Tarnów’s greatest son was without doubt the general Józef Bem, born here on March 14, 1794, at a time when Tarnów was a part of Austrian Galicia. A national hero of Poland, Hungary and Turkey, famous for his courage and resilience, the stature of Bem's legacy as a freedom-fighter far exceeds his quite diminutive physical stature, as he fought for various independence movements at home and abroad throughout a diverse and distinguished career.
Not long after Bem took up the Polish cause in earnest by playing a lead role in the doomed November Uprising (against Tsarist rule in PL) in 1830, earning the Virtuti Militari - PL's highest military honour - in the process. After surviving a Russian assassination attempt in Portugal, Bem joined yet another revolution - the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 . Immediately making himself a Hungarian national hero when he valiantly defended Vienna from imperial troops, the city eventually capitulated, but Bem was already elsewhere, becoming general of the ragtag Szekely troops and miraculously winning numerous battles across Transylvania in which his men were outnumbered and supposedly out-skilled by Austrian forces. With the Austrian-Hapsburg Empire on the brink of collapse, Franz Jozef I had to call on Russia for help, bringing the military might of two imperial powers to bear against Bem in Transylvania. His army was decimated in the Battle of Segesvar (now Sighisoara, Romania ) and Bem himself only survived by playing dead on the battlefield, but he rallied his piecemeal army onwards before being seriously injured in the Battle of Temesvar (now Timisoara, Romania
