Eva Konopacki's strong, clear voice breaks as she speaks by phone from her room in a luxury hotel in Warsaw.

She's recalling her teen years as a member of the Polish Underground Army and the fight for Polish independence from German occupation in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. More than 200,000 civilians and members of the Polish Home Army were killed in the span of two months, Konopacki says.

"It was unbelievable, like in a dream," she says. "It was very tragic when somebody was killed. You were ready to put up your life to save anybody, because this is what is called brotherhood in arms. Strangers fighting next to you become your family."

Now 83, Konopacki lives in Ottawa and has travelled to the capital of Poland as one of a group of 25 veterans, only four of them women. They will be honoured Sept. 1 during a commemoration of the Second World War at the Polish seaside where the first German attack occurred on Sept. 1, 1939.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as well as dignitaries from numerous other countries, are expected to attend the 70th anniversary of the start of the war.

Only 2 Canadians invited

Konopacki and 86-year-old Andrzej Garlicki, also of Ottawa and president of the Polish Combatants Association, were the only two Canadian veterans invited to participate in five days of remembrance events.

On Sunday and Monday the veterans will receive decorations from the president of Poland and visit a Polish Army exhibition at the Museum of War in Warsaw. On Tuesday, they'll attend a ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and a concert at the Great Theatre before boarding a military plane for a flight to Gdansk, north of Warsaw.

Anniversary celebrations include a concert featuring British composer Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, while the world convention of Polish combatants in Warsaw and a final mass at a monastery in Czestochowa, in south Poland, take place Wednesday and Thursday.

Poland faced a double attack with the outbreak of the Second World War. Following the German attack on Sept. 1, the Soviet Union invaded on Sept. 17.

"Poland in 1939 was taken between two fires, Hitler and Stalin," Konopacki says. "It was like a burning house, with two people trying to burn it."

As an 18-year-old soldier in the Warsaw Uprising five years later, Konopacki built and repaired army telephone lines and operated switchboards. Repeated bombings and shrapnel continually tore the lines, and repair workers were "sitting ducks," often shot on the job. So Konopacki eventually became a courier instead, delivering messages to army officers.

Extraordinary personal bravery

Just before the underground army surrendered, she was awarded the highest military honour in Poland, the Order of Virtuti Militari, for an act of extraordinary personal bravery.

It happened when the Polish army had taken over the convent of the Sisters of the Resurrection in Warsaw, once used as a high school but abandoned when the uprising began. Konopacki described it as a solid building, surrounded by fields on three sides and facing a German post in a chemical institute some distance away.

Polish soldiers defending the convent had lost contact with those inside as German tanks and soldiers advanced. The danger was so great that the commander of Konopacki's troop refused to order any of his soldiers to enter; instead, he asked for volunteers.

The building had already been heavily damaged by artillery shells and attacking troops used a flame-thrower to start fires on the top floors.

"I preferred to do something rather than to sit," Konopacki says, explaining her decision to attempt the task.

Bullets hitting the ground created fountains of sand that rose into the air as she crawled over piles of fallen bricks. Trying not to attract attention, she made her way into what remained of a trench, where she could see a large hole in the convent wall.

A German Tiger tank sat facing the hole, but she knew the heavy cannon couldn't fire as rapidly as a machine gun. So she waited for it to shoot, then darted into the building.

Inside, she found a "very tragic situation" with ammunition dwindling and many injured, including a boy who had lost a leg.

"We actually defended this spot, at great cost," she says.

The attacking army retreated, leaving her able to exit the convent and get more ammunition and bandages for the wounded. But with the walls weakened and another attack imminent, the Polish army retreated as well.

Polish soldiers forced to surrender

With the dead numbering in the hundreds of thousands, the underground army capitulated. England and the United States agreed to regard the Polish soldiers as combatants in the war, and they were treated according to the Geneva Convention as prisoners of war.

Konopacki's platoon was sent to do heavy physical labour at the Gross-Lubars camp near Magdeburg. Six weeks later, the prisoners boarded a cattle train and travelled to Stalag VIC Oberlangen, a German camp near the Dutch border, where they stayed until they were freed on April 12, 1945.

Konopacki returned to Warsaw for a reunion on the 50th anniversary of the uprising. Everyone had greying hair, she says.

"You were, for a few minutes, forgetting about it. You were just as you were 50 years before. That was the greatest."

On Tuesday, she plans to wear a grey skirt, beret and polished decorations pinned to her navy blazer.

Margaret Konopacki, 52, has accompanied her mother on the trip.

"I feel that my whole life has brought me to this place to witness history," she says.