Lozinski, Frank
(Oct. 2, 1918 - )Unlike apples and oranges, Taunton, Massachusetts, forty miles south of Boston, and Wielkie Oczy, a remote hamlet in Podkarpackie province, Poland, have many things in common. For example, Taunton was founded in 1639; Wielkie Oczy, 1671. By the time of the First World War, Polish and Jewish settlers were deeply rooted in Taunton and Wielkie Oczy. Although they crossed the same ocean to get to the United States, the stories of the Jewish families and the first Lozinski family in Taunton were different. They brought different prayer books and languages with them. Whatever the history of Wielkie Oczy is, Michael and Victoria Lozinski did not have time to study it. They had nine children to raise and their relatives back in Wielkie Oczy (meaning Big Eyes) had their own headaches.
Among the relatives of the Taunton family was Franciszek (Frank) Lozinski, the son of Anthony Lozinski, who served with the Austrian Army in World War l, and Elizabeth Rydzik, who bore six children. After he completed his schooling in the village of 1,000, Frank Lozinski worked in a carpenter shop and a blacksmith shop until November 7, 1938, when he joined the Polish Army and soon learned to drive and repair tanks, trucks and motorcycles. His brigade was stationed in southwestern Poland when the German troops invaded his homeland on three sides. For about two weeks he fought the German invaders through a series of towns in the Carpathian foothills from a forest near Zator, where he was on guard duty on September 1, 1939, to the former capital of Galicia, Lwow, which now lies in the Western Ukraine and is known as Lviv. Then, on September 17, without warning, Russian troops fought with the Germans against the Polish troops, forcing the Polish general who was supposed to defend Lwow to surrender in several days. Lozinski and his unit escaped. Instead of imposing law and order, the Soviet authorities took over Lwow and marched most of the Jewish population and Polish leaders to concentration camps. Many of them were refugees in Wielkie Oczy. Later, when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, they purged by November 1942 the Jewish population of the hamlet, about 40 miles east of Jaroslaw as the crow flies. The only signs today of the Jewish people with whom Frank Lozinski grew up in Wielkie Oczy are a cemetery and a synagogue with a leaky roof and no windows.
After driving a truck over the mountains to Hungary, which in 1939 was not at war. Frank Lozinski did not know what would happen in Wielkie Oczy. Shortly afterward, he was arrested by Hungarian police and put in jail, first in a fort at Komarno, Hungary, where he was provided with civilian clothes, and then in a camp at Rajka, near Austria, from which he escaped, and made his way, slowly from one hideout to another, until he crossed the Yugoslavian border. Nobody knew what would become of the Polish fighters until General Wladyslaw Sikorski set up in France a Polish government-in-exile in the spring of 1940.
General Maczek issued a call to Lozinski and other veterans of his brigade and they regrouped in France. At first France would not give it tanks and motorcycles. Not until Germany invaded France. Without going into detail, Lozinski fought for France and won the battles for Mont Orme, Hill 262 and the town of Chambois. After France capitulated to Hitler, Maczek had a pretty clear idea as to the future course of his like. He would rebuild a free Polish army and, if possible, help England and the United States win the war. For the third time, the Polish Armoured Division was born on Feb. 25, 1942, albeit on English soil. It landed in Normandy on August 1, 1944, with 16,000 men and about 400 Sherman tanks, and distinguished itself.
After the war, Maczek, Lozinski, and thousands of other Polish soldiers were not allowed to return to their families by the Communist government of the Peoples's Republic of Poland, and they had to remain in the United Kingdom. After his discharge with the rank of sergeant in Salisbury, England, in 1949, Frank Lozinski learned to repair watches and set up his own shop. He created somewhat of a sensation when he repaired the watch of Queen Mary. Even his relatives in the United States, including Michael Lozinski, who came from Wielkie Oczy in 1908 and found work in a cotton mill at Taunton, Massachusetts, heard about it and invited him to come to America. The queen of the United States Lines, SS America, set sail on April 23, 1951, at Southanpton, England, and brought Frank Lozinski to New York in seven days. He lived with his uncle in Taunton and got a job in the jewelry district.
In 1955 he moved to Fall River, Massachusetts, and opened a small watch repair shop on South Main Street. When he was 65 years old he built a three story house on Quincy Street for himself and his wife, Ursula, whom he met in Poland in 1965 and by whom he had no children.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)