance. The story of Poland's gold - all 38 tonnes of it - and how it was taken out of Poland by National Bank of Poland staff as the Blitzkrieg raged all around, and how it came to end up in London via the Sahara Desert - is thrilling stuff. Equaly interesting is the story of Akcja Góral - the biggest bank robbery in Nazi occupied Europe - which happened in Warsaw on 12 August 1943. The equivalent of over a million dollars at the time was seized by around 50 Home Army soldiers who attacked an armoured car carrying newly printed banknotes. And also the story of how the Polish underground state forged banknotes on a massive scale - and how the Germans found out about this. Co-author Juliusz Kulesza was an apprentice working at the state security printers PWPW at the time.

But there was another story, little known, that appears in the book, concerning the fate of the granddaughter of Leopold Kronenberg, a famous Polish banker. She was executed by the Home Army during the Warsaw Uprising. A medical orderly, she was helping to move a stretcher case, when someone looking through the contents of her handbag found a Gestapo identity card. She was shot by Polish soldiers. It now transpires that she had been working for British military intelligence at the time. During the Q&A session with the authors, an AK veteran stood up to say that he was in the counter-intelligence unit that executed her, and that until this very moment he had been unaware of the fact that she had been a double agent.

Many of the audience today were AK veterans, like my father, in their 80s or even older. Only a handful were on walking sticks. The majority looked well and younger than their years.

The book is available online via Askon publishers (www.askon.waw.pl). Next Askon book launch will be on 29 January in the Royal Castle in Warsaw - Silent and Unseen. E-mail me if you want to come - places are limited and in great demand, everyone wants to meet the author, 96 year-old legend General Stefan Bałuk, commando, writer, photographer, forger and get a signed copy of his book!