Historical research rarely begins with a complete story. More often, it starts with fragments - a name in a personnel file, a handwritten letter, a government report, a witness testimony - scattered across archives, countries and languages. The challenge is to fit these pieces together until a clearer picture begins to emerge. Sometimes it feels less like reading history and more like solving an intricate puzzle, where every new document changes the shape of the whole.

Since 2023, our search for the experiences of Polish Jewish soldiers has taken us across Britain and beyond. We have worked in the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre in Glasgow, The National Archives at Kew, the Christ Church Archives at the University of Oxford, where the papers of Tom Driberg and records relating to the National Council for Civil Liberties reveal political efforts to support the soldiers in 1944, and the Hull History Centre, which preserves invaluable testimonies from the soldiers themselves. We have also consulted the collections of the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust, the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London, and Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej). Together, these collections preserve a remarkable documentary trail, recorded in both English and Polish, by governments, military authorities, civil rights organisations, and the soldiers themselves as they sought to understand and document the events of 1944.

Yet the greatest discovery is not a single document. It is the extraordinary range of voices that emerge when these collections are read together.

On our journey through the archives we meet soldiers who defended Poland in September 1939 before escaping east, only to be arrested by the NKVD and deported to Soviet labour camps. We encounter refugees whose journeys took them through Central Asia, the Middle East, and South Africa before they finally disembarked in Liverpool and were sent to Scotland to serve in the Polish Army. We hear voices of those who volunteered from the United States, Canada and South America, committing themselves to a cause without knowing where the war would take them.

The people we encounter in these records could hardly be more different. One file introduces an engineer trained in Switzerland, another a doctor or lawyer whose comfortable pre-war life disappeared almost overnight. A few pages later we find celebrated artists such as Aleksander Żyw, Jankiel Adler and Marek Szwarc. Then the archive shifts again: to Yiddish-speaking shoemakers, tailors, market traders and labourers whose lives would rarely find their way into history books. Each testimony reminds us that there was no single story of the Polish Jewish soldier, only hundreds of individual journeys brought together by war. And every so often, the archives deliver a genuine surprise. Among the documents is the extraordinary story of a triple agent, a kind of Jewish James Bond, though with rather more chutzpah than Ian Fleming could ever have imagined.

When these stories are read together, it becomes impossible to see the Polish Jewish soldiers as a single group. Their lives had taken them across continents long before they arrived in uniform. Their military service was only one chapter in lives shaped by displacement, loss, extraordinary resilience and, above all, an unwavering determination to rebuild. Their stories reveal the many different ways people survived, adapted and searched for belonging in a world transformed by conflict.  It is these journeys, not simply the events of 1944, that give this project its depth.