His commission papers were handed to his family on Monday in the village of Śmiłowo by Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz.
Konieczka died at 1:40 a.m. on September 1, 1939, during a German assault on a Polish Border Guard post in Jeziorki, near the then-border between Poland and Nazi Germany.
He manned a machine gun to cover the retreat of his comrades from a customs post. Wounded in the fight, he was killed when German troops beat him with rifle butts, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
“He defended what he was called to defend, the borders of the Polish state," Kosiniak-Kamysz said in Śmiłowo, near the northwestern town of Piła.
"This is not just a line on a map, it is the defense of our values as a nation and as a family. He defended his own home, and through that he defended our common home called Poland," Kosiniak-Kamysz added.
He announced that a military unit in northwestern Poland would soon be named after Konieczka.
Kosiniak-Kamysz stressed Konieczka’s background as both a farmer and a soldier, evoking a tradition stretching back to Tadeusz Kościuszko, the 18th-century Polish general who is a national hero in both Poland and the United States.
'They feed and they defend'
“They feed and they defend,” Kosiniak-Kamysz said, describing how Poles have combined everyday duties with patriotic service in times of need.
Local officials, state representatives, and schoolchildren attended the commemoration, which included a military ceremony at the Śmiłowo cemetery.
Kosiniak-Kamysz thanked the local school for preserving the memory of the defenders.
He expressed hope that the Śmiłowo ceremonies would become an annual tradition, saying: “We will build this memory and raise new generations in patriotism by demonstrating heroes who were both ordinary, and at the same time extraordinary.”
Historians note that the Germans did not retreat after capturing the customs post, which confirms that Konieczka’s death came in the opening moments of the war.
Some accounts suggest that even a German officer later saluted his body, remarking: “He was a hero.”
Konieczka, born in 1901 in Czarże in north-central Poland, moved to the Greater Poland region in the 1920s, where he farmed with his wife.
He joined the reinforced Border Guard platoon in Jeziorki in the summer of 1939.
In 2010, he was posthumously awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Polonia Restituta Order, one of Poland’s highest honors.
Memorials to him stand at Jeziorki, Kaczory and other local sites, the PAP news agency reported.
Ceremonies were held across Poland on Monday to mark the 86th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.
(rt/gs)
Source: IAR, PAP