September 1, 1939, Marian Piotr Opala was an eighteen-year-old student living with his parents in Lodz, Poland, when he heard the news that the Germans had invaded his homeland and were headed toward Lodz from the west.

Marian, a law student, discovered a resourcefulness and a will to live that took him through the years of the Nazi occupation of Poland. These characteristics served Marian Opala just as well in later years when he served as a justice on the Oklahoma Supreme Court from 1978 to 2010.

After the German occupation of Lodz, Marian and his family awaited English action to liberate Poland, which never occurred. Antony Opala, Marian’s father, thought that the Germans would not be as brutal as they turned out to be. Realizing that the Germans were trying to eradicate the Polish element in what had been western Poland, he reluctantly allowed his family to leave Lodz for Warsaw in January 1941. The Opala family departed surreptitiously and walked the distance to Warsaw, living for a time with Marian’s uncle in an apartment. Marian witnessed violence, oppression, and arbitrary arrests.

In Warsaw, the Polish Home Army, also known as the Polish Underground, a highly organized defensive and offensive organization operating by subterfuge to resist the Germans, conscripted nineteen-year-old Marian Opala. Working with the British, the Polish developed an organization in which most members knew very little of general operations. Marian received orders from people in disguise, and he never knew who his compatriots were. He lived at home, pretended to be a normal citizen, and never told anyone, even his parents, about his resistance activities. If he had, they and he would have faced death.

The Underground used Marian mostly as a translator. He was one of the few Poles who was fluent in English. He was given messages to translate from Polish to English, which were sent on to the British forces. On other occasions, he saw direct action committing violence against the Germany occupiers. Two occasions he was involved in assassinating German officials. The whole time he was, he recalled in an interview almost seventy years later, “scared to death each inch of the way. Absolutely scared to death.”

Eventually the Polish underground sent Marian Opala to join the British in Istanbul. He stayed with the British for several years, seeing action in Italy, Ethiopia, and Egypt. Eventually in 1944, soon after the D-Day invasion, Marian parachuted back into Nazi-occupied Poland. He was captured, and sent to Flossenburg, a concentration camp near the Czech border. Marian recalled it as “a plain murder camp.” He survived, however, and was liberated by the invading American army.

Marian, very ill, was taken to a British camp in Germany, where he recovered. An army captain from Oklahoma, Gene Warr, agreed to sponsor him in obtaining a visa to go to America. Marian ended up in Oklahoma City in 1947. There he studied law, was admitted to the Oklahoma Bar, served as a lawyer and judge, then in 1978 became a justice in the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

Living through utter fear and tragedy helped Marian Opala, during the war and afterwards in America, to develop a moral compass of right and wrong, based on pain and suffering, experiencing the oppression of one against another.

Justice Marian Opala’s resistance of Nazi repression during World War II resulted, later in life in America, in a fight against the oppression of government in any form, as signified by his embrasure of the cause of First Amendment rights in Oklahoma.

(This essay first appeared in Oklahoma Magazine)