For background—which informs
my interest in radio and in part shaped my character and thus explains some of
what is recounted herein—I was born in ‘Communist-occupied’ Poland shortly
after WW II….
There, as a child, I learned
about short-wave radio, by occasionally helping guard my Father’s long-wire
antenna from prying eyes in my Grandfather’s orchard, while they listened to
the likes of RFE, the BBC and VOA. I learned that: the longer the wire, the
better; the higher the wire, the better; and, because I occasionally ‘got
caught short’, that if you ‘peed’ on the ground-rod, reception improved…. More
seriously, unknown to me until later, the penalty for such “seditious”
radio-activities was execution
[after a very perfunctory trial—American QRM’ers take note] or many years of
‘room and board’ if one was fortunate. Suffice it to say that I learned
something about radio—and Freedom from that….
In the late 1950s—at the
height of Soviet power—my Parents ‘voted with their feet’ and emigrated to
Canada, sponsored by/to be reunited with my Father’s Brother. My Father and his
Brother had not seen each other since before September 1939 when my Uncle, then
a professional soldier, had gone off to the last World-Wide ‘Pissing’ Contest….
Because of his military
profession and otherwise, my Uncle had a formative influence on me, even before
we met. He survived the September 1939 Campaign/attack on Poland by the NAZIs,
but was captured by the Red Army which subsequently invaded from the East. As a
junior NCO with the Polish Eastern Border Guards Corps he survived Soviet
imprisonment—and the Katyn
Wood Massacres—where by some count more than 25,000 Polish Officers,
senior NCOs and others were ordered to be exterminated by Joseph Stalin’s NKVD.
After Barbarossa post 22 June 1941 my Uncle literally walked out on Soviet
‘hospitality’ and after an epic—but for the Poles not atypical—trek through
South-Central Asia, eventually joined the famous Polish 2nd Corps in
Palestine, which formed part of the famed British 8th Army. As an
infantryman, he had a walking tour of ‘sunny Italy’, from South to North, was
wounded near Monte Cassino
that in retrospect, he told me, may have saved his life. This, because after
convalescence, he was re-mustered to heavy artillery, using WW I ex-Naval
‘tubes’, stationed miles behind the Front. At the end of WW II ‘Perfidious
Albion’ asked him and virtually all the Poles in the West to “go home” or
otherwise ‘get lost’…. Going home was literally not an option [his birthplace
was annexed by the USSR in the largest ‘ethnic cleansing’/forced migration in
history], or figuratively [by 1946 the Soviets/Communists were shooting some
ex-combatants returning to Poland from the West]. He therefore decided to
immigrate to Canada, having made friends in the 1st Canadian Corps,
also part of the British 8th. So, after only six years of fighting
and bleeding for the common cause—longer than any other of the Allies [and
perversely after the Poles were forbidden to take part in the V-E Parade
(Shame)]—he had to indenture as a ‘powder monkey’ to a gold mine in Val d’Or in
order to pay for his passage to Canada….
My Aunt had a similar
story/history all her own—trekking additionally through Africa—before
re-forming with the Polish
Air Force in England. I owe my Uncle and Aunt, both recently deceased,
a debt that I obviously will never be able to repay….
My oldest Uncle—who was
incarcerated in and barely survived Gros Rosen
Concentration Camp [for the Crime of offering water to a slave-labour gang on a
hot summer’s day—no Good Deed deserved to go unpunished by the NAZIs], was
originally trained as a signalman in the Polish Army and occasionally sent
greetings to me in Canada—in Morse Code. My youngest Uncle was a teen-aged
courier and on two occasions a ‘hit man’ for the Polish Underground (AK). My Father, too young
to be a combatant at the start of WW II was a forced/slave-labourer—first by
the NAZIs and then in the Soviet Gulag…. Etc., etc.
And, that’s a woefully
incomplete ‘radio-centric’ sketch of only one side of my family….
But, as a sometime
historian, I digress….
I came of age in Toronto,
where often on Saturdays my boyhood friend and I would ‘raid’ what we called
“The Bell Telephone Junkyard”, to ‘liberate’ discarded treasures from a fate
worse than death. I learned something about electricity, telephones and radio
from that—and still frequent junkyards on Saturdays….
In High School I was very
active in Cadets [won “Best Cadet”] and the Reserves. There, among other
things, I qualified as a Marksman and BREN-gunner and was trained by the Royal
Canadian Signals Corps as a Communicator/Signaller. I have fond memories of the
“No. 19 Set” and one of my prized possessions is a Canadian Army Certificate of
Military Qualification in Signals signed by the late General ‘Boy George’
Kitching, who had accepted the NAZI surrender in North West Europe in May 1945.
Subsequently, I was
selected—“On Merit”—to attend and graduated with Honours from the elite Royal
Military College of Canada (RMC) [the
Canadian ~equivalent of Sandhurst, West Point, etc.]. In the Service, among
other things, I was trained both as a Navigator and as a Communications &
Electronic Warfare Officer. First licensed in the early 1970s while still in
the Service, I traveled extensively. I served an unprecedented three
consecutive tours of duty in a unique position with the UN Emergency Force in
the Middle East—where interestingly I occasionally met Arabic and other local
peoples who still understood and/or spoke some Polish, but with a decidedly WW
II ‘dialect’—and helped to pass phone-patch traffic back to Canada, when primary
duties allowed.
English is the fourth of
five languages I ~learned, three of which I occasionally still practice on/near
14.273 MHz—known among the Poles and knowledgeable others as the unofficial
“Polish Calling Frequency”—extant for only 50+ years.
I earned several Diplomas
and Degrees, some of them professional/advanced. But, I value my first Degree
the most—take the admonition “with all its … responsibilities”
written thereon seriously—and partly as a consequence and otherwise, suffer
fools, Internet stalkers, cyberpaths, sociopaths—and the current crop of
American right-wing trash-radio ‘wannabes’, whackos, war-mongers,
‘cluster-fucks’ and general fucktards, badly….
BACK TO: “RADIO
CANADA”—VE7KFM—Being Stalked by Brian L. CROW K3VR