World War II ended in demographic chaos, with between 11 and 20 million displaced persons outside of their home countries in Europe. That’s a lot of people trying to cross frontiers, many of them suffering from malnutrition, maltreatment and trauma. Some of them had been wandering, or held against their will, since the very beginning of the war.

The people who were uprooted in 1939 and 1940 were often either refugees who fled the battles or military personnel on the losing side. In 1940, of course, it was the Poles, British, Dutch, Belgians, French and their Allies who had lost the most recent battles. An Allied soldier left behind in occupied Europe after Dunkirk had the choice of turning himself in as a POW or going underground. Some of them found their way back to the Allies via escape lines. Some hunkered down under false identities. And some joined the resistance out of either inclination or necessity.

The most well-known of such servicemen-turned-resisters may well be a Scot named Ian Garrow who started the Pat O’Leary escape line that funneled British and Allied servicemen through Belgium and France to Allied hands in Spain. Far less well-known but equally as impressive, a Pole named Andre Wyssogota (spelled in various ways) also ran an escape line known as Visigoths-Lorraine through France. This is his story as he told it in 1945.

Born in 1905 and trained as an economist, Wyssogota served as a captain in the Polish army as they tried to defend their country from the German invasion of 1939. Like many others, he escaped capture as a POW with the intention of continuing the fight with the Allies. After the consul general of France in Prague gave him false papers, he travelled through Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Italy before finally arriving in France at the end of 1939. He rejoined the Polish army in France in May 1940, just in time for the German invasion of that country. When the Italian air force attacked their troop train, Wyssogota and another officer manned an anti-aircraft gun. They hit three planes, but at the cost of the other officer’s life. Wyssogota himself was hit in the leg in 17 places. Because he had been condemned to death in Poland, Wyssogota chose to march onward with his unit on crutches.

Wyssogota was now an injured Polish soldier in a country that was quickly falling apart under the German onslaught. He faced the same desperate situation as many other enemies of the Third Reich – Jews, Communists, Socialists etc, but he showed unique creativity and daring in dealing with it.