ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the answer to the question about who the people were who joined the post-war underground, what education they had and where they came from. It turns out that they were mostly young men, with very poor education, who had come from the country. This information tells us a lot about the partisans’ ways of thinking. The reasons for joining the underground are then analysed in the text, pointing out both patriotic factors and the impossibility of leaving the underground because of the terror the anti-Nazi partisans experienced at the hands of the communist authorities entering Poland. A significant set of causes were also random motives, often very trivial, from being persuaded by friends, to desires to experience adventure, to a quarrel with the police while intoxicated, which resulted in an escape to the forest to avoid imprisonment. Very important were psychological reasons: unwillingness to leave one’s commander under whom one fought during the war, failure to accomplish the mission, appeals to honour or fear of retuning to civilian life to which one was disaccustomed for years. The last question is the participation of women in the underground movement, and their problems with adapting to difficult living conditions in the underground.
