Poland Bids Farewell to Kazimierz Czaplo, Last AK Partisan in Podlasie

Kazimierz Czaplo (1927‑2026), known by the nom de guerre “Irys,” died on 29 July 2026 at the age of 99. He was the last surviving member of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) who had fought as a partisan in the Podlasie region. Czaplo was buried at the St. Roch Cemetery in Białystok, where a military ceremony was held. Soldiers of the 1st Podlaskie Brigade of Territorial Defense and the 18th Białystok Reconnaissance Regiment provided an honor guard, and General‑Brigadier Mieczysław Gurgielewicz attended the service.

Born in Lida (now in Belarus) in 1927, Czaplo joined the Home Army’s 2nd Battalion of the 77th Infantry Regiment, fighting on the eastern borderlands during World War II. After the war he endured Soviet repression, including imprisonment in a labor camp, before returning to Poland in 1945. He later earned an engineering degree from the Warsaw University of Technology and worked as a city planner in Białystok. His funeral was described as both a personal farewell and a symbolic tribute to the generation of underground fighters who resisted both Nazi and communist regimes.