BISIA & ISHAM: The Countess & The P.O.W.

On Valentine’s Day 1945, two soldiers met in a small café in Lublin, Poland, both caught in the tragic and uncertain currents of a world at war. 23-year-old Countess Elzbieta (Bisia) Krasicka was a lieutenant in the Polish Home Army, fighting for her nation’s doomed freedom. 33-year-old Isham Reavis was lieutenant in the U.S. Army, an escaped prisoner of war, searching for an American mission. Neither spoke the other’s language. Yet 11 days later they married, beginning a life of 64 years together. These are the tales that led to their meeting in the Artists Café in Lublin, and Bisia’s subsequent escape from Soviet-occupied Poland as she sought to reunite with the husband she barely knew./