‘This is the incredible, endearing and heartwarming true story of Wojtek, the Polish bear that went to War.

As I was growing up in London, surrounded by Polish émigrés, I repeatedly heard this wonderful story about Wojtek, a Bear soldier who fought alongside the Polish II Corps.

Being from a very patriotic family, I had the pleasure of meeting many Polish war veterans, and deportees who had survived the Soviet Gulags; it was often they who told me about Wojtek.

The story deeply moved me as I always saw a similarity between the fates of these aging Polish veterans and that of Wojtek the Bear. They had so desperately wanted to go back to their homeland, but the imposition of a brutal Soviet backed communist regime meant that returning home was at best prison and at worst death. And so, these soldiers who had supposedly won the War and helped defeat Nazism ended up being homeless heroes, wandering the World, unable to return home, in a sense, in captivity.’ https://summit.news/2019/12/19/the-incredible-story-of-the-polish-bear-that-went-to-war/