Zbigniew Ścibor-Rylski

Zbigniew Dionizy Ścibor-Rylski (10 March 1917 – 3 August 2018) was a Polish brigadier general and aviator who was a participant of the Warsaw Uprising during World War II. As a Polish Air Force officer, he fought alongside the resistance movement starting in 1940 and rose through the ranks of Armia Krajowa.

Ścibor-Rylski retired with the rank of brigadier general in the Polish Land Forces, he was rewarded several Polish awards and decorations, including Virtuti Militari. He was Chairman of the Association of Warsaw Insurgents.

Biography

Childhood and youth

Zbigniew Ścibor-Rylski was born at the height of World War I, in Brovki-Pershi (Polish: Browki), a village southeast of Zhytomyr, and southwest of Kiev, in present-day Ukraine, but at the time part of the Russian Empire. He belonged to a Polish aristocratic (szlachta) family from the Clan of Ostoja, being the son of Oscar Ścibor-Rylski and Maria Raciborowska. Located in territory controlled at the time between Russia's republican government, Brovki is the central key estate, which included the Spiczyńce (from his Marszycka grandmother) and Wolica Zarubieniecka (from his Raciborowski grandparents).

In 1918, a year after the outbreak of the October Revolution in Russia, he fled with his family to Bila Tserkva (Biała Cerkiew), in Volhynia and then to Kiev due to the Bolsheviks' great hunt for the rich land owners in their occupied areas. After the battle of Kiev by Polish troops under Edward Smigly-Rydz in 1920, the Ścibor-Rylskis left for Kiev, then the newly independent Polish Republic by train. They settled in the Lublin region, initially in Studzianki, then in Zwierzyniec (near Zamość), where his father Oscar was offered a post within the county Maurycy Klemens Zamoyski in the Zamość Ordinance.