Polish Legacy

The Family Home, Haczow, South-East Poland July 2010

2010-07-19T14:33:00.000-07:00

Family story has it that Stepeks lived on the land pictured here since 14th century and in this house since it was built at least a hundred years ago, may twice as long ago. It looks like it could easily last another thousand years. Here my grandfather Wladyslaw returned, first in 1917 after being a prisoner of war by the Czarist Russians for agitating against their occupation of Poland, second in Septermber 1939 when he was being hunted by Stalin's NKVD as a potential resistance leader near Lwow. Even as a place of hiding he had to hide all day in the corn fields in 1941 or 1942 when the Nazis took revenge for a resistance action by taking out one male from every home in Haczow and executing them. Finally he left this home in 1943, fatally ill with cancer, to seek possibly healing in the beautiful mountains of Zakopane where he died before his body was returned here to be buried. What a tale these old beams of wood could tell us, what a tale of suffering, of loss, but also of resilience, love of country, love of family and love of the soil.

We Love You Who Never Knew You

2010-07-19T14:24:00.000-07:00

Haczow, South-East Poland July 2010.
Gravestone at my grandfather's burial place, with words of memorial for my grandmother Janina who is buried in Teheran. The inscription says that the family in Scotland and England request prayers for her. Soft sad words on hard marble from her children who watched her fall ill and die of hunger and exhaustion so many decades ago.

Wladyslaw's summary of his early life

2009-01-24T04:27:00.000-08:00

My grandfather Wladyslaw was asked to give a summary of his early life in a 1937 document which was part of a recommendation to award him the high honour of Cross and Medal of Independence. I received a photocopy of the full seven page documentation that comprised the report on his award from the Central Archives of the Military in Warsaw in a letter dated 24 July 2008. It contained a full A4 page in Wladyslaw’s own handwriting, translated as follows:

I was born on 19 September 1893 in Haczow, son of Josef. I finished six years high school in Sanok, and I went to practice as chemist in Strumien, in Silesia.

In 1914 I was conscripted to the Austrian army. In April 1915 I was captured and taken to a Russian prison camp where I was employed to work as a chemist in a factory in Sartana near Marjanpol [at the Azov Sea in far south east Ukraine]. Whilst imprisoned here I was charged with political agitation for trying to persuade the factory workers to rise against the Tsar and Russia. They put me in an underground cell and then sent me to Barmuta where they told me I was to be deported to Siberia.
I managed to get free thanks to giving money to the guards. In my place, with all the necessary papers, they sent another prisoner.

In 1916 the Russians sent me back to Austria as a TB sufferer. There I was still in hospital in 1917 for tuberculosis in Lesa Wielenski.

In 1918 I came back to Haczow on unlimited sick leave from the army. Here for agitating against Austria I was again sent to prison in Przemysl. After leaving prison I returned to Haczow and persuaded 170 people to desert the Austrian army. A group of us disarmed the Austrian army garrison at Nohermerjew on the 30th October 1918 following an order given to me by the Polish army organisation.

The next month, November 1918, I volunteer to join the local military unit at the war and was able to persuade about 100 others to volunteer from Haczow.

On 11 May 1921 I travelled to Lwow to volunteer to take part in the uprising in the region of Gorny Slask [Upper Silesia, a German-Polish region whose territory was disputed and was made subject to a League of Nations sponsored referendum on which country it was to be part of] but I wasn’t sent to the front.

Portrait of dad at around fifty

2008-08-10T13:15:00.001-07:00

Well, dad recovered from everything that life, war, disease and hunger could throw at him. He became a very successful businessman and this portrait of him was made at the peak of his energy and vigour at around fifty in the early 1970s.

Danka and Zosia, Pahlevi, Persia, August 1942

2008-08-10T13:01:00.000-07:00

Two young girls in Polish uniforms on the beach at Pahlevi. The clothing looks fine but the faces, especially the expression in their eyes, cannot hide what they have been through. Aged fifteen and seventeen respectively they have known violence, death threats, ethnic cleansing, forced labour, hunger and near starvation, repeated bouts of disease and sickness, and the slow fading away of their mother.

The Stepek Family Farm, Haczow, Poland

2008-08-10T12:56:00.001-07:00

Great Aunts Helena and Aleksandra enjoy the sunshine in this photo taken in the post-war years.

The family farm house in thick snow. It is a typical wooden farm house of the area in south-east Poland at the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, close to Slovakia to the south and Ukraine to the east. I hope some day soon to visit for myself and add some new photos of the house to this blog.

Aunt Zosia

2008-08-10T12:48:00.000-07:00

Two pictures of my Aunt Zofia. The first is from 5 May 1944 during the war. After recovering from the trauma of Siberia and the odyssey to Persia, Zosia went to Palestine with Danka then qualified to teach English to Polish officers in Alexandria, Egypt. It is astonishing that she looks so well, so beautiful after all that she had been through. Photographers knew the art of superb picture taking in those days; the lighting, the angle of her face, like a Hollowood photo.

The second photo shows her with her husband, Pan Repa, after the war.

Poscard from my grandfather Wladyslaw from Krakow during First World War

2008-08-10T12:38:00.000-07:00

This is a wonderful document from 1916. Poland exists only in the minds of its people. All of Europe is at war and both Krakow (where the postcard was sent from) and Haczow (where it was sent to) are still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Indeed the little town of Haczow had an Austrian garrison, which my father and a group of twenty-five young men disarmed at the end of the war.

It is thought that for this action they were given the land in the Kresy that was to be the birthplace of my dad and my two aunts.

Dad as a student at Bojanonowo near Wroclaw 1939 just months before war broke out

2008-08-10T12:22:00.000-07:00

In 1938 my dad finished secondary school and left home to study at agriculture college. He didn't go back after the summer holidays of 1939 because everyone knew war was coming and he wanted to be at home. I don't know who his two fellow students in the photo are, and I sometimes wonder what their fate was. Dad is sixteen in this picture.

Portrait of my Great Aunt Helena

2008-08-10T12:20:00.001-07:00

We have no idea when this lovely gentle watercolour was painted. (I think it's a watercolour; I scanned in a photo of the original portrait and I have never seen the original). I asked my wife and two children what age range they think Helena may have been when she had the portrait done. It's very hard to pin it down; we think minimum age is fourteen, maximum age thirty so the picture could have been made either before or after the First World War.

My grandfather Wladyslaw

2008-08-10T12:14:00.000-07:00

As a young man.

Near the end.

May 1941

Summer, 1942, a year before his death.
He died at Zakopane Hospital.

Bitter Harvest May 1941

2008-08-10T11:54:00.000-07:00

My grandfather Wladyslaw, with his two sisters Aleksandra (Ola) and Helena harvesting in the Spring of 1941 at their farm in Haczow near Rzeszow in present-day south-east Poland. Wladyslaw was in hiding at this, the family's farm since the 14th century, having been tipped off by a Jewish then a Ukrainian friend that he was on a Red Army death squad list.

Four months after he fled west to Haczow the rest of the family were swept to Siberia. They never saw each other again, and he was never to learn that his children evaded death, nor that his wife, my grandmother Janina paased away a year before he did. She died of hunger; I think he died of a broken heart though the death certificate says cancer. He was fifty.

My two great aunts seen here in the photo lived to a ripe old age, visited by my mum and dad, Aunts Danka and Zosia and some of their children. Sadly I never met them. What tales they could have told me!

I don't know who took this photgraph but it is mightily evocative of a bygone era, and almost biblical in quality.

The original photo is tiny, barely three inches by two. But through the wonders of technology we can see much greater details such as a fourth person working in the field by clicking on the image.

Mum and Dad 2007

2008-08-09T06:49:00.000-07:00

It's sixty one years since they met at a dance in Glasgow in 1947. And it's sixty six years since dad was foundering in a hospital in Teheran while at the same time mum had to leave school at the age of fourteen to bring in an additional wage to help her family, which comprised a miner / steelworker's widow and eleven children in Rutherglen, Lanarkshire, near Glasgow. What resilience, what inner strength.

Janina Ciupka Stepek, my grandmother, 1902-1942

2008-08-09T04:34:00.000-07:00

It was only about five years ago I first saw a photograph of my grandmother. It has been a very emotional, bitter-sweet experience getting to know about her. The grandmother I never knew.

Postcard from the Gulag, Charytonowo near Kotlas

2008-08-08T13:06:00.001-07:00

Clicking on these images will provide you with a much larger and clearer image. I will eventually translate these to English. What precious documents. This one is from 22 May 1940.

Dad aged 20 freshly enlisted in Polish Navy 1943

2008-08-08T13:00:00.001-07:00

Only a few months after lying for months near death with malaria in Teheran, having already suffered two bouts of dysentery and a near-fatal typhus illness in Kazakhstan, dad looks so vibrant, so recovered... and so very young. He is 20.

Aunt Danka, sick and malnourished, aged 15, on shores of Pahlevi, Teheran 1 September 1942

2008-08-08T12:56:00.000-07:00

When she arrived in Persia, carried off the ship by a Polish soldier, Danka weighed 25kg (three stone twelve pounds).

Danka's Polish Passport in Teheran 6 March 1943

2008-08-08T12:28:00.000-07:00

When you magnify the photo of Danka (thanks to modern computer technology) you can see the poor state of her eyes, especially the right eye, which seems to have a film over it. But she is alive and free.

Ciupka Family Photograph Circa 1904

2008-08-02T10:14:00.000-07:00

My grandmother, Janina, is the little girl on the far right, supported by her mother. The contrast between this photograph and the Stepek photograph from the same era couldn't be greater. The Ciupkas were a very well-to-do family of mill and land owners, formal and gentrified in their dress and style, unlike the Stepek photograph which shows a family rooted to tradition and regional dress.

To see an enlarged image just click on the picture.

The Stepek Family Circa 1898

2008-08-02T09:44:00.000-07:00

Wladyslaw, my grandfather, is the formal little boy at the far left. There may be four generations of females in this photo, though we are not sure. I wish they had colour photography in those days - we can only guess as to the different colours of the regional dresses the ladies wore for what must have been a very special occasion - a family photograph in the 19th century.

Click on the photo to see it enlarged.

Letter from Zosia and Danka in Charytonowo to their father Wladyslaw in Haczow 18 May 1941

2008-08-02T09:36:00.001-07:00

The following letter written in Zosia’s handwriting but signed by both girls was sent to their father at this time. Zosia was sixteen, Danka thirteen at the time they composed this letter to their father. They had not seen him for twenty months.

18 May 1941

Dearest father!
I am very sorry that you are not getting any news from us although we have sent lots of letters. We are getting lots of letters from you and postcards. The last letter from 14 April and the postcard from 27 April. We are feeling all right except mama is not very well. Janek and I are working. Janek is working in joinery making furniture and I’m working on the river sorting out the timber. The work is not very heavy and I’m earning 5 roubles a day.[this bought two loaves of bread if any was available to buy] Janek’s wages are getting better. They are taking 10% of our wages and Janek is paying more because he is earning more. Please don’t worry about us. We managed to live over the winter and we’re still alive. And at summer it will be easier. The spring is rather late. We are hoping to plant some potatoes and are preparing the field. Please write to us often because we are missing you and we will try to write so that our letters will reach you. We send to you and aunts all our kisses and best.
Zosia and Danuta.

Letter from Janina in Charytonowo to Wladyslaw in Haczow 18 August 1940

2008-08-02T09:28:00.001-07:00

The following translation of a postcard letter written by Janina from the gulag was kept after Wladyslaw’s death by his two sisters, for Janina and the children should they survive the war and ever return to Haczow. This and other precious mementoes of these years were given to Danka on her return to Poland in 1964. It beggars belief what emotions ran through her heart on receiving such gifts, but it is inconceivable how Wladyslaw responded when one day in September 1940, almost a year after he had last seen his family, he received this letter:

18 August 1940

Oh my dearest!
We received your letter of 7 July luckily. All of us are still alive. There are now lots of berries and mushrooms so we are eating them and some we’re selling. Somehow we’re managing but what will winter make of us; will we still be alive after that? All of us are barefoot and the winter lasts eight months and starts in two months time. I don’t know how we will manage with that. We’re missing everybody but life has to go on. I could write quite a lot but we can’t write about everything. It’s such a good thing that you know where we are. Henrik [Janina’s eldest brother] and his family were taken away to Russia as well. We don’t have any news from them. Gutek Konopnicki [Janina’s nephew] is in Russia as well. Irena [Janina’s sister and Gutek’s mother] is in Lwow. She is having to get through her tragedy alone [her husband was shot by the Russians when he was trying with Gutek to cross the border into Romania to rejoin the Polish troops. He was a major. Gutek lied that he was only 16 so instead of being shot he was taken to Russia.] Please don‘t forget about us and try to get us out of here. Send best wishes to Czsiek’s family [another of Janina’s brothers, then living in Krosno, near Haczow. One of his sons disappeared during the war]
Janina

A Knock on the Door in Winter Time

2008-06-25T10:42:00.000-07:00

Winter 1917. Haczow, Galicia, a tiny, unimportant outpost of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire. A knock on the door of a farmhouse. A young woman, suspicious, opens the door slightly. Nearby is the hated Austrian garrison, and the local Polish people, simple farming villagers, have already been suffering over two years of deprivation and fear in a war they never asked for, their menfolk fighting for an alien empire, under a foreign flag, a beaten resentful people, still clinging to the hope of one day resurrecting the Polish nation, and fighting under the Polish flag. But it’s a foolish hope.

Now there is a knock at the door. It’s cold, wet and dark outside. Nothing good stirs outside on such a night. The young woman is called Aleksanda Stepek. Her parents long dead, she lives with her sister Helena, in the farmhouse. They are tenants; the farm is owned by their brother Wladyslaw, who has been posted missing whilst serving in the medical corps of the Austrian Empire. Dear Wladyslaw, with his fine mind. How the family showed their pride when he graduated in Chemistry at the University in Krakow only two years earlier, the first member of the family to attend university. Then the accursed war, and the inevitable enlistment to fight for the oppressing forces against the Russians, another empire oppressing Poles in the north and east of what was once their free nation.

Who could be calling? Perhaps the dread army come to take their spoils, the family food, heirlooms, or worse, to abuse the two young women who dared yet to live alone in such times. Fearing the worst, Aleksandra opened the door a fraction, her foot jammed against the door and braced for a violent response.

In the darkness, she could barely see the face of the stranger, made worse by his long hood which dripped over his cloaked shoulders. And his long beard increased the vagueness of his appearance. He was ragged, perhaps some beggar seeking refuge from the storm in the byre, or just some food, though little they had to spare. Christian pity demands a warm reply, Aleksandra thought.

The beggar stared at her as if in a dream and then said “Well my beauty you have a poor memory after all if you cannot even recognise your own brother.”

Wladyslaw had returned home.

The destroyer ORP Krakowiak which my father served on from 23 June 1943 to 8 November 1944

2008-06-15T07:04:00.000-07:00

Dulab Cemetary, Teheran, resting place of my grandmother, in 2002

2008-06-15T07:01:00.000-07:00

There are no good or bad peoples only individuals

2008-06-15T06:32:00.000-07:00

We are plagued with prejudiced minds. The Scots are mean so it is said, and they hate the English, whilst the English in turn despise the Germans and French. So it goes on across the whole world, with historical enmity and cultural habits combining to maintain and nurture these corrosive views.

I was struck whilst researching my father's family story that there is no such thing as a stereotype of a people. My grandfather, a mediator amongst the ethnic minorities that made up the eastern part of pre-WW2 Poland, was tipped off by a Jewish friend, and then a Ukrainian friend, that his life was in danger. Individual Ukrainians and soliders in the Red Army later abused and tortured my father, his sisters, and their mother. Others said words of support and gave what little assistance they could, such as the Russian who told them to take as many blankets and possessions they could when they were told to leave their home, allegedly to do some work in the nearby forests, but actually to be ethnically cleansed to the gulags.

Danka and my father said the commandant of the labour camp was fair and reasonable. Others, in more unfortunate camps, speak of abuse, rape, even murder.

On their six thousand mile odyssey to Persia their lives were saved by the kindness of Russian civilians, Kazakh and Uzbeki peasants, whilst Soviet NKVD (forerunners of the KGB) officials threatened to shoot my father, tried to coerce him into spying for them, and sought to keep infirm Polish children from leaving the country with their parents. On another occasion my father had his only pair of boots stolen whilst he washed himself in a local river. Perhaps the thief had no shoes either, so who can blame someone in such a position?

Persians, Britons, Indians, Pakistanis and Americans in Persia rallied to save the lives of thousands of stricken Poles, even though they could not save my grandmother. Later, in Palestine, the local people were kind and warm-hearted to Danka and Zosia.

Finally, when he arrived, demobbed, orphaned, and stateless in Scotland the people of Glasgow treated my father and his fellow Polish refugees with kindness and warmth. In turn some decades later, when we was a wealthy businessman, my father repaid the kindness by bringing homeless people into our family home to eat with the family, with one man living with us for almost two years. Kindness begets kindness.

There is no place for bigotry, prejudice, or stereotypes. Depending on their circumstances, their past life, and their genetic make up, an individual may be kind or callous to another. And this attitude may change over time, so that today's villain may be tomorrow's hero or heroine. We would do well to reserve judgement on others, and instead focus only on our own failings and weakness.

The Poker Game Crimea Early 1917

2008-06-15T06:27:00.000-07:00

My grandfather Wladyslaw Stepek had been captured by the Tsarist Russian forces during the first world war, whilst serving in the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was taken to Crimea. Whilst there he became quite friendly with the army guards and they used to play poker.

One evening when they played Wladyslaw won handsomely, to the extent that the soldiers couldn’t afford to pay him what they owed. He said ‘I want freedom not money. Find a way for me to leave this place and get home and I’ll forfeit what you owe.’

Being men of honour the soldiers agreed to settle the debt in this way.

Another prisoner had died of typhus at the camp the day or so before, whilst a third prisoner was due to be hanged for attempting to escape.

What the guards did was this.

They changed the name of the man who was due to be hanged to Wladyslaw Stepek, so that there would be no record that the true Wladyslaw had left the camp. They sent this man to Siberia.

They hanged the body of the already dead man so that the execution took place as ordered.

And they buried an empty coffin and reported the death of the man who had his name changed to Wladyslaw Stepek.

The real Wladyslaw was secretly placed on a train and returned to Poland via the Baltic Sea and Sweden.

Some nineteen years later in 1935 there was a knock on the door of the Stepek family farm in Maczkowce (pronounced Mach-kovsy). Danka, who was then eight years old answered the door. It was a man looking for her father. She asked what his name was to which the man replied Wladyslaw Stepek. Danka ran to her father saying ‘There’s a man at the door with your name.’

Wladyslaw went to the front door and said to the man ‘My name is Wladyslaw Stepek too.’

The man replied ‘I know. I am the man whose named was changed to your name and because of that I was not hanged in Siberia. I was released and came back to Poland and I wanted to say thank you very much for saving my life.’

A Christmas Gift 6th December 1941

2008-06-15T06:24:00.000-07:00

Sixth of December 1941. Somewhere in Siberia. It’s cold, dark, and the snow is feet thick.
On a cattle truck, stuck in a railway siding, hundreds of exhausted Poles are crammed, hungry and ill. They have recently been freed from the dreaded Siberian gulags and are seeking to flee the Soviet Union, but they have few resources, and their energy is spent.

Four of the refugees are dear to me. My father is one. He is19 years old. His two sisters Zosia and Danka are 16 and 14, and their mother Janina is 39. She has been unable to get up for three months now, desperately sick, worn out, and starving. The family haven’t eaten for a week, and are surviving by melting the snow on the ground and the icicles that form all day long on their cattle train.

Then another train, filled with Russians fleeing the advancing German forces, stops on the next track. All of the Polish refugees, aching with hunger, start to beg from the Russian people on the other train, and the Russians generously share some of their food with them.

Little Danka is watching this from the opened grille which serves as the carriage window. Jan and Zosia have been out begging leaving her to tend to her mother. They return empty handed and are desolate.

Danka hears the word ‘Divotchka’ amongst the bustle of Polish beggars and Russian givers. Again she hears it - ‘Divotchka.’ It means little girl. She starts looking for the source. A Russian woman, wrapped in a thick fur coat and hat is standing at the door of the other train. Danka stares at her. The woman is young and beautiful, maybe thirty years old. She stares back and smiles at the girl. Then she delves into the bag at her side and she throws something large and heavy straight at Danka. Instinctively Danka ducks but catches it. It is a huge loaf of bread. She looks up to thank the lady but she is gone.

This loaf feeds the family for a week. Without it they would all have died of hunger.

The date was sixth of December, St Nicholas’s day. It is the day Polish children receive their presents.

I can never know who this woman was who saved my father and his two sisters and prolonged the life of my grandmother so that when she finally died of hunger she did so knowing that her children were free from the Soviet Union. Several other strangers, many of them impoverished Muslim peasant farmers in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan , shared what little they had to help my father and his family. It is due to their altruism that I came to have a life, and in turn now have my own two children. My nine brothers and sisters, and our children all owe our lives to these unknown people. Of all human traits it is this, the kindness of strangers in the most trying of times, which I think is most astonishing and moving, and it is our great source of hope

Statement from Zofia Stepek, Aged 17, to Polish Officials April 1942

2008-06-15T06:22:00.000-07:00

We lived in a farm in Osada Maczkowce with two hectares for orchards and the house. My parents lived there from 1921. With a big effort they built the house and bought machinery for farming and planted the orchard from which in the last few years we had plentiful harvests. I never knew what it was to have no bread or fruit. I never saw anyone go hungry. People who passed the house were always welcomed, and offered food and rest.

The Soviets took us to Archangel region. The work was very hard and the earnings very small. The wages were so small it was not enough for the necessities of life. So we resorted to selling our clothes and whatever we could to survive.

Everyone had to work from 16 years old. Being late to work was a criminal offence, punishable by law in a court. Not only were the earnings small, they still took 10% for the commandant. They were cheating us as much as they could.

After the amnesty we left for the south. On the way there we started to suffer hunger, not having food for three days in a row. The cattle train drivers would stop in the wilderness on purpose so we couldn’t get anything to eat. Without telling anyone they would set off again leaving people behind. So there were lots of children on the cattle train without their parents.

Hungry and tired, after a two months journey we arrived at Polit-Oddiet in Kazakhstan. We received 200gm of flour and a half-litre of milk for the family each day. At the beginning we got 200gm of dried apples. We were so hungry it was difficult to forget about food and we even dreamed about it.

We were working collecting cotton and received dinner, which was water with a few grains of rice, a sort of soup. I was going to work with my brother and sister; mother was ill all this time. The nearest town was 30km away. To buy anything was very difficult and anyway we had no money. This was from November 1941 till February 1942.

In February my brother went to the Polish army and we were left alone. Mother was lying ill from starvation. She couldn’t walk. I had to look after my mother and younger sister who was very weak. I was seventeen and I learned how difficult responsibility is. Being hungry and tired all the time I couldn’t see any way out of it. I thought I would go crazy. Death from starvation was coming nearer and nearer. There was nothing to do in the collective farm, no work for us, so they told us to dig up the earth full of old roots after the cotton harvest was done. I went to work; we were digging with heavy forks to try to achieve daily targets. It was impossible particularly as we didn’t have the strength.

One the first day I received 150gm of flour which was supposed to be enough for three of us for the whole day. Later I managed to get a little more, sometimes I managed to achieve their target, with help from my sister, and got half a kilo of flour. We were always hungry and always pushed to the limit.

Later they told us to dig canals for water but I didn’t go to that work because I knew I wouldn’t earn anything. We started selling our clothes and shoes for practically nothing, to buy potatoes. They cost 15 roubles a kilo. We were also going to fields digging for potatoes, carrots and onions in a farm four kilometres away. We were called names, and one time a man came to our collective farm to tell the Poles about work. I went along, and he told us that the collective farm wouldn’t be giving us food because we were lazy and didn’t want to work. Later he started criticising the Polish government, especially Pilsudski. At that I just left the meeting.

In February 1942 we received help for the first time from Polish embassy officials. Someone from the farm brought aid to us after he went to Saragaczu. We received 2kg of flour for a month. We left the collective farm on the last days of April 1942 and travelled to Jang-Jul. Before then I had travelled four times to Saragaczu to the Polish embassy’s centre there, for help. Usually it was for food; wheat or corn which I had to carry more than 30km.

People from the collective farm didn’t help us at all. We had to make that journey to the town in one day, leaving at night and returning at night because we had nowhere to sleep. I have no idea how I managed. The thought of trying to save my nearest from death gave me strength.

After one trip I walked 15km in heavy rain carrying 12kg of wheat. For three days afterwards I couldn’t walk because I didn’t have the strength to get up. I looked like death.

When we were leaving the collective farm we had to carry everything 10km to the station because the farmers wouldn’t give us the use of the horse. We took only what we needed most. Luckily we got to Jang-Jul then to Wrewsko where the Polish army took care of us.

Statement from Danuta Stepek, Age 15, to Polish Officials April 1942

2008-06-15T06:20:00.000-07:00

On our farm in Osada Maczkowce we had 16 hectares of land and were doing rather well. [The Stepek family were then ethnically cleansed by cattle truck to a Soviet forced labour camp in Siberia, south-east of Archangel, near the Arctic Circle]

We were in the labour camp at Charotonowo from 1st March 1940 until 16 October 1941 and headed to the south in November. [When we arrived in Kazakhstan] we spent two weeks at a collective farm where we had to collect 20kg of cotton each day, but this target we never managed to achieve. The best I achieved was 8kg. For that I got 100g of flour and half a pancake.

After two weeks we were moved to another collective farm. This entailed a two week journey during which we were given nothing to eat, nor could we buy anything. We arrived in the Kazakh collective farm called Polito. We were given 200g of flour each day until 10 February 1942. When my brother [my father, Jan] left to find the Polish army the Kazakhs were very angry and from then on would not give us anything. Then we had to save ourselves from death by hunger. So I went with my sister to another collective farm to dig the fields looking for potatoes, carrots, and onions. Because of this we were insulted and even beaten.

Soon after we had to stop because there was nothing left so we cooked grass, and when that finished I went with my sister to the market and sold my brother’s last pair of trousers. We got 70 roubles and bought 5kg of rotten husks of wheat. We went back happy to the house because we had something to eat for the next few days. But we couldn’t do anything with it as we couldn’t cook it. So we made pancakes but these wouldn’t hold together.

After a few days mother became ill with stomach pains from eating that food. We couldn’t get any medicine. The nearest doctor was 7km away. The locals wouldn’t give us the use of a farm horse so we couldn’t take mother to the doctor. They didn’t give us food either. She was becoming worse, swollen up to her chest.

I, to save myself from starvation, went [with a group of adult Polish women refugees] to the army. I was happy there but I was always hungry. After one month they moved us to Wrewsko. Mother [came later and] started to feel better and got some help at Jang-Jul. In May I left for Guzar.

Watching Scotland play Poland at Football May 1990

2008-06-11T05:45:00.000-07:00

I am in the stand at Hampden Park Football Stadium in May 1990. I am waiting for the game between Scotland and Poland to begin, but the players will have to fight their way through a stadium full of ghosts. It is a football match, only a football match, but I am blinking away tears that well up in my eyes. Everyone around me is in a similar state. I am a thirty-one-year-old Scottish man who suddenly feels Polish for the first time in his life. And to be Polish is to know pain, to know loss.

I am with my father Jan. He betrays no emotions; he rarely does, but his self-control is apparent by the artificially fixed setting of his face. Of the dozens of people around me, I am the only person under fifty years old. Most are sixty or over. Unusually for a football game there is almost an equal split between men and women. I am the only one amongst us who is casually dressed. Some of the men, and even some women, have war medals pinned to their jackets or blazers. For this is the end of the Second World War. Not 1945, but 1990.

The Polish national anthem plays and we all stand up. I never stand up for national anthems but feel compelled to do so this time out of respect for those around me.

Those same people sing the first line of their anthem in strong, emotional tones. “Poland is not yet lost while we live.” The ghosts are still present and I sense my grandmother and grandfather around me. I have never thought of them until this very moment. Each of the elderly Poles around me feels that the ghosts of their own loved ones are with them. From their resting places in Poland, from shallow ditches in Siberia or Kazakhstan, or from carefully tended cemeteries in Persia, they have come to this place, Glasgow, to this football match, to be with their surviving family members. They have come, if not to celebrate, then at least to bring closure and to be together one last time.

Some eight months earlier on September 12th 1989, Poland had formally sworn in a non-communist government. This marked the end of fifty years of oppression in Poland, the end of the Second World War. Poland was free for the first time since September 1st 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded western Poland, followed sixteen days later by Soviet troops invading from the east.

Those in the stand with me are survivors of what then befell the Polish people in the eastern half of the country. The ghosts in the stadium - and as I write this my grandmother and grandfather are again with me – are those who did not survive those years between 1939 and 1945.

This football game, a friendly match between Scotland and Poland, is the first opportunity since Poland regained its political freedom for the exiled Polish Scottish community to be present at a national Polish event. It is a strange setting for the recognition of the winning back of one’s freedom; an even stranger setting for embracing those one loved and lost so many years previous. And for me it is the starting point of moving from being solely Scottish in my heart; the beginning of a long and often painful journey to understand what it means to be Polish.

Around me in that football stand are the ghosts of dead babies, little boys and girls, teenagers. These are the brothers and sisters, or closest friends of those who stand beside me. Also, there are adults, the mothers and fathers, or the grandparents who did not make it through the executions, the exile, the deportations and enslavements, or the long journeys to freedom. Two of the ghosts are my grandparents, my father’s mother and father, Janina and Wladyslaw.

This site explains how they lived and died, and how my father and his two younger sisters survived. I have written their story to let the ghosts know I love them.

The Polish Clearances

2008-06-10T06:48:00.000-07:00

Two Polish girls on the cattle trucks that bore them to the labour camps of the Siberian gulag in 1940. Ironically it was the same kind of cattle trucks many used to traverse through the USSR to make it to freedom in Persia in 1942.

Polish children waiting in Kazakhstan, near the Caspian Sea for the boats to take them to Rehovets, Persia, 1942.

The Polish cemetary in Dulab, Tehran, in Persia, during the war years. This is where my grandmother Janina is buried, having died of starvation and exhaustion despite the best efforts of British, Indian and Pakistani medical teams on 25th October 1942. R.I.P babcia.

The Person I Admire Most by Katie Stepek Aged 9

2008-05-30T02:47:00.000-07:00

A Primary School Solo Talk

The person I admire the most is my Grandpa. He has a terrifying past but has managed to do great things. I will tell you his story but be warned it is very sad.

My grandpa’s name is Jan Stepek. He was born in Poland on a lovely farm. He grew up there hearing wolves and bears. He skated to school with home-made skates or skis in winter. When he was only 17 Russia invaded Poland. This was the start of the Second World War. My great-grandfather would have been killed because he was a local politician. So my grandpa had to drive him to a station in secret so he could escape. My Grandpa never saw his father again. My great grandfather died of cancer a few years later.

On 9th February 1940 Grandpa, his mother Janina and his little sisters Sophia and Danka were woken by soldiers at 2am. They were taken to the train station and put in cattle trucks. They were in those trucks for four weeks. Lots of people in the trucks died or got very sick or hungry.

Finally they were allowed off the truck. But they were put in a slave camp called a gulag in the north of Russia at the Arctic Circle where it was winter for half the year. They had to work very hard there for a year and a half. Janina grew ill with hunger and exhaustion. Everyone was hungry and tired and very cold. Some days it was minus 50 and the snow was feet thick.

Eventually they were freed but they were thousands of miles from anywhere safe because the war was going on. So they had to walk or sneak onto trains going south or east for over six thousand miles in total, with few clothes and no money. They begged for food and the local Russian and Muslim people saved their lives lots of times by making them watery soup or even killing their only chicken to share with these strangers. Still Janina (my Grandpa’s mother) grew sicker and weaker.

Finally they made it to Iran, which was called Persia in those days. Sadly Janina died even though she had finally made it to freedom. She was only 40 and her three children were saved but she never saw her husband again before she died.

Danka and Sophia, who were about 14 and 16 by now were seriously ill but recovered, but Grandpa was in a terrible state. He had typhus and dysentery and he spent six months in a war hospital in Teheran. Then he caught malaria and the doctors thought he would die but the malaria caused a fever in him and that heat killed the other diseases and the doctors treated the malaria and he recovered. It was a miracle. He was 19 by now but weighed the same as someone in our class.

After all this he had to serve in the war, invading Italy then Greece then France with the Polish Navy. After the war he couldn’t go home because the Russians would kill him if he returned. So he moved to Scotland and lived a happy life.

Even though he had lost his mother and father, lost his country and could hardly speak any English he managed to start a successful business called Stepek and married a Scottish woman, my Grandma. He even ran Hamilton Accies and gave lots and lots of help to homeless people in Hamilton. One lived with them for over a year and lots of others ate in their home with the family. He said people should help each other because he was helped when he needed it the most.

Now he is 82 years old and is surviving. He has had 3 strokes in the past two years. This is proof he is a strong man.

January 2005