Lviv student
The earliest trace of Stefan Knap in Lviv is his name on the list of students of the Third State High School and King Stefan Batory High School in Lviv (No. 561) in the 1935/36 school year. 14-year-old Stefan is listed among class I B colleagues.
School. Batorego at then Batorego Street 5 was a state-wide secondary school, educating male students, composed of a four-year middle school and a two-year high school. Stefan couldn't find himself there, he wasn't doing very well. In the square sun, he mentions the escape from school and hiding place in the forest near Bilgoraj, to which Janina’s sister was to bring food to him. This very strong expression of the boy’s rebellion toward science convinced his parents to consider changing their son’s school. All points to the fact that the next facility, attended by Stefan Knap from the following school year, was the S. Szczepanowski State Technical School in Lviv – a technical school with an artistic faculty. During the interrogation he was subjected to in March 1940, Stefan testified that he attended school at 47 Snopkowska Street in Lviv. The address agrees, as well as the description of the school in the Square Sun: "The best we could find was a new type of school, which has recently been operating in Poland. It combined the learning of several classic subjects with fairly thorough training in science. I was happy to say that I enjoyed it. I was happy. I loved all tools and machinery, I liked doing things with my hands, I wanted to know everything about physics. In a flash, I fired at the class top and remained there: it was an astounding show after the humiliation of my early years of learning. I won awards for drawings [...]"
That would be right. Stefan Knap's school certificate for 1938/39 states: "Stefan Knap, born on 11 July 1921 in Biłgoraj (Bilgoraj County), religion (denominations) of class 2b, receives for the first half of the school year 1938/39 the following degrees: [...] from workshop classes: very good; from the basics of electrical engineering with mediocrity: good; [...] from physics with mechanical science: very good; [...] from the study of drawing: very good [...]"
After the Russian occupation of Lviv, the school continued to function, but it was demoted to the level of vocational school. In theory, the teaching staff remained unchanged, but teachers – and students – disappeared under unexplained circumstances. The authority was taken over by so-called student committees, which are actually ideological structures that control. Discipline in pre-emptive terms did not exist, propaganda flourished. One of the students' duties was to paint posters announcing, among others, the slogan of free and free learning for everyone. In the "Quarter Sun," Stefan recalled: "I had a lot of fun getting high on the big planes."
This is where Stefan Knap's story splits apart and for some time runs double-track. One testimony to his fate since the beginning of 1940 is the memories contained in the autobiography written 16 years after these events. The second testimony is NKVD documents concerning the arrest, conviction and imprisonment of Stefan Knap, stored in the State Archives in Lviv.
Stefan Knap states that after the whole family moved to the eastern side, he crossed the demarcation line twice more. This was to happen for the first time between September and December 1939, and the purpose of the visit to the side occupied by the Germans was to meet the already mentioned Basia and to transport some kind of documents from Biłgoraj to Lviv. During his first attempt to return to the Russian side, Stefan was to be beaten by a German soldier and left in the snow. After this event Knap returned to Biłgoraj, to his aunt's house, and a few days later, along with a rented guide and two women from the city, set off again to the border. After entering the zone occupied by the Russians, they were spotted and arrested by the NKVD border unit. Stefan and his co-travelers were thrown into custody in Rawa Ruska. After a few days of interrogations, prisoners were brought to the railway station, from which Stefan managed to escape – he was to use the fact that another prisoner had escaped and caused confusion. He managed to get back to Lviv, to school.
A slightly different version of the events is given in an interview with Halina Ewa Olszewski Zygmunt Knap: "Back to Lviv proved difficult. On the way, behind Sieniawa, he was beaten by Ukrainians and ordered to return to Biłgoraj. So he returned, but shortly after that incident he went back to Lviv."
Olszewska adds: "This time he was assaulted by the Soviets and imprisoned in Rawa Ruska. Then he was in custody at Kazimierzowska Street in Lviv (on the so-called Brigidki), from where he was transported to Chersonia."
Stefan himself writes in his autobiography that the "right" arrest took place in late December 1939: "I came back from school. The tight books were on my wrist. I turned to the corner of the street and suddenly I was in the middle of a big fuss. [...] Turns out the street is closed from both ends. [...] After a while Russian trucks began to arrive. Men, women, some with children in their arms, students – all who were on the street – were rushed to trucks and taken away. It took a long time, because there were lots of people. [...] We went to Brigidek, the famous old prison, under the key."
Prisoner
The story told by Stefan Knapp in 1956 completely disagrees with the arrest documentation made by the NKWD. From documents stored in a folder entitled "USRR NKVD; State Security Board; Case No 18545; Concerns the indictment of Knapp Stefan Antonowicz; Based on Articles 16-80; 56-25 KK USRR" it can be concluded that Stefan was captured by 91 NKWD Border Branch while attempting to cross the border in the village of Lubycza Królski, about 15 km from Rawa Ruska, 1 March 1940. The personal questionnaire shows that Stefan Antonowicz Knap, born in 1921 in Biłgoraj, a student, non-partisan, crossed the border for the first time.
On March 2, Stefan Knap was interviewed. He testified that he was going to Klemensov to meet his family on his mother's side. He reached Rawa Ruska by train, from there in a carriage, for which he paid 2 rubles and 80 kopecks, he went to Lubyczy Royala. He's gone on foot, alone. He was to help his uncle, Jan Okoniewski, bring his family from Klemensów to Lviv, where Okoniewski lived.
On March 3, 1940, the younger Lt. NKWD USRR Zemskij searched the apartment at 35 Długosza Street (now Cyril and Methodius) in Lviv, where Stefan rented the state. The requisitions were: photographs – 130 pieces; school certificates – 2 pieces; various certificates and notes – 4 pieces. All these documents survived in a folder stored in the Lviv archive.
On March 10, 1940, the arrested Stefan Knap was sent to Lviv Prison No. 1 and the case was transferred to the Circuit Board of the NKVD in Lviv. Stefan was convinced that he was imprisoned at Kazimierzowska Street (now Horodocka Street), on the so-called "Brygidki". Meanwhile, Prison No. 1 in Lviv from 1939 to 1941 was located in the building at Łąckiego Street (now Stepana Bandery Street). Today this building has its headquarters in the Museum of Memory of Victims of the Occupation Regimes. "Brigids" wore No. 4 at the time.
According to preserved documents, Stefan Knap reached Chersonia in April 1940. He was transported there along with the other prisoners in Prison No. 1. In the memories recorded in "The Square Sun," Stefan assumed that it could have been March. However, the distortion of time and confusion is perfectly understandable, given the conditions under which he found himself. The train with the cattle wagons where the prisoners were transported, the route of Lviv – Cherson was to beat in three to four weeks. People locked in cars for almost a month remained in cold, tight and dark, deprived of all rights, stripped of dignity. The events that took place during this trip shocked a 19 - year - old boy deeply. Especially traumatic for him were the recurring images of a young mother pushing the body of a dead newborn through the only open, tiny window in the carriage. Their echo sounded in a series of images created by him immediately after the war called the Siberian Nightmare. Although, as it turns out, Stefan Knap was never in Siberia.
In Kherson, April 17, 1940, Stefan was re-hearsed, and on April 20, 1940 he was commissioned to refer his case to the Soviet Special College of the NKVD. The document mentions the handwritten statement of the Prosecutor of the Mikołajewski District: "For trying to illegally cross the border – 5 years of labor camps in a correctional work camp."
On July 10, 1940, a final sentence was passed: under Articles 16-80; 56-25 KK USRR Stefan Knap received a penalty of 5 years in a correctional work camp, counting from March 1, 1940. These articles concerned the preparation and attempted assassination, illegal crossing of the state border, and the provision of assistance in illegally crossing the border.
Stefan Knap spent several months in the Kherson prison before being transported to the labor camp. He was relieved by his creative work, in which he fled from childhood in difficult times for him. Every form of creation allowed to occupy thought and momentary though "cut off" from the monstrous reality. He worked with material that was available in prison – he learned to make a plastic mass with several times chewed bread. He used to do chess pieces, pipe cybumas in the shape of heads, cards and dice to play, box, buttons. For painting, he used dyes derived from onions, soot, lime from walls, dye from prison laundry (presumably crystals of synthetic ultramarine) and blood. In prison, he also learned to tattoo with fish bones.
He recalled: "[...] I went back to sticky bread figures, glad that I was not disturbed. The figures have filled my whole life. I worked on them with complete devotion, in obsessive concentration. Against the uncertain future, against hunger and the ailments of prison living, in the moments I sacrificed to my figurines, I was shamelessly happy."
Stefan Knap was extremely sensitive to color. He instinctively sought him out in his surroundings, absorbed and remembered him. In addition to the memories of the fight for food and water, the deaths of co-inmates, the trauma of transport to the camp, Stefan also placed memories of the colour of the sky on the river, in which the bodies of the shot prisoners floated. He mentioned the color of this water – red turning into purple. He remembered the colour of the sprouts growing out of the gaps of the wooden sides of the grain boats, which were transported to the camp. He remembered the red color of the number "1" which the guard placed on the stripped tree trunk in the place where he was to stand the labor camp. The inmates had to build it themselves.
Stefan Knap, along with the prisoners from Chersonia, was initially transported to a transitional prison in Kharkiv. The journey continued for several weeks, but the exact date of leaving the prison or the date of arrival in the camp is unknown. He eventually went to the Soroki Correctional Camp in the Karelsko-Finish Socialist Soviet Republic. In the Square sun he mentions the city of Archangelsk because one of the prisoners saw this name from the train. This is Stefan's last point on the tour. From there, instead of the expected east, part of the transport bounced west towards the town of Biełomorsk. Along the tracks he saw palisades of labor camps.
Regarding his time in the camp, he wrote: "We wanted to know where we were. We wanted to write letters to families and receive letters. Such questions and demands were rejected or simply ignored. To this day, I do not know where I have spent more than a year of my life."
The main task of the prisoners in Soroka was to build railway lines, among others on the Biełomorsk-Murmansk section, to build railway infrastructure and work on the construction of colonies where war orphans were placed. The camp moved along with the successive work along the tracks. It was part of the GUŁag system, and since 1940 it has been subject to the Main Board of Railway Construction Camps. The conditions in which the prisoners were present were inhuman.
In "The Square Sun", Stefan wrote about an insufficient amount of food, which were almost exclusively bread and boiling water. Lack of nutritional value caused numerous diseases and death of prisoners. The prisoners were very weak, and yet they worked too hard. In the article "Artists tell the truth" asked by author Knapp, she says: "[...] hunger, frost, heat, lice, torture of non-incarceration in prisons, torture of working in camps, scurvy, dysentery, nostalgia, leech, raging [...]".
It is difficult to speak of seeking goodness and tranquility in a place such as a stallion, where a man is stripped of dignity, and his only value is his ability to work physically. It is not clear whether Stefan's escape into creation and color was a conscious attitude he took to defend himself against the surrounding evil. Or was it already a form of mental dissociation, unintentional, but ultimately salvation? Stefan was delighted by the fires in the winter in the pits dug by the workers. He wrote about workers returning to the camp at night carrying torches, seemingly forming a line of light in the cold air. He saw a ferey of colours in the glowing bile, green, red in the crushed block of frozen urine at the entrance to the barracks. In the Square Sun, he said, "If I could forget the circumstances surrounding this view, I would cherish him in memory like a priceless treasure."
In the camp he sketched images of fellow prisoners, created a portrait of the camp doctor in gratitude for temporary dismissal. The prison authorities saw and appreciated his skills – Stefan received crayons in three colours (black, red and blue – of course he remembered them), bandage canvas and the task of creating portraits of stachanists based on photographs from prison records.
On August 31, 1941, the following document was issued:
Pass – USSR – People's Interior Commission – Railway Construction Board – and Correctional Camp of Work in Soroki – 31 August 1941 – No U/57888 – City of Biełomorsk, Karelo-Fińska SRR – LEGITIMATION – The bearer of this document, citizen Knap Stefan Antonowicz, born in 1921 in Biłgoraj (Poland), under the Decree of the Bureau of the Supreme Council of the USSR, was amnestized as a Polish citizen and has the right to reside freely in the territory of the USSR, with the exception of prohibited zones, martial law areas, and first and second-class regime cities. He has no assets. – The citizen is directed to his own place of residence: the city of Uralsk. – The card is valid for three months and is subject to exchange. – The above is certified by the signature and stamp – Head of the Board of Railway Construction and Sorotsky Camp NKWD
On September 2, 1941, Stefan Knap signed for the card with his own handwritten signature. So he became a "free man."
Soldier
Stefan Knap left the camp with a group of other men released under the Sikorski-Majski Pact. According to the above document, they had nothing on them – neither money nor anything that they could trade for food or clothing. To survive, they stole and hunted, moved across Russia by trains, attached boards placed under the floor of the wagon, just above the tracks. Civilian travel was illegal, so they had to hide. Directed by hunger and struggle for survival, they made a decision to join the Red Army. Joining the Russian formation gave them hope for a daily meal and a chance to get out of the USSR. Indeed, Stefan, like the others, received a frayed coat and can, which was to be a dish for meals. The motive for this empty, hungry vessel appeared in later years in his "Sibrian" painting cycle.
On 18 August 1941, General Władysław Anders assumed the duties of commander of the Polish Army in the USSR. The place of formation of the army was the district of Buzułuku on the Samara River, and its number was set at 30,000 people. Division troops began forming in September 1941, with recruits being people released from camps in Russia.
One of the recruits was Stefan Knap, who heard on the station in the Asian part of the USSR, from a accidentally encountered Polish officer, about the forming Polish Army. In winter at the turn of 1941 and 1942 he abandoned the Red Army and joined the Army of Anders. However, the conditions in the ranks of the army did not appear much better than those in the camp. In addition to hunger, lack of equipment, and uniforming, soldiers were decimated by the typhoid epidemic, many of them also suffered deep frostbite.
Shortly after joining the army, cadets received a proposal to join the Royal Air Force and undergo basic training at the border with Uzbekistan. In March 1942, Stefan and thirty other volunteers embarked on another train trip, in cattle carriages. The conditions were still tragic, but the prospect of change for the better raised the spirits of future airmen. The trail led through the port in Krasnowdsk, further to Pahlevi, Tehran, Mumbai (now Mumbai) and Cape Town. From there, the squad went to Scotland, Glasgow, where Stefan was sent to Hucknall for the first basic course of the RAF. It was placed on the site on June 7, 1943.
Stefan Knap was assigned to the 318th RAF "Gdanski" Division. It was a tactical reconnaissance unit, formed in Detling, Kent County, South England, on March 20, 1943. Already in the summer of the same year, the squadron was moved to the Middle East – Egypt and Palestine. In the spring of 1944, the unit went to Italy and since then, until the end of the war, supported the actions of the Second Polish Corps.
At the turn of 1942 and 1943, Stefan changed his spelling to "Knapp". Thus he recorded them in a flight book he had been conducting since May 1943 when he learned to fly a Tiger Moth school plane. The first flight of the Spitfire fighter was made on September 8, 1944.
Stefan was a pilot of the Photo Reconnaissance Unit, responsible for taking aerial photographs of the site and enemy position, as well as for targeting bombers for appropriate targets. The fighter Knapp flew was equipped with onboard guns, which the airmen sometimes used: "We were officially not allowed to shoot at anything, but everyone occasionally knocked a little bit, and it blew up a truck, and it aimed at a train or a flowing barge. [...] It was like a dream, far from reality. At times I tried to sober myself up, I told myself that at this very moment I was killing people – when we were smoking shoulder fire or shooting at a convoy – but it was never really real. It remained only a visual experience [...]"
Indeed, the book of flights for 1944/45 with specific dates and courses contains the following notes: "Truck straffed"; "Truck shot up"; "Staff car straffed"; "Lorry destroyed"; "MT set on fire"; "Barges on river set on fire." Some of these events include the name Władysław Nycz, the co-pilot who later wrote the book "In the Air Scout", a record of his aviation history. On her pages, Nycz recalls one such event: "I’m communicating with Stefan, changing my course to come from the sun, and squeaking for attacking a truck. [...] I gave the series with all four machine guns, went too short, improved, and the car probably got. Stefan gave the series right behind me. [...] It was a retaliation for September, sad and leaving more taste than satisfaction, even though we paid the debt in a deep conviction that a good fascist was a dead fascist. We lit a truck and definitely blew up a few Germans."
Stefan Knapp is the author of portraits of the command and pilots of the 318 "Gdanski" Squadron, illustrating Nycz's book.
On February 28, 1945, Lieutenant pilot Stefan Knapp was appointed lieutenant. On May 2, 1945, he wrote in the flight book in Polish: "The end of the war in Italy". Line down, in English: "The war is over."
author: Maja T. Wal
The article is a modified form of biographical text by the author, who first appeared in the catalogue of the exhibition "Stefan Knapp. Alechemist and visionary" presented at the Center for Contemporary Art "Marks of Time" in Toruń (February-May 2026).
Sources of quotes: Державний архів у. Справа П-17445. Фонд Р-3258. Опис 1. Кількість 233; Кнап Стефан, 1921 р.н. Зображення 1–233; Knapp Stefan, "Quarter Sun", Biłgoraj Regional Society, Biłgoraj 2017; Kushelewski-Rayska, Stanisława. "Artists tell the truth." Wings = Wings. News from the world. First letter of soldiers of the Polish Air Force, No. 6/506, 1947; Nycz Władysław, "In Air reconnaissance", Publishing House of the Ministry of National Defence, Warsaw 1982; Olszewska, Halina Ewa. "About the Outstanding Artist Stefan Knappie." Writer.pl, October 31, 2023. [Accessed 2 September 2025] https://pisarze.pl/2023/10/31/halina-eva-olszewska-o-prominent-artist-stefanie-knappie