Tadeusz Lutak

Tadeusz Władysław Lutak was born on 29 August 1917 in Żarnowa, a village near Strzyżów in the Subcarpathian region, then part of Austria-Hungary. He was the son of Piotr Lutak and Katarzyna, née Dudek. He was one of nine children, with five sisters and three brothers. His father worked on the railway as a switchman and his mother ran the family farm. He remembered night-long fishing trips with his father on the Wisłok river. TVP Rzeszów reported that he was a scout and then a member of the Riflemen's Association before joining the army.

After completing elementary school, Lutak qualified as a journeyman in meat processing, the trade he returned to after the war. In 1937 he volunteered for military service. On 25 November 1937 he was assigned to the non-commissioned officers' school of the 2nd Armoured Battalion at Żurawica near Przemyśl, which he attended from 1 February to 30 September 1938. On 1 August 1938 he received the Good Marksman badge, and in September 1938 he was promoted to senior rifleman.

After training, Lutak was assigned to a company equipped with Vickers tanks and served as a motorcycle dispatch rider. In the autumn of 1938 he took part in the Polish operations in Zaolzie, Spiš and Orava.

When Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, he served as a dispatch rider with the 121st Light Tank Company of the 10th Cavalry Brigade, commanded by Colonel Stanisław Maczek, carrying messages between the brigade commander and the company commander, Lieutenant Stanisław Rączkowski. He fought near Myślenice and in the Battle of Jordanów as Polish forces withdrew to the south-east. He told the IPN he was at the front for about three weeks.

He was captured near Stary Dzików (in another account he gave, in the forests near Biłgoraj). He escaped by jumping from a prisoner train at night, crossed water up to his neck and walked more than a hundred kilometres home. His older sister, who had just heard from a neighbour that he had been killed, at first thought she was seeing a ghost.

To avoid deportation for forced labour in Germany, Lutak took work in the spring of 1940 on a German railway shelter near Strzyżów, under Żarnowska Góra. The tunnel later sheltered Hitler's headquarters train during his meeting with Mussolini on 27 and 28 August 1941, and Lutak said he watched the train from a barn where he was hiding. He was described by the Office for War Veterans as the last living witness who had built the shelter.

From 1940 he was a member of the underground Union of Armed Struggle, which became the Home Army in 1942, using the pseudonym "Pancerz". He served in the sabotage group of Stanisław Mikulski ("Żmija") and was linked with the underground centre of Lieutenant Józef Lutak ("Orzeł"). Within the intelligence and sabotage organisation codenamed "Ruch", subordinate to the Rzeszów Home Army inspector Łukasz Ciepliński, he gathered intelligence and took part in sabotage and diversion. The IPN reports that he obtained explosives from the construction site for the resistance. In early July 1943 Mikulski's group, including Lutak, joined a partisan training detachment in the forests near Sołonka. In 1944, as an underground corporal, he commanded a sabotage squad in the sabotage platoon of the Home Army post at Strzyżów.

He later spoke of hunger, of seeing comrades killed, and of being lined up for execution three times and surviving.

Lutak married Maria, from a neighbouring village, in 1943, during the occupation. The wedding was held at her family home in Żarnowa. Four German officers passing through the village came in and asked to dance at the party, and he later recalled having to keep quiet and serve them. Maria often cried with fear when he went out on underground operations at night.

After about a year in the western territories transferred to Poland after the war, he returned to Żarnowa in 1946. The couple built a house and farmed, while he also worked as a butcher, and they had three daughters. They were married for 69 years until Maria died after an illness in 2012. In later life he lived with family in Strzyżów, cared for by his granddaughter Beata. He had ten grandchildren, and Nowiny reported fifteen great-grandchildren at his death. A grandson, Wojciech Grodecki, a soldier, collected and edited his war stories. He loved singing folk and soldiers' songs and dancing.

Lutak spoke of his survival as a gift, telling Nowiny that he owed his life only to God's Providence. He described honesty, hard work and respect for others as the values to live by, and said he had always tried to keep a positive attitude despite hardship. He loved the army and his country. At the Subcarpathian Congress of National Remembrance in Jasionka in September 2023 he told the audience that he loved Poland, his beloved homeland, and had fought for it to the end. He said hunger in captivity had taught him to appreciate simply having food, warmth and safety.

Lutak was among the last living soldiers of the 1939 September Campaign and the last surviving soldier of Maczek's 121st Light Tank Company. Polish institutions described him as the oldest tank soldier in the history of the Polish Army, the oldest living soldier of the Polish Army and, from July 2024, the oldest known living man in Poland. His testimony, recorded by the IPN at the age of 105, is the oldest in its Opowiedziane oral history archive. He worked with the IPN's Rzeszów branch on historical education, helped historian Piotr Szopa with books on the Home Army in the Strzyżów area (2009 and 2014), and in 2016 gave historical photographs to soldiers of his former unit at Żurawica. Soldiers of the 3rd Subcarpathian Territorial Defence Brigade visited him many times.

Officer's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta (2017) Knight's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta (1987) Home Army Cross (1981 and 1998) Partisan Cross (1973) Army Medal for War (four times, 1948) Medal of Victory and Freedom 1945 (1968) Medal for Participation in the Defensive War of 1939 (1982) Medal for Long Marital Life (1993) Merit badge of the Union of Combatants of the Republic of Poland and Former Political Prisoners (2000) Medal of the Centenary of Regained Independence (2018) Pro Bono Poloniae Medal (2018) IPN Witness of History honorary award (2019) Honorary Citizen of Strzyżów County (2022) Honorary badge Meritorious for the Subcarpathian Voivodeship (2024) Gold Medal for Merit to National Defence (2025) Promoted to second lieutenant (2001), lieutenant, and captain (3 March 2023)

Lutak's wartime recollections appeared in the regional monthly Waga i Miecz in 1991 and 1992 and were published in 2001 as the book Wojenne losy Strzyżowiaków. In 2024 his grandson Wojciech Grodecki published Tadeusz Lutak ps. "Pancerz": opowieści wojenne, presented in Strzyżów on 15 March 2024. The IPN released his 47-minute oral history on its Opowiedziane portal. He was interviewed by TVP Rzeszów, Polskie Radio Rzeszów, Wirtualna Polska and Nowiny, which visited him on his birthdays for many years, and he appeared on TVP's Pytanie na Śniadanie in 2025.

Tadeusz Lutak died on 5 October 2026 in Strzyżów, aged 109 years and 37 days. Poland's Territorial Defence Force announced on X that evening that he had gone to his eternal watch, calling him a soldier and patriot for whom service to the homeland was the value of his whole life. The news was carried by PAP, TVP Rzeszów, Polskie Radio Rzeszów, Polsat News and Nowiny. The cause of death was not made public. LongeviQuest reported that 108-year-old Alfons Tomke likely succeeded him as Poland's oldest living man. Funeral details had not been published at the time of writing.