History /
Pieces of Real Polish History [60]
My Dad was born in 1919 in Warsaw, in a family of a soon-to-become gardener, an unqualified but literate Warsaw worker who took the opportunity of buying his piece of land by bank loan after the partition of large estates. The land of my Grandpa was located in Wawrzyszew on northern outskirts of Warsaw. My Dad took the opportunity of education, finishing a technical high-school, the funds for learning obtained from Mrs Piłsudska Foundation to promote talented school pupils. Just before the outbreak of WWII, my Dad was doing apprenticeship in a truck-construction company in Warsaw.
On September 1st, 1939, first Nazi bombs hit Warsaw, including the house of my grandparents and killing the horse. Vigorous fight took place between Polish and German troops nearby. Poles lost the battle and their graves can be found in the Wawrzyszew cemetery.
My Dad, as instructed by radio broadcast set off on his bicycle together with a group of local boys in the direction of Romania. As soon as the boys got into the former East Lesser Poland, Ukrainians robbed bicycles off the boys and they continued walking. On September 17th, 1939, the Soviet troops entered the area. The group was caught in a real estate of a Czech landowner. The Soviets asked the landowner who the boys were. The Czech said: "They are my farm-hands". "Show hands!" the Soviet soldier demanded. The boys showed the hands, and the hands were... black. If the hand had been white, the boys would be executed on spot as "panowie" (upper-class people). Irony was, the boys were industrial workers but every qualified worker wore protective hand-gloves at work, so the hands would be white. Yet, the hungry boys ate fresh walnuts the day before, the walnut juice making their hands black...
My Dad took the difficult way back home, and indeed he had to pass the German-Soviet border at peril of being shot down.
The winter 1939/1940 was hungry. The family had to eat another horse. Under Nazi occupation of Warsaw it was hard to find work. Around 1941, my Dad was making money by trading used clothes at the Kercelak market in Warsaw. The market was surrounded by Nazi soldiers and my Dad was caught in the round-up. He was transferred to Germany as a slave labourer. The history of his stay in Germany, surviving coal mine, his escape from coal mine and his capture by Gestapo, roof repairs in bombarded Essen, surviving massive Ally bombardment of Essen where the river burned, his escape from Essen and pretending to be someone else to find better job, his liberation by the British in 1945, his D.P. fate in after-war Germany, his immigration to Australia via UK, and his return to Poland in 1957 could make a good novel.
My Mum was born in 1922 in Peczeniżyn (Pechenizhyn) near to Horodenka, Stanisławów (Ivano-Frankovsk) voivodship, near to the Romanian border of the era. My Granpa was a car-driver at local Polish administration and my Grandma was a Polish teacher. After the occupation by Soviets in 1939, things started happening. In 1941, the local Polish population, especially clerk, teacher, generally intelligentsia families went to the Soviet proscription lists, to be exiled to Siberia. Two uncles and an aunt were met by this fate. Both uncles died in Soviet Union, and the aunt returned, mentally ill and died soon. My Mother's family was on the exile lists for June 1941. Before that happened, Nazis attacked Soviet Union on June 22nd, 1941. My Grandpa was working as the driver for the Soviet administration at the time. When panicked Soviet officer run out the building, shouting and waving his pistol, Granpa pretended the engine had broke. He might get shot, yet the officer requisitioned a horse cart and escaped. My family avoided certain death in Siberia, saved by... Germans.
My mother did not want to talk on next years only describing those as a "dark era". Once she told me about her friend, a lovely Jewish girl that disappeared some day, apparently killed or taken away by... who knows? Ukrainian nationalists? Nazi? My Mother
never wanted to go to back to see her homeland again, even if such possibility existed after 1989.
After WWII, the remaining family was expatriated to Wrocław, Bydgoszcz, £ódź. My Mother after graduating in microbiology settled in Warsaw and met my Dad in 1957 there.
What I have described are fates of just two Poles, and we could talk about millions of different fates. I'm not a nationalist, racist, or hater. I've seen a great part of the world, survived the commie rule in Poland. I can only see that history is making turns over and over. People forget. People only can read. People form their opinions based on the information chaos of the Internet. And they never learn.
No need to get personalNot planning on moving anymore posts. Please keep it on topic, there is no reason to make another forum member the point of your thread. If you have something to say, do it through a PM. 