Now the meaning has finally been unlocked, thanks to two Polish historians. They looked at 80-year-old records and found that the list referred to six Polish Special Forces soldiers trained at the large Jacobean estate during World War II. The Cichociemni (the silent invisible) were a specially selected group of special operations paratroopers trained to fall behind enemy lines in occupied Poland to confront the Nazis. The Audley End, then known as Station 43, served as a graduation school for 527 of the selected soldiers volunteered by Polish Army units throughout the United Kingdom. English Heritage will mark the 80th anniversary of the start of the program on Sunday, with a new exhibit exhibition for Station 43, which opens May 2, featuring documents, images and everyday items customized to hide messages. For more than two years, men trained in the Audley End for three months, taking attack lessons over the River Cam as they learned about the underground war, but graffiti names are one of the few visible signs left of Cichociemni, along with the remnants of a schedule stuck to a wall in a former newsroom and ammunition labels inside a laundry closet. The six men completed their training on April 12, 1944. Dr. Andrew Hann, a British heritage historian, said the latest findings provide valuable insights into the lives of soldiers trained on the property. While he knew for a few years that graffiti was there, “what we did not know was what it really meant.” He added: “Then some Polish historians came to look around and my colleague Peter showed them to them in the closet. They said, “Oh, I think we know what that is.” After checking their files, they confirmed that they were the names of special forces paratroopers, and Khan began searching for them in the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust archive in Ealing, using Google Translate to interpret their personnel files. “It was a very slow process,” Hann said. But, he added: “It’s a lot more than we knew before, and it makes them real people, real personalities, rather than just a list of names.” The six men who were identified made some remarkable achievements. Franciszek Socha, who was 29 when he graduated, was a teacher who studied at the University of Lviv and seemed to be the protagonist of the group. During a mission, he was parachuted into northern France to obtain a sample of poison gas, but was arrested by the Gestapo. He managed to escape by jumping from a moving train and, with the help of local resistance, made his way to a British submarine. Jan Benedykt Różycki, then 43, was a former civil engineer from Klimkiewiczów who spoke five languages fluently. He returned to Poland by parachute to deliver supplies to the Polish army. Other Cichociemni were persecuted under the post-Soviet regime, but remained. In 1949 he was arrested on false charges and imprisoned for three years and his son was killed trying to free him. He eventually became director of the Polish Institute of Civil Engineering and died in 1991. Among them were Teodor Paschke, 29, of Chodecz, a pre-war Polish Army officer who trained at Audley End, Jósef Zbrzeźniak, 22; a Warsaw-based printing company courier who fought in Italy; 38, a prominent film and theatrical actor from Lviv who starred in many pre-war films and Czesław Migoś, 23, an artillery sergeant who escaped from Poland and joined the Polish forces in France before being sent to Britain. However, the mystery about the reason for the list – and why some of the names are deleted – remains. The proposals include a record of lending rubber boots or those who have passed certain courses, but there is no definitive answer. “It’s one of those mysteries that we will probably never discover. But what was really fascinating is that there are so many different types of people with interesting stories, “said Hann, adding: parachute back to Poland “. The underground warfare seminar included training in sabotage, field craft, reconnaissance and specialized training in areas such as microscopy and wireless operation. During the last stage, before being sent out on the field, the soldiers would be informed of the latest information about Poland and fabricated pseudonyms and false identities, as well as given clothes and forged documents. It was such a detail that they would even check their dentistry to make sure it was in line with their destination, so as not to let them know.
