Battle of Zadwórze

On 17 August 1920, at the railway station of Zadwórze (PL), about 33 kilometres east of Lviv, a battalion of Polish volunteers fought a day-long battle against the cavalry of Semyon Budyonny’s (PL) First Cavalry Army (PL). Surrounded in open country, it beat off several charges, and when its ammunition ran out it fought with bayonets and rifle butts. Of some 330 soldiers, 318 were killed. Between the wars the fight was called the “Polish Thermopylae”. It took place in the same days in which the fate of the war was being decided before Warsaw.

Volunteers from Lviv

Ever since Budyonny’s cavalry broke through the front in Ukraine, the Red Army’s South-Western Front had been pushing west, and in the summer of 1920 its main objective became Lviv. Volunteer units were being formed in Eastern Galicia at the time. One of them was the detachment of Rittmeister Roman Abraham, which was joined mainly by the young people of Lviv: grammar-school pupils and students, among them veterans of the Defence of Lviv of November 1918. It included Captain Bolesław Zajączkowski’s infantry battalion, about 330 men strong according to most accounts. At the beginning of August the detachment had already fought the cavalry at Horodyszcze and Chodaczków.

The fight at the station

On 17 August the battalion was marching along the railway line from Krasne towards Lviv. Near the village of Kutkorz it came under machine-gun fire from the direction of Zadwórze, which was already held by units of Iosif Apanasenko’s 6th Cavalry Division. Zajączkowski decided not to retreat across open fields but to take the station and the nearby hills and defend himself there. The battalion attacked in three lines of skirmishers. Lieutenant Antoni Dawidowicz led an assault on the guns placed by the station, and the Soviet battery had to withdraw behind the village. By about noon the station and the hill were in Polish hands.

Then the defence began. According to Polish accounts, for about eleven hours the volunteers beat off six cavalry charges under artillery and machine-gun fire. Three Polish aircraft from Lviv supported them. Towards evening fresh Soviet forces arrived, and the defenders began to run short of ammunition. They took it from the dead and wounded, then fought with the bayonet. At dusk Zajączkowski ordered the remnants of the battalion, some thirty soldiers, to withdraw in small groups to a nearby forest. The last defenders fought by a linesman’s hut, number 287.

The end of the fight is known mainly from Polish accounts. According to them, most of the soldiers who surrendered were cut down by the Cossacks’ sabres, and Captain Zajączkowski and other wounded officers took their own lives rather than be captured. A small group was taken prisoner. 318 defenders were killed.

The Polish Thermopylae

Among those killed at Zadwórze were Captain Krzysztof Obertyński, Lieutenant Dawidowicz and the 19-year-old Konstanty Zarugiewicz, a grammar-school pupil, a defender of Lviv in 1918 and a holder of the Virtuti Militari. Budyonny took the station, but the fight tied down one of his divisions for a whole day and delayed the cavalry’s march on Lviv, whose defence the Poles were just preparing. When the cavalry left Zadwórze a few days later, the families of the fallen came to the battlefield. Most of the bodies could not be identified.

Several of the identified dead, among them Captain Zajączkowski, were buried in the Cemetery of the Defenders of Lwów, the rest on the battlefield, by a mound raised in the autumn of 1920. In the Second Polish Republic Zadwórze became a place of remembrance of the young people of Lviv, visited by scouts and veterans. In 1925 Konstanty Zarugiewicz’s mother, Jadwiga Zarugiewiczowa, chose the body of an unknown soldier that was laid in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw.