What happened in Przemyśl in November 1918?
In November 1918, as Austria-Hungary collapsed, Poles and Ukrainians fought for Przemyśl, the garrison city on the San. Polish volunteers, many of them schoolboys, held the Zasanie district on the left bank, while Ukrainian troops took the city center on the right bank on 4 November. On 11 November a relief group from Kraków under Major Julian Stachiewicz stormed the bridges, and by the morning of 12 November the whole city was in Polish hands.4
The fight for Przemyśl lasted twelve days, and much of it was carried by teenagers. It mattered beyond the city: the railway from Kraków to Lwów crossed the San here, and whoever held the bridges held the road to the besieged Polish quarters of Lwów. The wider war is told in our guide to the Polish-Ukrainian War, and the fighting in Lwów in the defense of Lwów, 1918.5
A garrison city on the San
Przemyśl, the former Austro-Hungarian fortress city, lay on both banks of the San in Austrian Galicia. The Austrian census of 1910 counted about 54,000 inhabitants: about 25,000 Roman Catholics, mostly Poles, about 16,000 Jews and about 12,000 Greek Catholics, mostly Ukrainians. The countryside around the city was mostly Ukrainian, and both national movements claimed it.6
The city center, the old town, the castle and the main railway station stood on the right (south) bank. Across the river, on the left (north) bank, lay the district of Zasanie, with the barracks of the 45th Infantry Regiment and large army depots. The two halves were joined by a road bridge, a wooden footbridge and a railway bridge, and the line from Kraków to Lwów ran across the last.7
At the end of October 1918 the last Austro-Hungarian commandant of Przemyśl was General Stanisław Puchalski, a Pole born in nearby Wapowce, and his chief of staff was Władysław Sikorski. On the Ukrainian side the county National Council was headed by the lawyer and Diet deputy Teofil Kormosh, with Volodymyr Zahaikevych as a deputy chairman, and Captain (sotnyk) Teodor Hoza headed the Ukrainian military committee.8
In Lwów a Ukrainian National Council had been formed on 18 and 19 October as the representative body of the Ukrainians of Austria-Hungary. Before dawn on 1 November Ukrainian soldiers seized Lwów, and the Polish-Ukrainian war began.9
1 to 3 November: the Poles take Zasanie
1 November. Groups of the Polish Military Organization, joined by schoolboys and scouts, took over military buildings and the railway station, and soldiers in the streets tore the imperial badges off their caps and pinned on white and red cockades. By the evening the Poles held Zasanie, where the 45th Regiment's barracks became the gathering point for volunteers, with the large army depots.10
The same afternoon and evening the two sides negotiated. They agreed on a joint commission of four Poles and four Ukrainians to keep order in the city until its future was decided.11
4 November: the Ukrainians take the city center
4 November. The agreement did not last. In the early hours of 4 November Ukrainian units made up of the soldiers left in the garrison and armed peasants from the nearby villages seized the right-bank city: the main guardhouse, the offices, the railway station and the castle, where they raised the blue and yellow flag.12
The Ukrainians interned General Puchalski with his staff. As a prisoner, Puchalski signed an order for the Polish troops to hand the city, Zasanie and their weapons over to the Ukrainian authorities. The Poles on Zasanie refused to obey, and Lieutenant Leon Kozubski took command of the Polish defense of Zasanie.13
The defenders were few, and many of them were pupils of the Polish gymnasium on Zasanie. On the first day of the coup the schoolboy Adam Kończy, a member of a scout sports club, was mortally wounded. Ukrainian attempts to cross to Zasanie in the following days were driven back.14
Two IPN publications tell how three Zasanie pupils, Alfred Twaróg, Marian Wąsik and Jan Guzek, took the breech blocks out of Ukrainian guns on the heights above the city and buried them in a garden, leaving the Ukrainians without those guns.15
The Ukrainian command in Lwów ordered the San bridges blown up, but in Przemyśl they were not destroyed. The bridges that divided the two sides were left standing, and a week later the Poles crossed them.16
Truce on the river
Within days the two sides agreed a local truce (the sources date it to 5 or 6 November). The San became the line between them, prisoners were released or exchanged, General Puchalski among them, and civilians could cross the bridges.17
For a week the city lived split along the river, with shooting across the water, raids and talks. During the truce Herman Lieberman, a deputy to the Vienna parliament, proclaimed a short-lived "Przemyśl Republic" and tried to bring the two halves together, without success.18
The relief group from Kraków
9 November. In Kraków the Polish command had formed a relief group named "San" under Major Julian Stachiewicz, part of the forces gathered to relieve Lwów. It left Kraków by rail on the afternoon of 9 November.19
The group was small: two infantry companies, an officers' legion, a battery, a few uhlans and an armored train captured from the Austrians, in all about 60 officers and 319 men with 17 machine guns.20
10 November. The group came by rail through Żurawica and reached Zasanie on 10 November, and Stachiewicz took command of all the Polish forces in the city. The same day the armored train crossed the railway bridge and fired on the Ukrainian positions near the main station, but under heavy fire it pulled back to the left bank.21
11 November: the storming of the bridges
11 November. In the morning Stachiewicz sent the Ukrainian command an ultimatum: lay down arms and withdraw from the city by noon. There was no answer.22
At about a quarter past twelve the Polish guns on Zasanie opened fire on the right bank. After about two and a half hours of shelling, at 14:40, the assault began. The armored train crossed the railway bridge first, followed by the Przemyśl company, the schoolboys and students among them, while other units forced the road bridge and the footbridge.23
By the evening the Poles held the railway station and the city center.24
Among the Polish dead of 11 November were Władysław Kramarz, killed at the railway bridge, and the gymnasium pupil Mieczysław Bitmar, killed in the square Na Bramie.25
12 November and after
12 November. By the morning the whole city was in Polish hands. The Ukrainian troops withdrew south toward Nehrybka and Chyrów.26
The losses are given differently. A first count gave 26 Polish killed and wounded, and a later estimate about 15 killed and 30 wounded. The Ukrainian losses are uncertain (some counts give 11 dead), and the Poles took about 200 prisoners.27
On 12 November Lieutenant Colonel Michał Tokarzewski-Karaszewicz took command of the Przemyśl district, and a state of siege with a curfew was declared in the city. Ukrainian leaders were arrested in the following days, among them Volodymyr Zahaikevych, and Teofil Kormosh and other members of the National Council were interned in the camp at Dąbie near Kraków.28
Przemyśl now became the base for the relief of Lwów. On 19 November a force under Tokarzewski-Karaszewicz, 140 officers, 1,228 men and eight guns, left the city by train. It reached Lwów on 20 November, and by 22 November the whole of Lwów was in Polish hands.29
The front settled south and east of the city, and through the winter the Poles held Przemyśl and a narrow corridor along the railway to Lwów. The Ukrainian historian Myroslav Fitsuliak counts the loss of Przemyśl, a rail junction and a bridgehead on the San, among the decisive blows of the war's first weeks, because it opened the railway for the relief of Lwów.30
The Przemyśl Eaglets in memory
The young defenders are remembered in Poland as the Przemyśl Eaglets (Orlęta Przemyskie). They were schoolboys and scouts, chiefly from the Polish gymnasium on Zasanie, the First Polish Gymnasium and the commercial school, and in the assault of 11 November they formed a student company.31
The fighting around Przemyśl did not end in November. On 13 December, at Niżankowice south of the city, schoolboys serving in the 10th Infantry Regiment were killed in the fighting (seven by one count, twelve by another).32
Many of the young dead lie in the common grave of the Przemyśl Eaglets in the Main Cemetery. A monument to them was unveiled on 11 November 1938, destroyed in 1940 and rebuilt in the 1990s, and the city's defenders received a commemorative badge, the Star of Przemyśl.33
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