Sylvester Ciszewski was born in the village of Siedliska in south-eastern Poland in January 1915. He had a turbulent early childhood, and his parents were local peasants. He was the second youngest of seven siblings, and due to poverty during World War I, his parents abandoned their youngest son Stanisław in 1917 and fled to Medyka with the other six children.

Following the establishment of an independent Polish state in 1918, his parents briefly moved back to Siedliska, but they could not stay due to the guilt of abandoning Stanisław. Young Sylvester grew up in Ostriv, now within Ukrainian borders. The district spoke a mixture of Polish and Ukrainian, and Sylvester became fluent in both at a young age. However, he did not learn how to read or write.

Sylvester moved to Przemysl City with his older sister, Zofia, in 1925. He never went to proper school - Zofia enrolled him in a state school for a term to learn essential reading, writing and arithmetic, and he started selling newspapers on the street in 1926. In his teenage years, he worked as a waiter in cafés and restaurants and as a courier for the local post office.

Most saw his personality as oddly eccentric. He sometimes lacked respect for his superiors and elders but was friendly towards his peers. He was not afraid of consequences and would do anything to get what he wanted, often impulsively and irresponsibly, which created contradicting impressions on the people around him. He almost associated himself with gang members in 1930.

Zofia became the mistress of a tycoon and moved to Warsaw with him in 1931. The 16-year-old Sylvester lived alone in Przemysl, indulging in an unrestricted lifestyle despite the economic difficulties. He also joined several local political communities, which became troublesome as tensions rose and the far-right National Democrats drifted towards authoritarianism.

Sylvester became cynical as World War II broke out. The Soviets and Germans closed in on them, the Western Allies did not send help, and even the Polish people collaborated with the invaders, turning in Jews and other undesirable people. This motivated him to start sabotage activities on a small scale. His group of saboteurs eventually grew, and he moved to Warsaw to make his activities more meaningful. He and his friends not only helped 20-30 Jews escape to Sweden, with the help of a sympathetic Nazi officer Leopold von Brandt, but also assassinated significant collaborators and burned down their houses. Some saboteurs raped the collaborators’ wives and daughters.

In the summer of 1940, Sylvester received news of his father and older brother Mikolaj’s death, possibly in Soviet hands. He returned to Lviv, and after a brief reunion with other family members, he got acquainted with a Polish-Ukrainian man named Chaplinski. Chaplinski ran a bookstore in Lwów City, which was also the rendezvous for his resistance group “Piotr”.

Sylvester joined Chaplinski’s resistance group. Although his eccentric personality was sometimes hazardous to the activities, Chaplinski deemed that a resistance group’s effectiveness depended solely on its members’ courage. Therefore, Sylvester’s courage and recklessness were highly valued.

Sylvester’s cruelty towards his enemies in 1940 and the first half of 1941 was comparable to the NKVD and SS operations in occupied areas. He earned much respect from the Soviet occupiers this way, and his fellow resisters also admired his fearlessness. The opinions of other “Piotr” members towards him are polarised - some thought he was dangerous to work with and would doom the entire group; others looked up to his brutality toward the enemy. There were no moral concerns for Sylvester whatsoever, as long as it was towards the enemy.

The death of Chaplinski in 1941 changed Sylvester’s perspective on the ongoing conflict and purpose of the resistance group completely. From a cynical and reckless young man, he learned the meaning of patriotism and even became a bit nationalistic.

The Germans were increasingly brutal to partisans in occupied Soviet territories, including Lwów, and ordinary civilians often had to pay the price if German officers were found dead. Sylvester, as brutal and reckless as always, was not aware of this and “declared war” on the local German garrison in a nearby village, by hanging the corpses of two German officers on patrol on the tree just in front of the garrison. As the garrison began to deport and kill civilians while investigating, Chaplinski turned himself in to take the blame for Sylvester. As mentioned before, he valued Sylvester’s abilities and courage a lot, and although this act was symbolically reckless, he saw this as a representation of the rage of the Polish people.

Sylvester thought that Chaplinski’s death was entirely his fault, and blamed himself harshly for it. He took on the responsibilities of handling “Piotr”, as that was what Chaplinski wished, and became the bookstore owner - the base of the resistance. “Piotr” operated with the Wachlarz, subordinate to the Union of Armed Struggle (renamed Polish Home Army/Armia Krajowa in 1942).

On 22 January 1943, the Wachlarz combined with the Union of Retaliation, both were organisations within the Home Army, forming the Kedyw. Sylvester had a good time operating with the Boy Scouts of Kedyw in the upcoming years.

“Sylwetka”, meaning “silhouette”, was Sylvester’s nickname in the Kedyw.

After the start of Operation Barbarossa and German troops occupied Lwów, not only did the Poles start resisting, but the Soviets also had NKVD forces in occupied territories organising and aiding resistance activities. However, the Soviet government considered the Polish Home Army to impede the establishment of a communist Polish regime. Thus, the relationship between the local NKVD and Sylvester’s men deteriorated even in the presence of a common German enemy. This led to an outright conflict between the two forces in February 1943, where Sylvester stabbed a Ukrainian NKVD officer to death, got into another fistfight with a Soviet and nearly lost his life. That NKVD officer also took away the bayonet he used.

Sylvester took a mild approach to resistance in 1943, as he “collaborated” with the Germans, providing them with necessary information regarding Soviet partisans and NKVD operations while sabotaging their actions simultaneously. That way, he diverged the attention away from the Poles and let the two superpowers fight against each other.

He met a local young man, Yuri Dmitriev, who visited his bookstore frequently. However, after seeing him once in a secret meeting of the Underground, Sylvester started suspecting Yuri’s true identity - he could either be an NKVD/SS man or a civilian paid by the NKVD/SS. However, through their everyday interactions in the bookstore, he became increasingly attracted to Yuri. This grave mistake of trusting Yuri while he was supposed to be suspecting him eventually caused an unexpected development - Yuri, an NKVD officer who also happened to be the one who nearly killed Sylvester in February, forced him to collaborate with the NKVD against the Germans.

From this point onwards, Sylvester became on collaboration terms with both the Germans and Soviets. For him, there was no difference between the atrocities they committed to the Polish people, so his sabotage actions were also directed at both. At the same time, Yuri used Sylvester’s men to fight against the Germans to reduce losses on the Soviet side. Eventually, Yuri killed the German who handled relations with Sylvester’s men, so he had no choice but to stand on the united front with the Soviets he once despised - the Germans wanted him dead. Although the Soviets probably wanted the same, they would likely remain on friendly terms before the Red Army liberated Lwów.

He was engaged in a personal relationship with Yuri from the summer of 1943 onwards, despite their hostilities against each other behind the scenes. On Christmas Eve, they recorded Suliko together - a Georgian folk song popularised in the USSR by Stalin, where the narrator mourned for a dead lover.

Operation Tempest, a nationwide series of uprisings during the year 1944 taking place in Poland, started on 4 January. Sylvester and his partisan forces in Lwów prepared for the Lwów Uprising as the Soviet Red Army advanced into pre-war Polish territories. By early March, they had taken most of Tarnopol. The Uprising occurred in July, and the Red Army entered soon afterwards. However, Sylvester was well-informed about the exasperating tension between the Polish Underground State and the USSR, especially after the Poles inquired about the Katyn massacre. Unsurprisingly, 5,000 Polish soldiers were arrested, others forcibly conscripted into the Red Army or fortunate enough to escape and rejoin the underground.

Sylvester abandoned the bookstore and was among those who escaped the city; he left without informing Yuri despite their closeness. He was invited to join the Radosław Group, a Kedyw unit created just before the Warsaw Uprising, and took the role of the commandant’s adjutant. He fought in the Warsaw Uprising in August with the Group, and he fought in the Wola district.

Unexpectedly, he met Yuri again in the destroyed streets of Warsaw around 15 September, when the latter had come with General Berling’s First Polish Army. This was their last reunion before Sylvester was captured at the end of September and was transported to Mauthausen.

However, the train ride to Mauthausen was not successful. Resistance fighters in southern Poland destroyed parts of the railway, allowing prisoners to escape. Sylvester was shot in the arm as he attempted to run away among many others, and he was eventually rescued by Leopold von Brandt, an old acquaintance who provided shelter and escape routes for Polish Jews with him in 1939.

Sylvester settled in East Germany after the war, and he also justified Leopold von Brandt’s consistent effort to assist persecuted communities when he was captured by the Allies.

After the war, He opened a vinyl store in Rüdersdorf, a municipality about 26km east of Berlin. He would sell Yuri’s favourite operas, and weirdly enough - even though most of his valuable possessions were lost or destroyed during the war, the vinyl record of Yuri’s Suliko stayed with him all along, through the chaos and abyss named 1944.

Whenever the streetlights dimmed and the town bid goodnight, Sylvester would put the gramophone needle onto that precious vinyl disc, from which his lover’s voice sang:

Alone among the thorns of the bush

A lone rose was blooming

My heart was beating hard, I had to ask it:

“Where have you hidden Suliko?”

It was unexpected for Sylvester’s character to be developed this far. When I was creating him, my only inspiration was to expand on Siegfried Herbst’s story; as you can see here, he was initially named Stanisław. Perhaps Sylvester’s wildness was weirdly appealing to me, so I spent the effort researching and giving him an entire story. His personality and motivations to do things are more centralised around emotion and impulse rather than logical reasoning that my other characters all use. Writing his story was a fun experience, and I enjoyed it.

The central motif in his and Yuri’s story is finding peace and love in the darkest of times, and it has a generally upbeat theme. I wanted to convey the idea that there is hope in humanity in this whole story. Something unique to Sylvester’s point of view here is probably also the effect of war on people’s mentality and how much war can change someone - not really in terms of trauma, but ways of living and perspective on the world around them. Sylvester here actually had a hard time adjusting to the post-war world - Poland was in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, and it wasn’t a truly independent Poland that he fought for. Even the stories of the Polish Home Army were silenced; ex-members were arrested or sent to gulags, and it was only after the fall of the Soviet Union that the portrayal of the Home Army became positive again.

As the author, I actually feel very bad for him and all ex-fighters of the Polish Home Army - to live through 1944 as a Polish underground soldier was tough, and although the sacrifices were huge, their efforts were not properly credited until most of the soldiers were in their 70s and 80s. I guess everyone has a fixed amount of luck in their life - for Sylvester, he unfortunately used it up during the war.