A Polish refugee learns the ‘GI Salute’ in 1950

The stocky, silver-haired, house painter had a dignified manner about him. His foreign accent betrayed the Americanized name he adopted. Born in Poland and abducted by the Nazis, my great-uncle Stanley arrived to Chicago in 1949. Then just a little over a year after his arrival the recent immigrant found himself drafted during the Korean War. He served his new country honorably in what became a proud chapter in his life.

Early life and liberation

Stanisław Kozak was born on 25 November, 1927, in the small Polish village of Strzelce Wielkie, west of Tarnów. He was my grandfather’s younger brother. Their family maintained a small farm on the edge of a forest which the patriarch, Wincenty, managed as a forester. Life in the countryside was relatively peaceful and boring for the Kozaks. That was until 1939.

After the Invasion of Poland the Nazi occupiers began to conscript ethnic Poles into compulsory labor. Approximately 1.9 million persons experienced this fate. My great-grandparents bid farewell to four children shipped off to Nazi Germany, my grandfather included. All returned home except for Stanisław.

Click here to read more on my grandfather’s experience as a forced laborer.

Stanisław began his labor on 20 February 1943, at the age of fifteen. At first he worked on a farm. Then transitioned over to factory work, he was employed by the still-active domestic appliance company Miele & Cie from December 1943 to March, 1944.¹ At war’s end the Polish teenager was liberated in the American Zone of Occupation.

As a seventeen year old my great-uncle made a difficult decision. Presented with two options, he either could accept repatriation to Soviet occupied Poland or remain in Germany as a displaced person (DP). To remain a DP meant having no home country for the foreseeable future. Single, with no children, young, and ambitious, my great-uncle declined repatriation and hoped to have a successful life as a re-settled refugee in a foreign country.

The DPs were Holocaust survivors, forced laborers, prisoners of war, victims of aerial bombings, and others. In the early postwar days they numbered in the millions.² They roamed all across Germany unchecked at a time when the country was engulfed in chaos. During this period my great-uncle was reduced to a life of banditry.

Stanisław joined a group of other DPs in carrying out petty crimes. Camped underneath a bridge, the bandits targeted German civilians. My great-uncle loved to entertain family members with tales of black market dealings, stealing clothes off clotheslines, and cattle rustling. Some of his loot and profits were sent to Poland to support his family.

Labor Service

The authorities in the American Zone of Occupation had an acute awareness of the DP situation. Although DPs found refuge at hastily set up camps, they could become restless without work to keep them occupied.

A partial solution came in the form of Labor Service (LS) units.³ As auxiliary and paramilitary organizations of the US Army, these units employed DPs in typically company sized formations. The companies were organized by ethnic identity and each had about two hundred enlisted men and five or six officers. Four major types existed: Guard Companies, Truck Companies, Fog Companies (two in the 1950s), and standard Labor Units.

Appearing in mid 1945, LS units were not only a response to the plight of DPs. Immediately after the war the US Armed Forces transitioned to a peacetime standing. Millions of men and women eagerly awaited demobilization. By employing DPs to take over some of the soldiers’ more mundane duties, less Americans were needed on occupation duty.

By 1946, Stanisław was a member of a Guard Company in the Bavarian city of Erlangen. Guardsmen protected ‘military installations, warehouses, prisoners’ camps, prisons, army offices, and civil representatives of the Western Powers’.⁴

Guardsmen were given basic military drill, were provided uniforms, and were armed. While on duty they wore helmets that bore the letters ‘CG’ on the front. This identified the men as civilian guards. It was also common for guardsmen to wear custom patches and metal badges on their uniforms that identified their unit affiliation.

LS members were not soldiers but some were recruited directly into the US Army, through the Lodge Act of 1950. The act authorized the voluntary enlistment of 2,500, later 12,500, foreign nationals primarily from Eastern Europe, whose native language skills and local knowledge could be used in fighting communism.⁵

Life inside a DP camp

For how long Stanisław was employed by the LS is unknown. Eventually he left the service and relocated to the DP camp in Hohenfels which had been Stalag 383 during the war. He was apart of the nearly one million DPs still living in camps in 1947. For these persons the resettlement process was long and arduous.

Why such a large number of persons remained in the camps long after the war owed to the reluctance of countries to accept refugees on a mass scale. Changing this situation was the passage of the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 by the US Congress. Thereafter other countries followed suit and began to accept large quotas of DPs.

Only a trickle of DPs were resettled before the first Displaced Persons Act was passed in June 1948. The figure stood at over 61,000 persons. Then in the two years after the act’s passage, some 560,000 DPs were resettled.⁶

Life inside the DP camps was far from luxurious. Like in the case of my great-uncle at Hohenfels, DPs typically lived in temporary facilities constructed during the war. Nonetheless, DPs made due with what little they had. Members of the same ethnic groups formed their own institutions like schools, sports teams, and libraries.

Work was found, but it was usually low-income. Males found a variety of jobs outside the US Army. In Hohenfels, for instance, around forty Polish DPs operated a stone quarry and crusher. The Hohenfels DP camp also had several workshops. One was dedicated to shoe repair. Another employed women in knitting articles of winter clothing.

A DP could improve his or her job prospects, however, through education. They had access to primary, secondary, and higher learning institutions. There was even the UNRRA University in Munich, operating from February 1946 to September 1948, which was formed exclusively for DPs. The university had over 2,000 students enrolled at its height.⁷

Despite all the self-improvement activities and work carried out, DPs still eagerly awaited permanent resettlement.

Welcome, now go and serve!

On 29 May, 1949, the SS Harry Taylor docked at New York City. Onboard the vessel were about 877 DPs, of whom 161 were bound for Chicago. The Chicago Daily Tribune reported that among the passengers was twenty-one year old Polish factory worker Stanisław Kozak, sponsored by the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC).⁸

My great-uncle settled on the southwest side of Chicago. Americanizing his name to Stanley Kozak, a common practice for immigrants at the time, he began a new life in the land of opportunity. But another disruption soon came.

The Korean War broke out in June 1950. North Korean troops poured across the 38th parallel into South Korea, in a bid to unify the Korean Peninsula under communism, prompting the US and other United Nations countries to come to the defense of South Korea. The US mobilized for war and drafted hundreds of thousands of men into the military.

Later that year the Chicago Daily Tribune announced the induction of 270 residents from the southwest side of Chicago into the Army. Among the list of names was Stanley Kozak.⁹ My great-uncle was drafted as a non-citizen.

Stanley entered the army on 2 November, 1950. He was sent to ‘learn the GI salute’, basic training, at Camp Polk, Louisiana, in the Deep South. While not training Stanley took full advantage of weekend passes. More than a few ladies were charmed by my great-uncle in his uniform and sunglasses.

Ironically Stanley was not sent to Korea and instead returned to Germany as apart of the American occupation forces. He re-entered the port at Bremerhaven in 1951 which he left as a refugee two years prior. For the next year my great-uncle carried out garrison duty interspaced with field exercises, both in Germany and in France.

Discharged on 31 October, 1952, as a Private First Class, Stanley used his honorable military service to expedite his citizenship process. Proud to have served the country that adopted him, he was buried with military honors in 2002. In the gallery above a colored photo of my great-uncle can be seen. This image sat alongside his coffin during his wake.

1. This information was found through the online database of the Arsolen Archives. The archives preserves documents pertaining to Nazi oppression and crimes during the Second World War.
2. To learn more about the lives of Second World War DPs in Europe, read David Nasaw, The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War (New York: Penguin Press, 2020), or Mark Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945-1951 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).
3. A brief history of the Polish participation in Labor Service (LS) units is provided in Wojciech J. Muszyński, ‘The Polish Guards Companies of the U.S. Army After World War II’, in The Polish Review 2012 (vol. 57, no.4), pp.75-86.
4. Muszyński, ‘The Polish Guards Companies’, p.75.
5. A history of Lodge Act soldiers in the Army’s Special Forces is provided in two parts by Charles H. Briscoe. See Briscoe ‘America’s Foreign Legionnaires: The Lodge Act Soldiers, Part I’, in Veritas (vol. 5, no.1), 2009, pp.33-46, and Briscoe ‘America’s Foreign Legionnaires: The Lodge Act Soldiers, Part II’, in Veritas (vol. 5, no.2), 2009, pp.28-47.
6. Nasaw, The Last Million, pp.533-4.
7. Anna Holian, ‘Displacement and the Post-war Reconstruction of Education: Displaced Persons at the UNRRA University of Munich, 1945–1948’, in Contemporary European History (vol. 17, no. 2), 2018, pp.167-195.
8. Staff, ‘More Displaced Persons to Find Homes in Area’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 24 July, 1949, p.SW6.
9. Staff, ‘270 More Men of S.W. Side to Learn GI Salute’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 November, 1950, p.SW16.