Ex-Resident Revisits Her Roots in New Book

For today, we have a fine book by a real Greenwich home town author and prominent media journalist, Rita Cosby, called “Quiet Hero.”

Rita grew up on Halsey Drive in Havemeyer Park, Old Greenwich, went to Dundee, Eastern and Greenwich High, has happy memories of skating and watching fireworks in Binney Park, and loved as a special treat steak dinners at the former Manero’s on Steamboat Road.

Her parents, though obviously of European origin (Mom Danish, Dad Polish), led breathtakingly ordinary lives. Then, on Christmas Eve 1983, Rita’s world came unglued: her father announced that he no longer loved her mother and was leaving with a younger woman for Alexandria, VA.

He promised to take care of his ‘first’ family, but didn’t. Rita paid her way through the University of South Carolina working for WACH-TV in Columbia, which turned out to be a blessing, leading to a successful media career.

When her mother died a few years later, Rita found a box full of unusual stuff: a tag and ID card (in French, for some bizarre reason) from Stalag IV-B, a German prisoner-of war camp, in the name of Ryszard Kossobudzki, a worn Polish Resistance armband, a passenger manifest on the RMS Queen Mary from England to New York for two ‘stateless aliens,’ and other remnants from WWII.

And thereby hangs this story, told lovingly but factually by an experienced investigative reporter who has interviewed everybody from Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat to Slobodan Milosovik (in jail) and Mike Tyson (not in jail).

Who, she asked, was this chap Kossobudski? Well, it was Dad of course, with whom things were strained since he decamped years before with Judy. But off she went to Alexandria with her box of stuff, to learn the remarkable story of the ‘quiet hero’ of Poland she had known only as her quiet, undemonstrative, physical-fitness devotee, Havemeyer Park father.

It is a fine journey of discovery: her Dad was an exemplary member of the Polish section of what Tom Brokaw famously called the Greatest Generation. As a teenager, he joined the Young Eagles (a sort of Polish Boy Scouts) but quickly graduated to full combat status as a member of the Armia Krajowa or “AK,” the Home Army  “backbone” of resistance to the Nazi occupiers.

All his adventures were extraordinary for a teenager, but the heavy fighting started on Aug. 1, 1944, with the famous uprising in Warsaw’s Jewish Ghetto. Dad was not Jewish, but his group broke into a warehouse and stole some German uniforms which they wore with armbands (his was still in the box Rita found decades later) saying “WP” for Wojsko Polska or “Polish Military.”  Of course the uprising failed, but under Allied pressure the Germans agreed to treat the Wojsko Polska as prisoners of war. So Dad (who had been badly wounded with artillery shrapnel) eventually found his way to Stalag IV-B near Muhlberg, from which he escaped on Hitler’s  birthday, April 20, 1945. Guided by a friendly drop from an American plane – a chocolate bar wrapped in a note – found his way to the good guys’ lines and eventually to engineering school in England and a house in Old Greenwich.

The final, and perhaps the most touching, part of Rita’s story was taking him back to now-free Poland and honors from his friends. Don’t miss this inspiring story of discovery by a daughter and her father.

In other literary news, there will be a presentation led by successful author Howard Roughan on “Writing Your First Novel: From Page One to Finding a Publisher” at the Perrot Library in Old Greenwich on Wednesday, April 27 at 7:30 pm.  And stay tuned to Literary Lines; our next column will discuss a ‘coming of age’ first novel by a young Fairfield County woman which has attracted serious, and favorable, critical attention.