Wojciech Witold Jaruzelski was born on 6 July 1923 in Kurów, into a family of Polish gentry. He was the son of Wanda (née Zaremba) and Władysław Mieczysław Jaruzelski, a Czech-educated agronomist and volunteered soldier who fought in the war against Soviet Russia in 1920 and was raised on the family estate near Wysokie (in the vicinity of Białystok). From 1933 until September 1939, he was educated in a Catholic school in Warsaw where he received strict religious education.