Wojtek, the Polish soldier bear who carried grenades

One day he will be 182 centimeters tall and weigh 220 kilograms. But now he’s just a pile of misery vibrating in a sack. The bag is carried by a neglected Iranian boy. He was born in Hamadan, in that city that is more than 4000 years old and from where 2000 years ago the three kings left for Bethlehem to pay homage to their Redeemer.

It is 1942, World War II is raging, the boy is starving, Iran is occupied by Britain and the Soviet Union to secure the oil fields, Vichy France has already started deporting its Jewish inhabitants to Auschwitz and Stalingrad is transforming into a mass grave.

The bag is still shaking when the boy hands it over to the Polish soldiers. Not so long ago, the men had been prisoners of war, but were released after the Soviet Union was attacked by its former ally Germany. They would soon become part of the 75,000-strong Polish Second Army Corps being raised in the Middle East.

Corporal Piotr Prendys looks in the pocket. A small, confused bear looks back. A Syrian brown bear whose mother was shot by hunters. The boy should have taken care of it, the animal should have turned into a dancing bear. But the boy ran off with his bundle – he was probably just too hungry.

Piotr buys the animal in exchange for some canned meat. He becomes his foster father, feeding him condensed milk from his vodka bottle.

War’s friend Wojtek becomes the house bear of the 22nd Transport Division.

He is allowed to roam freely in the Palestinian camp where the men were stationed to supply Syria, Egypt and Iraq. Wojtek sleeps with the men in the tent, he plays with them and he makes them laugh. Time and time again he succeeds in cheering up their souls darkened by captivity and making everyday war life bearable.

Wojtek is starting to look more and more like his confidante, he imitates the men and they too want to make him one of them.

At Christmas he gets beer and he also craves cigarettes, which the men light for him before he gobbles them down in one bite. It’s Christmas Eve when Wojtek, either giddy with alcohol or simply following his slumbering bearish instincts, breaks into the grocery store, rips everything open and works his way through the packages.

The next morning he is chained as punishment. It’s not often that Wojtek’s nature gets too bearish, only very rarely do they get through, his animalistic instincts. Once he almost kills a donkey and brutally gets rid of his foster father. Piotr has to scream so that his bear friend wakes up from his bad bear dream, so that Wojtek readjusts to his human upbringing.

Well behaved there, where he knows what is appropriate. Just like the morning shower he usually takes with the men. Like her, he just pulls the chain and the water splashes down on him. And Wojtek loves water. So much so that he squanders the resource, which is so rare in the area, without hesitation. Because he absolutely does not want to let go of the chain, the bear is not allowed to shower.

For days he hangs around the closed door in the hope that one day he will be let in. But that doesn’t happen. But in the end, the soldiers forget to close the shower cabin. Wojtek immediately sneaks in.

Then the soldiers hear a scream. He sounds terrified. And it comes from a man crouching in the corner of the cabin. He holds his arms protectively over his head as Wojtek gleefully pulls the magic chain next to him. His voice trembles as he candidly admits to being a spy who hid here to locate the arsenal of weapons that would be destroyed.

The bear caught an Arab spy. He was a hero and in return he was allowed to shower as long as he wanted for the rest of the day.

In September 1943, the Polish Second Army Corps was shipped from Alexandria to Naples – they were to be used in the Italian campaign against the Axis powers.

But when the 22nd Transport Division showed up with their bear, the port authorities wouldn’t let the animal on board. But the men couldn’t just leave him behind. Wojtek was one of them. And so they received the approval of the high command: from that moment on, the bear was listed as Sergeant Wojtek, he was given a service number and a pay book. This made him an official member of the Polish army – and legitimized to take part in the crossing.

The battle for Monte Cassino, the mountain on top of which a Benedictine monastery had stood for 1300 years, lasted four months. But now German paratroopers have settled here.

At a height of 514 meters they could see everything that happened on the Gustav Line. This line of defense crossed central Italy, starting at the mouth of the Garigliano River in the Tyrrhenian Sea, then upstream to Cassino and continuing up the top of the Apennines to Ortona, a port city on the Adriatic Sea.

By the time the Polish 22nd Transport Division arrived in Italy, three of the four battles around the Monte Cassino base had already been fought. After the second, the monastery had also disappeared.

On May 11, 1944, the decisive last Allied offensive finally began – from the sea to beyond Cassino, four corps were stationed with a width of 32 kilometers: 105,000 French (Algerians, Moroccans), Americans, British and Poles. And among them Wojtek. Initially intimidated by the deafening sound of artillery, he gradually grew accustomed to his new warlike environment.

He watched as his foster father and the other soldiers unloaded the grenades from the truck and then moved them to the various positions. Then he got up, joined them too, and stretched out his legs so that some projectiles could also be fired at him. And so he carried the heavy crates across the battlefield, over rough terrain on the slope of Monte Casino, to their destination.

And when he didn’t feel like it anymore, Sergeant Wojtek just lay down and could only be encouraged to keep working with sweets.

Wojtek’s transport division supplied the fighting Poles and British with about 17,300 tons of ammunition, 1,200 tons of fuel and 1,100 tons of food.

On the morning of May 18, 1944, the Germans raise the white flag. The Polish associations then climbed the abandoned monastery ruins on Monte Casino and exchanged them for their own flag. The battle cost the lives of 20,000 German and 55,000 Allied soldiers.

But Wojtek, the hero of Monte Casino, was now immortalized on the emblem of the Polish army: with an artillery shell in his arms, the bear now adorned the military vehicles of the 22nd Transport Division.

Pjotr ​​and his men spend the summer in Italy after the war. Splashing in the sea is especially fun for Wojtek – much to the dismay of the other swimmers. Only the starting engine of his foster father’s truck can lure him out of the water. Then the brown bear jumps off, almost panicked, running towards the men as if afraid they would leave him alone on the beach.

It’s not time to say goodbye yet. In September 1946, Wojtek accompanied his division to Scotland to Winfield Camp in Berwickshire, an army camp designed to prepare soldiers for life after the war. And although the Scottish children adored him and he also loved to dance and especially play the violin, the food was not enough to feed that six-foot-tall and 500-pound brown bear. The men’s meals were still rationed, but Wojtek needed 20,000 calories a day.

And when the demobilization of the Polish army took effect a year later, one had to wonder where the bear actually belonged. Pyotr could not take him to the Warsaw Zoo, which lay in ruins, and besides, he did not know what homeland he would return to. And soon he would see Poland again controlled and oppressed by foreigners.

And so it was that Wojtek moved into his new home at the zoo in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh. Piotr himself brought his bear there, even though his heart broke at parting. Wojtek, the hero of Monte Casino, will spend 15 years there until he dies at the age of 21.