![]() ![]() One of the civilian refugees in their midst, eighteen-year-old Irena (Inka) Bokiewicz, the great-niece of General Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszowski, was very taken with the cub. At a railroad station in Hamadan, Iran, on 8 April 1942, Polish soldiers encountered a young Iranian boy who had found a bear cub whose mother had been shot by hunters. In the spring of 1942 the newly formed Anders' Army left the Soviet Union for Iran, accompanied by thousands of Polish civilians who had been deported to the Soviet Union following the 1939 Soviet invasion of eastern Poland. After the war he was mustered out of the Polish Army and lived out the rest of his life at the Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland. During the Battle of Monte Cassino, in Italy in 1944, Wojtek helped move crates of ammunition and became a celebrity with visiting Allied generals and statesmen. He accompanied the bulk of the II Corps to Italy, serving with the 22nd Artillery Supply Company. ![]() ![]() In order to provide for his rations and transportation, he was eventually enlisted officially as a soldier with the rank of private, and was subsequently promoted to corporal. Wojtek (1942 – 2 December 1963 Polish pronunciation: in English, sometimes spelled Voytek and pronounced as such) was a Syrian brown bear ( Ursus arctos syriacus) bought, as a young cub, at a railway station in Hamadan, Iran, by Polish II Corps soldiers who had been evacuated from the Soviet Union. Polish soldier with Wojtek (right) in 1942ģ522, 22nd Artillery Supply Company, II Corps (Poland) ![]()
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