If you do want to stick with the 'Escape From Kalisz' scenario, I'd suggest you place the emphasis on the escape and evasion aspects and keep any heavy combat out until they're comfortable with the rules and the gameworld.
No matter what way you start them on their T2k experience, you could add some eerie/horror aspects to peak their interest at the start, for example: -
1. Have the scenario at night & describe battles in the distance as 'strange lights'. True the PCs may have been in combat before but if there's a mist rolling in (and they are common in Poland even in summer) and the light from fires (like say a forest on fire) and artillery/tank muzzle flashes are distorted by the mist and by distance the players themselves will probably let their imaginations conjure up something else. And sound will also be distorted by the mist and by distance. You could even throw in an unexpected storm with lots of lightning and wind.
2. Have them escape through a cemetery during the night, you can throw in every horror trick in the book to make them wary, odd noises, strange shadows but hey, it's just a rundown old cemetery that has a few terrified refugees hiding in it... or perhaps they're escapees from an asylum for the criminally insane. Again, the players will likely take what you describe and let their imaginations make it worse than what it really is.
3. During part of their escape, they could stumble through an old mass grave of unburied bodies (if they're in vehicles, it could be during one of their halts). The bodies are well covered in leaf litter and it's only when the pc's sit down that they find themselves 'crunching' through some poor soul's ribcage. When they start to really look, they can see movement under the leaf litter and they can see bones poking through here and there. Of course, the bones were already poking through, they just hadn't noticed them earlier and the movement, it's just local animals scurrying away from the noisy humans but the odd skull or two rolling down a hillock because it's been dislodged by an animal seeking to escape might help convince the players that there is more at work.
The idea here being that if you appeal to the player's liking for horror RPGs, you can slowly introduce the more military aspects of T2k and hopefully by the time they realize it isn't a 'horror' theme all the time, they're actually enjoying the game without worrying that it's not a genre they were initially interested in. You can keep it sort of survival-horror themed (but without the obvious 'horror' monsters) simply by the way you describe the scenes and encounters until they no longer need that hook to enjoy the game.
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