Otto Hulacki is dead. The Anders Army veteran was 102 years old

Col. Otton Hulacki (102 years old), from Lviv, from Siberia, soldier of the 2nd Polish Corps, conqueror of Monte Cassino, Ancona and Bologna, passed away to the Eternal Warta – the head of the Office for Veterans and Victims of Oppression, Jan Józef, announced on Monday on the X platform (formerly Twitter). Kasprzyk. “A wonderful man with a big heart, filled with love for Poland. Sleep in a dark grave, my friend, and let Poland come to you in your dreams,” added Minister Kasprzyk.

“Our last meeting with the late Col. Otto Hulacki during the May celebration of the 79th anniversary of the Battle of Monte Cassino. We will miss him very much! His Lviv humor, kindness, knowledge, cordiality,” Kasprzyk said in the next entry.

“The Appeal in which this year he recalled the names of his colleagues who died at Piedimonte will always be remembered. He is with them now,” he added.

Otton Hulacki was born on January 2, 1922 in… Lviv. At a young age, he joined the “Orląt” organization operating at the Shooting Association. In September 1939, he joined one of the Polish units heading east. It was then that he encountered Soviet troops for the first time.

– In a shooting uniform, I attached myself to a squadron of the Silesian police, and one morning I was woken up by the noise of tanks, a whole mass of them appeared, followed by Red Army soldiers. What a pitiful sight! Some of them were barefoot, most of them had rifles hanging on strings, it made a terrible impression on me – he recalled in 2018.

In November 1939, he was sworn in as a member of the Service for Poland’s Victory. On April 10, 1940, the NKVD arrested Otto’s father, a pre-war policeman. In April 1940, he was deported together with his mother and siblings to… Kazakhstan. – I was suffering from typhus, I was lying in bed completely exhausted, and once I woke up and there was a dead body on one side and a dead body on the other. People died every day, he said.

In March 1942, he joined the Polish Army in the East. He served in the 6th Armored Regiment “Children of Lviv”, where he graduated from non-commissioned officer school. In 1944, he was assigned to the command of the 2nd Armored Brigade of the 2nd Polish Corps, with which he arrived in Italian and fought, among others, about Monte Cassino.

After the war he remained in Great Britain. – There was no other way choice, after all, after what the NKVD did to me and my family in Lviv, I became known to the communist authorities. Returning to Poland was impossible, he recalled.

He participated many times in ceremonies at the cemetery at the foot of the Monte Cassino monastery on the anniversary of the battle in 1944. He was active in veterans’ organizations for the last time in May 2023.