The recent events to mark the anniversary of VE Day brought back memories for all those who remembered that day 80 years ago. But few people still alive have memories as extraordinary as Jan Lis’s.

Jan – or John, as he has been known since he arrived in England after the war – is one of the very few people still alive who fought at Monte Cassino, one of the Second World War’s pivotal battles.

He now lives in Knaresborough, and at the age of 103 is one of the region’s oldest citizens, but his life started over a thousand miles to the east, in Slonim, which is now in Belarus, but back in 1921 was part of Poland.

John was a teenager when the war started. Nazi forces marched into the west of the country, but 16 days later, Soviet forces invaded the east, and he and his family were all deported in railway cattle trucks to Siberia.

They lived in a gulag, where the prison regime forced John to labour as a forest worker.

In an exclusive interview with the Stray Ferret, John told us:

He had endured camp life for nearly two years when Germany broke its pact with the Soviet Union and invaded Russia. In July 1941, the USSR and Poland signed the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement, which allowed for the release of Polish prisoners from Soviet camps and the formation of a Polish military force in the Soviet Union.

So John and thousands of others made their way south to Iran, where they were picked up by British forces.

John said:

He then made his way through Iraq to Palestine, where he put on a British uniform and joined the 2nd Polish Corps under the legendary Lieutenant General Władysław Anders.

From Palestine, the corps headed to Alexandria in Egypt, where it embarked to cross the Mediterranean and land at Taranto in Italy.

At that time, the Allied advance up the boot of Italy was being held up by a stubborn German force holed up in a monastery at the top of a mountain, which gave them command of the valley the Allies had to pass through to get to Rome. Its name was Monte Cassino, and it became the site of some of the fiercest combat in the Italian campaign.

John – Private Lis – fought as a sniper.

He said:

A series of four major assaults between January and May 1944 saw US, British, New Zealander, Canadian, Indian, and French and Italian troops – including Maoris, Gurkhas, Moroccans and Algerians – attack the stronghold. But it was the Poles who eventually took it.

John said:

The Polish flag was raised in the ruins of the monastery on May 17 – and John was there.

After Monte Cassino, John carried on fighting – the 2nd Polish Corps went on to fight for Ancona, Bologna, and the Po valley.

It was during this fighting that he was shot in the left ankle and spent four months recovering in hospital on the Adriatic coast.

But despite the hardships, he does have some happy memories. He said he enjoyed “the wine and the little fried fish”, “going for a walk and having a coffee”, and the Italian people, who were “very kind”.

He also remembers well one of the heroes of the Polish armed forces: Wojtek the bear. Wojtek (pronounced ‘Voytek’) was a Syrian brown bear who had been adopted as a cub by the Poles on their way to Palestine and who remained with them throughout the Italian campaign. His fame spread far beyond his unit, and there are statues of him across Poland and even in Scotland.

John said:

After the war, John spent another two years in Italy before coming to England. He didn’t want to go back to Poland, because it was under Communist domination, and after his experiences in the Siberian camp, he felt more hostility towards Communists than he ever felt towards the Germans.

It was in England that he was finally reunited with his parents, who after Siberia had spent the war in a refugee camp in Tanganyika (now Tanzania).

He settled in Leeds and married Giulia, an Italian who had come to work in the textile industry. She was on a two-year contract, but stayed permanently.

As a soldier, John got on very well with the British, and most of his friends in Leeds were English, even though Leeds had – and still has – a large Polish population.

In civilian life, he worked as an engineer, and he and Giulia lived very happily together for more than 70 years, until she died last year at the age of 99.

John then moved to Knaresborough to live with his niece, Eva and her husband – also called John – and so only made his first appearance at a local commemorative event in November, when a Remembrance Day was marked at the war memorial in the Castle courtyard.

The war, he said, had made those who fought it stronger, but also gentler and kinder. Perhaps those who have experienced inhumanity know better than the rest of us what humanity should look like.

He has been back to Monte Cassino just once, in 1986, and has no desire to return.

He said: