SAM HORMUSJI FRAMJI JAMSHEDJI MANEKSHAW

India’s most famous soldier

Field Marshal Sam Hormusji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw, India’s best-known soldier and the architect of the country’s victory in the 1971 war with Pakistan that gave birth to Bangladesh, died in Wellington, India, on Friday. He was 94.

The cause was pneumonia, India’s Defense Ministry said in a statement.

Manekshaw first drew notice as a captain in the British Indian army during World War II. He was severely wounded on Feb. 22, 1942, in a counteroffensive against the Japanese on the Sittong River in Burma, now known as Myanmar. But he kept exhorting his soldiers, and he continued fighting until he collapsed.

In 1947, as colonel in charge of operations, he oversaw Indian forces in fighting that broke out between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, the territory claimed by both new nations.

In 1961, he had a falling out with the defense minister, V.K. Krishna Menon. But by then a general, he was vindicated late the next year when Indian troops were overrun by Chinese forces that swept down from the Himalayas. Menon resigned and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had been close to Menon, rushed Manekshaw to the front. There he rallied the retreating Indian forces until a cease-fire was declared.

He became the eighth chief of the Indian army in 1969, and in 1971 led India’s forces in the war with Pakistan that ended with the creation of Bangladesh from East Pakistan. According to articles published in Indian newspapers after his death, Manekshaw firmly resisted demands by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the spring of 1971 for an immediate invasion of East Pakistan in support of rebels there. He insisted that a campaign be put off until after the monsoon season ended and the armed forces were better prepared.

Just before the conflict began that December, the prime minister asked him, “General, are you ready for the war?” He replied, “I’m always ready, sweetie.” Less than three weeks later, Pakistan was defeated.

Manekshaw became a national hero and a household name after this triumph, and in 1973, two weeks before his retirement, he became India’s first field marshal. He had already received India’s highest civilian awards — Padma Bhushan in 1968 and Padma Vibhushan in 1972.

• JOZEF SZAJNA

Polish playwright, set designer

Jozef Szajna, a Polish playwright, set designer and theater director who through often nearly wordless productions evoked the beastliness of humanity, the suffocation of individuality and the oppressiveness of dictatorship, died Tuesday in Warsaw, Poland. He was 86.

His death was announced by the Warsaw Academy of Arts, according to Agence France-Presse.

Szajna (pronounced SHY-nuh) was a Roman Catholic who survived five years in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.

“Today I have a name; then I was a number,” he once said.

In Poland, Szajna circumvented Communist censors by presenting his work as abstract expressions of opposition to fascism and to passivity in the face of repression: his productions were eloquent in their near-silence by speaking wordlessly.

Among his plays are “Rejoinder,” “Reminiscence” and “Dante,” the latter based on the journey through the realms of the dead in the 14th-century “Divine Comedy” but laced with Szajna’s depictions of 20th-century hellishness.

Szajna was born in the southeastern Polish city of Rzeszow on March 13, 1922. At 16, he won a national diving championship. At 18, while fighting with the Polish resistance, he was arrested by the Nazis. After a foiled attempt to escape from Auschwitz, he was sent to Buchenwald.

“Waiting for execution brought me closer to the problems of eternity,” he later wrote. “All that we believed in — races, classes, political views — were not important anymore.” His death sentence was commuted by a new commander at Buchenwald, and he spent the rest of the war as a slave laborer.

From Wire Reports