Wojtek the Bear [paperback] (3 page)

As for me, that first Sunday School trip was unforgettable. Love at first sight always is! Be still my girlish heart, out of all the youngsters chattering and carrying on outside his enclosure,
Wojtek had singled me out and waved to me. Nothing would convince me otherwise.

My grandfather had started telling me stories about Wojtek when I was quite small, probably around three years of age. Jim enjoyed my company as I was always a very inquisitive child. A soldier
in his day, he had a unique view of the world which he was more than happy to share with me. Although I knew from all Jim’s tales that Wojtek was a very large bear, it was only when I saw him
in the flesh that I realised just how big he was. I was awestruck by his long nose and huge feet.

I always thought of Wojtek as my grandfather’s bear. Indeed, when he heard that our Sunday School trip was to Edinburgh Zoo my grandfather taught me the Polish word for
‘hello’. Sure enough, when I shouted it out, Wojtek immediately looked in my direction – he responded instantly whenever he heard Polish being spoken – and gave me that
first wave of his large paw. The thought of it still thrills me today.

One of my ambitions, drawn from that day, is to have a plaque commemorating his life mounted at Edinburgh Zoo. When he was resident in the zoo there used to be one. But today there is no
reference to him having lived there, simply due to the passage of time. He died, after all, in 1963. The world moves on and memories fade. However, nearly 50 years on, Wojtek is once more coming
out of hibernation. There is international interest in his story. It is
perhaps now time for his place in history to be remembered in the zoo where he spent so much of his
adult life.

There were to be later visits to Wojtek in Edinburgh Zoo with my mother and my grandmother, but I recall one other overriding emotion from that first trip: I felt desperately sorry for Wojtek.
In the confines of his zoo enclosure, to me, he truly looked a displaced bear. Around the farm and the camp he’d been allowed to roam free. Yes, he was locked up at night, but that was no
more than happened to the other livestock. In the morning they were all let out in the fields. There is a certain sad irony about that fact: a bear in a DP (displaced persons) camp had more freedom
than he did as a civilian bear living in his own compound at the zoo.

A huge admirer of the Poles’ hardiness and fighting qualities, Jim visited Winfield Camp several times a week and he listened to all their tales. He always had a small treat for the bear,
in the shape of an apple or some other titbit, in his pocket. It was only much later, when I began researching Wojtek’s life, that memories came flooding back and I realised just how many
stories Jim had told me about Wojtek.

My grandfather and Wojtek were great friends. There was a strong bond between them. In their own ways, they were both loners who had made the military their family. Wojtek had joined the Polish
army as a scruffy little motherless bear cub. My grandfather, one of a family of nine, had run away from home at the age of 14 to go soldiering round the world. Fiercely independent, he was a
small, wiry, bantam-cock of a man who was handy with his fists and didn’t take kindly to people taking liberties. He used to be a lightweight boxer.

Like Wojtek with his Polish companions, Jim had travelled to many foreign outposts with his regiment, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, and had participated in many
of the darker moments of its military engagements. As a girl I rifled through a biscuit tin in the bedroom wardrobe of Jim’s home in Moniaive to sneak a peek at some of the mementos
he’d brought back from foreign parts. They included photographs from the Boxer Rebellion in China when an international military force had to be sent in to rescue Westerners besieged in
mission compounds by hordes of Chinese rebels. In horrid fascination I found myself staring at severed heads lying in the street where people had been executed by mobs intent on ridding China of
‘foreign devils’.

In passing, it should be said that all Borderers have an abiding affection for the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. Raised in 1689 to defend Edinburgh against the Jacobites, the Kosbies, as
the regiment is often called by the general public (but never by the soldiers themselves), has a long and illustrious history. Still traditionally recruiting from Dumfries and Galloway, Lanarkshire
and the Borders, it has served in many campaigns including the Napoleonic Wars, both World Wars and the Gulf War. There are six Victoria Crosses among its soldiers. In August 2006, despite a
groundswell of protest, the regiment was amalgamated with the Royal Scots to form the Royal Scots Borderers and became the 1st Battalion Royal Regiment of Scotland.

In the KOSB my grandfather achieved the rank of colour sergeant and was a strict disciplinarian with his men. When his regiment was back in Scotland and the men were returning to their barracks
in Berwick upon Tweed after being out on military manoeuvres, he would first have
them run up Halidon Hill and then double-time them across to Winfield Camp at Sunwick to
have a brew with Wojtek. It was a social cuppa that both the squaddies and the bear enjoyed greatly. There can’t have been many farms in Scotland where you would come across a man talking
over the fence to a bear which appeared to be hanging on his every word. But Sunwick was one of them.

Well before Wojtek’s arrival in Berwickshire, Polish soldiers had arrived in large numbers in many of the towns and villages along the Scottish Borders. In 1942 they came to the pleasant
and peaceful town of Duns. Whereas some troops had received a lukewarm welcome when passing through, Duns did the Polish troops proud. The cheers of the townsfolk were tinged with more than a
little relief. Earlier, when the Poles’ tanks and heavy artillery were first seen on the horizon, there had been a local scare that Duns was being invaded by enemy forces. When it was
discovered the new troops were Poles, the flags on the street came out in earnest.

Younger generations have little notion of the huge number of people that moved in great waves through Scotland during and immediately after the war. Many were military personnel sent to the
oddest corners of the country in strategic deployments against the German juggernaut. Tens of thousands of soldiers were bivouacked in normally sparsely populated areas of countryside. The military
equivalent of fully fledged townships would spring up in fields virtually overnight, like mushrooms. It meant a tremendous influx of people into rural areas, and the Borders was no exception.

During the war years a large contingent of Polish soldiers lived in camps in nearby Symington and Douglas. They
were under the charge of General Stanisław Maczek who
was impressed by the warm reception from local communities. But then news of the Poles’ courage and tenacity in battle had reached Scotland long before the men, so the Scots already knew the
value of those soldiers as allies.

A legendary commander, respected by friend and foe alike, General Maczek led the only Polish units not to lose a single battle after Poland was invaded by the Germans in 1939. Under blitzkreig
attack, his forces made a dogged defence but their efforts were eclipsed when Russia invaded from the rear and they were forced to withdraw. Maczek was loved by his soldiers, who called him
Baca
, a Galician name for a shepherd, not dissimilar from the Scottish Gaelic word,
Buachaille
.

When Germany finally capitulated, General Maczek went on to become commanding officer of all Polish forces in the United Kingdom until their demobilisation in 1947. After the war he chose to
remain in Scotland, a de Gaulle-like figure who epitomised the struggle for a free Poland. Like many other Polish soldiers, he felt unable to return to Poland under the Soviet regime.

The thousands of Polish servicemen left their mark on the Scottish Borders in many ways. Some stayed and created new lives and new families. One of their most enduring gifts was the open air map
of Scotland they built in the grounds of what is now the Barony Castle Hotel in Eddleston, Peebleshire. While fighting in Holland, General Maczek once had been shown an impressive outdoor map of
land and water in the Netherlands, demonstrating the working of the waterways which had proved such an obstacle to the Polish forces’ progress in 1944. At Eddleston the general and his fellow
exiles decided to replicate the Love at First Sight 19
map; they conceived the Great Polish Map of Scotland as a permanent, open-air, three-dimensional reminder of
Scotland’s hospitality to their compatriots. In 1975 the coastline and relief map of Scotland were laid out precisely by Kazimierz Trafas, a young geography student from the Jagiellonian
University of Kraków. An infrastructure was built to surround it with a ‘sea’ of water and, at the general’s request, a number of Scotland’s main rivers on the map
were even arranged to flow from headwaters pumped into the interiors of its mountains. It was, and still is, an amazing feat of engineering and design.

Sadly, it was allowed to fall into disrepair. After long years of dereliction, the first steps are now being taken towards its restoration. One day soon people will again marvel at General
Maczek’s Great Polish Map of Scotland in the grounds of Barony Castle, once the home of the Murrays of Elibank, and later the Black Barony Hotel. In the war years the house and grounds seem
to have been in use by Polish forces, and even then an outdoor outline map was one of the features used to help plan the defence of the Scottish coastline which was under threat of invasion after
the fall of Norway. Whether this was really the case, I have not been able to ascertain. Returned to commercial use in the late 1940s, years later the hotel came into the possession of a member of
the Polish community who had been billeted there in wartime. He was a great friend of the general, and gave him permanent use of a suite in the hotel.

General Maczek never did return to live in his beloved Poland; by the time it achieved genuine freedom, age and infirmity had taken their toll. In his later years he lived in Edinburgh. He died
in 1994 at the age of 102, his name still synonymous with the history of World War II.

It was at the Biggar Museum that I learned much of the foregoing, as well as being made aware of the long-standing Scottish–Polish historical links which stretch
back over the centuries. The town of Nowa Szkocja (Nova Scotia), for example, was named by Scots who settled in Poland. Indeed, Scots became so integrated that one of them, Alexander Czamer
(Chalmers) was elected mayor of Warsaw four times before his death in 1703; sadly his tomb, housed in the Cathedral of St John in the city, was destroyed during the Warsaw uprising in 1944.

With its own centuries-long history of military recruitment, the Borders took wartime upheaval pretty much in its stride. Winfield was a prime example. At the height of its use during the war
years, Winfield Camp grew to a size where it accommodated 3,500 men – this in an area where the nearest villages could muster only a few hundred locals and a handful of able-bodied young men
left behind in reserved occupations.

In the war years, bonded by a common purpose, and intent on keeping invaders at bay, there were relatively few strains and stresses. But when Germany surrendered and the euphoria of VE Day had
dissipated, the Borders folk, in common with the rest of Scotland, began waking up to the fact that they were living in an all but bankrupt nation whose infrastructure was seriously impaired, if
not wrecked; and whose social order had been changed out of all recognition. Adding to that, they had on their doorstep large numbers of refugees with no homes and indeed no country to return to,
it having been bargained away like poker chips as the great powers hastily redrew the map of Europe.

In the aftermath of the war, the talk of building a land fit
for heroes was paid considerable lip service. But away from the rhetoric the population imbalances and social
strains could easily have overwhelmed the Borders. The bear living at the bottom of our garden would bring together two very different communities, providing each with the stimulus they needed to
forge lasting ties of friendship. You might call it the Wojtek Factor.

To understand why and how it happened we have to go back to the beginning.

Sometimes life is most mysterious. It takes only a small, apparently insignificant event to pivot a life onto a completely different path – like
missing your lift to work and then meeting your future husband on the next bus. The Spanish have a lovely proverb about such random events that change everything: ‘God writes straight in
crooked lines.’

So it was for Wojtek. By sheer good fortune, he was saved from the worst fate imaginable – life as a dancing bear.

It was April 1942, the tail-end of winter in the highlands of Iran. Despite the sunshine, the wind was still tinged with the snowy breath of the Zagros Mountains. A few hours earlier the
military convoy had passed by the 4,000-year-old city of Hamadan, one of the most ancient cities in the world, and had begun the steady climb into a province of long, harsh winters and short,
pleasantly cool summers.

This particular contingent of soldiers was slowly wending its way towards Palestine, the mustering point for the 2nd Polish Corps being created and armed there. Although they didn’t know
it yet, they were eventually to become its 22nd Company, Polish Army Service Corps (Artillery). The convoy had stopped at the roadside for some food, a
brew-up and a chance
for the soldiers to stretch their legs. It was uncomfortable sitting for hour after hour on the hard, narrow seats of army lorries as they bumped and jolted their way along the rough, potholed
roads of the remote uplands. However, these men had no complaints; this stop-and-start slow journey was like a holiday to them after enduring the privations of Siberian work camps, and besides, as
the Scots saying has it: ‘When you’re marching you’re no’ fighting.’

As ever, no matter how empty the Persian landscape appeared, their passage had not gone unnoticed. In that barren spot, from out of nowhere, a barefoot young boy appeared carrying a hessian
sack. He looked like so many of the half-starved youngsters the Poles had seen on their journey along the western side of the Caspian Sea – skin and bones, with enormous brown eyes in a
pinched, undernourished face that had timidity and hope written over it in equal measure. In his grubby burnous the Poles supposed he was a shepherd lad from the village they had passed several
miles back. Unblinking, he stared at the men, watching every bite they took. The men recognised the signs; they had known it themselves. The boy was starving. They beckoned him over. Feral child
that he was, hunger overcame any fear of strangers. In no time at all, the boy was wolfing down the billycan of meat he was offered.