Palestine Diaries Of A Polish Schoolgirl

Acknowledgements

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1Bolesław and Maria Minkiewicz with their daughter Irena, Stefanpol, spring 1928

2The Minkiewicz family with Helena Drozdowicz (in the middle) on the bank of the River Dzisienka, 1936

3Maria Minkiewicz with her two daughters, Irena and Janina (c. 1935/1936)

4Bolesław Minkiewicz in the Polish Army uniform (the emblem of the ‘Christmas Tree’ Division present on his shoulder), 1944

5Maria and Bolesław Minkiewicz in military uniform, January 1944

6Janina Minkiewicz as a schoolgirl in Digglefold, South Rhodesia, December 1945

7Janina in South Rhodesia, May 1946

8The oldest photograph from the family album showing Maria Minkiewicz, aged 15, in the Cracovian costume during a school performance, Dzisna, December 1924

9Maria in Dzisna, age 17

10 Maria in the military uniform of the Polish Women’s Auxiliary Service, Egypt, 1943

11 Maria in nursing uniform in Great Britain, 1945/1946

12 Volunteers of the Polish Women’s Auxiliary Service, Egypt 1944 (in the centre – Maria Minkiewicz; below – her daughter Irena; second to the left in the top row – Emilia Drozdowicz, the younger sister of Maria)

13 Irena during exile in Kazakhstan, 1941

14 Irena leaving Kazakhstan in spring 1942

15 Irena in Tehran, 1942/1943

16 School of Junior Volunteers (Szkoła Młodszych Ochotniczek, SMO) in Nazareth, Palestine, Irena’s Gymnasium

17 A portrait of Irena taken by a colleague on the beach at Lake Tiberias, Palestine

18 School pupils, including Irena, with the teacher priest on the steps of the school, 1944

19 After a walk with friends in the Palestine countryside, Irena in the middle, 1946

20 During a walk in the serpentines above Nazareth. Irena and her best friend, 1946

21 Cadets parade in Barbara, 1946

22 Last days at school, Irena in her school uniform, May 1947

23 Studying for the exams in the fresh Palestinian air, spring 1947

24 Final examinations for the certificate of completion of secondary education (matura), Nazareth, May 1947

25 Irena during examinations (matura), May 1947

26 Irena’s photograph required for the certificate of the completion of secondary education, May 1947

27 The ship ‘Asturias’ bringing Polish émigrés from Palestine to Great Britain, autumn 1947

28 Janina and Irena as students of the University of Wrocław, Poland, 1948

29 Irena with her husband Andrzej in their student days, Wrocław, Poland, 1951

30 Irena, a university graduate, starting her first job as a secondary school teacher, 1953

All the photographs are from family albums and the copyright of all illustrations belongs to the author.

The photograph of the painting by H. Perry showing S.S. ‘Asturias’ was given as a souvenir to all passengers (including Irena) on the homeward voyage to the UK in July 1947.

LIST OF MAPS:

Map 1 A pre-war map of Vilnius voivodeship showing Stefanpol, not far from Dzisna (modified from Graffer, 1937: ‘Map of Wilno Voivodeship’)

Map 2 The pre- and post-war (1945) outlines of the Polish borders (the map made by the author)

Map 3 A map of Palestine from 1945 (modified from ‘Palestine in 1945’, www.britishforcesinpalestine )

ABBREVIATIONS

Brexit The decision and process of the UK leaving the European Union

NAAFI An organisation providing leisure and catering facilities to suppoirt the British Forces and their families at home and abroad

NKVD Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the Soviet Police and secret service

PAFW Polish Armed Forces in the West

PE Physical Exercise

PWAS Polish Women’s Auxilliary Services (PSK; Pomocnicza Służba Kobiet)

SMO Szkoła Młodszych Ochotniczek, the School of Junior Volunteers

The 2nd WW The Second World War

USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

WAFAS Women’s Air Force Auxiliary Service

WiN ‘Wolność i Niezawisłość’, ‘Freedom and Independence’, an organisation fighting the influence of Communism in Poland in the 1940s and 1950s

FOREWORD

‘The past is never dead’

William Faulkner

This book tells the story of my mother’s life during the 2nd World War (2nd WW), in itself remarkable but not without equal, shared by many of her Polish compatriots.

The main part of this work contains the Palestine diaries of my mother, Irena Czerska (née Minkiewicz), translated into English by me, her daughter, Isabella Moore, the author of this book.

The narrative in the first part of this work starts with the description of the pre-war realities of life in Kresy (Eastern Borderlands) at the furthest Polish eastern outpost, and the account follows the Gehenna of exile in Russia, through to happy times in Palestine.

The outlines of the family history are pieced together from the facts provided by my mother during her life and by other members of the family, as well as information gleaned from the vast literature on the subject of Polish exiles during the 2nd WW. By no means is this an extensive analysis of the historical facts, as these are provided in many excellent books. This is an attempt to show how history shapes, distorts and sometimes destroys beyond imagination individual human lives. In order to illustrate this point, I used the information relating to members of my wider family and wrote short accounts depicting the life stories of my grandmother and her siblings.

My mother was not a natural raconteur. She liked to reminisce about her life in Nazareth, as these few short years spent there represented the happiest time in her life, as she frequently claimed. All other uncomfortable episodes were cloaked in silence, hardly ever recalled, seldom revisited.

There is an old Polish saying – ‘ocalić od zapomnienia’ (‘to save from oblivion’) – which is my guiding aim for this effort of putting pen to paper. I hope that younger family generations, particularly those who never learned Polish, will be able to gain some knowledge and understanding of the complex family history, unique in itself, and at the same time so representative of the history of the Polish nation.

PART ONE:

FAMILY AND HISTORY

CHAPTER 1:

THE PHOTOGRAPH

The idea of this book arose from the discovery of an old family photograph of a young couple with a small child, around 2 years old, standing between them on a rickety garden bench. The woman, at least six months pregnant, while sitting on the bench, holds a huge bunch of blossoming lilacs in her lap. This suggests that the photograph was taken some time in late May when the lilac flowers in North-East Europe. The little girl has a sulky and defiant look, in contrast to a serene smile on her mother’s face. A dapper, moustachioed man, hair neatly combed back, stands on the other side of the bench, holding a walking stick in his right hand. He sports a loose, white shirt, checked breeches and knee-high riding boots. The woman, despite her advanced pregnancy, is smartly dressed with a long string of pearls around her neck and a fashionable 1920s hairstyle.

Who are these people gathered for a photograph around a rickety bench? These are my grandparents, Grandfather Bolesław Minkiewicz (1900-1966) and Grandmother Maria (1909-1993). The little girl is my mother, Irena Czerska (née Minkiewicz).

We don’t know who took this photograph or where it was taken. It is likely that this took place at their estate in Stefanpol in eastern Poland. My grandfather was then 28 years old, while his young, expectant wife was only 19.

As we know, photographs can’t lie and in this snapshot there is a single revealing piece of information, knocking on its head the old family understanding. This small but important detail relates to my mother’s date of birth. The photograph confirms that my mother was a year older than stated on all her official post-war documents. No doubt the original birth certificate lost in the wartime turmoil was replaced by an oral declaration. Could there be any possible manipulation of information during the horrific wartime experiences? I will never know. This photograph was found after my mother’s death, dusty and abandoned behind the dresser in her bedroom.

Bolesław and Maria Minkiewicz with their daughter Irena, Stefanpol, spring 1928

Is it possible to imagine what this young couple might have felt when this photograph was taken? What emotions crossed their minds, what hopes for the future they had at this particular moment in their married life? My grandfather, a self-assured young man, and my grandmother, with her Mona Lisa-like smile, serenely contemplating a happy life ahead. Surely no one could expect a total destruction of their privileged existence and the attempted annihilation of the Polish nation in the stormy years of the 2nd WW.

CHAPTER 2:

FAMILY

My Great-Grandmother Anna Drozdowicz (1886-1972) lived in Ościewicze, an estate not far from Dzisna, a town representing the furthest eastern outpost of Poland on the border with the Soviet Union. Her husband Feliks was born in 1870 and died tragically in an accident in 1939. They had eight children, one of whom, Bronisław, died in early infancy.

My grandmother Maria (Marysia) was their eldest daughter, born in Ościewicze on 16th August 1909. The oldest of their sons was Jan (born in 1911), followed by Romuald (born in 1912), Władysław, and the youngest son, Leopold, born in 1916. There were also two much younger daughters: Emilia born in 1921 and Helena in 1923.

My intention is to describe briefly the life stories of some of my great-uncles and aunts. These were courageous and remarkable individuals and their stories are representative of the nightmare situation which befell the Polish nation during the 2nd WW.

I wish these members of my wider family could have told me personally about their war experiences. The stories of their lives are sketchy and incomplete, as they are pieced together from the information present in various war archives or incidentally mentioned by individual family members.

Uncle Romek and Aunt Leonia (Lola)

Thanks to the meticulously held archives of the RAF, I was able to piece together a reasonably detailed account about the fate of my Great-Uncle Romek (Romuald) Drozdowicz. Born in February 1912, he married Leonia (née Miszuto, born 24th January 1916) in 1938. As a young couple they stayed on the parental estate Ościewicze. Following the tragic death of his father in 1939, Romek took on the role of head of the household, as the two older siblings, his sister Maria and the older brother Jan, had already settled elsewhere. The younger brother Władysław was disabled (apparently after a childhood accident) and in need of constant care provided by his mother.

The second younger brother Poluś (Leopold) enlisted into the Polish Army and was stationed in Komorowo. So the responsibility of running and day-to-day management of the estate fell on the shoulders of Romek, by then only 27 years of age. Having obtained some technical qualifications, Romek also established himself as a supervisor of the local road building programme.

On 17th September 1939 the Soviet Army invaded Poland. The Polish Army with the small units of the Polish Frontier Protection stationed along the border, and Poles in general, were taken by surprise. Many of the Polish military personnel were killed, some escaped to Latvia, only after its annexation by Soviets to find themselves in various Russian POW labour camps. (1)

The mass deportations of Polish families from Kresy soon followed. This hostile Soviet activity started at the beginning of 1940. The first such deportation from the region of Dzisna took place on 10th February 1940. It included members of various professions, officials and farmers who took part in the war of independence of 1920. (2)

During the night of 9th / 10th February 1940 the family of my Great-Grandmother Anna, together with Władek, Romek, Emilia and Lola, were deported by the Soviets. (3) Their road to hell, a train journey in cattle trucks to Siberia, lasted several weeks. The overwhelming memory of this journey was persistent hunger and the dire need for food and protection from the cold. From then on followed the years of deprivation, cruelty and humiliation when they, the members of the privileged class, ended as homeless and stateless war refugees. Their initial journey ended up in the region of Archangel (Arkhangelsk) where, after the trip along the frozen river, they arrived in the place called Yuznaya Kargova. Those who were strong enough were drafted into the hard labour of felling trees in the forest in the Arctic Circle, 12 hours a day and often in chest-high snow.

Soon after their arrival Romek was arrested and imprisoned by the Soviet secret service, NKVD, for his alleged anti-Soviet activities, dating to the time before the war. Any excuse, true or fabricated, was enough for the Russians to imprison their perceived enemies. The family, consisting of three women and disabled Władek, managed to survive this harsh environment, sickness and hunger.

Following the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement in July 1941, they were released from the camp and together with thousands of incarcerated Poles left the Soviet Union. (4) Great-Grandmother Anna and Władek journeyed through the Middle East. After a short spell in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, they were transferred to Kidugala, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in Eastern Africa, which became their home for the next five years. (5)

Lola and Emilia joined the Polish Women’s Auxiliary Service and together with the military units were transferred to Palestine in the autumn of 1942 and stationed in Rehovot.

Romek, together with many other Polish political prisoners, was released from the camp with great difficulty and only after the intervention of General Sikorski. He left the inhuman Soviet land at the end of summer 1942, and after a journey through Iran and Iraq, reached Palestine (then under the British Mandate) where he was stationed at the base camp Quastina, nowadays in the Gaza Strip. He managed to establish contact with his wife Lola who was also stationed in Palestine at that time.

At this point in the family saga we need to mention briefly the birth of the Polish Armed Forces in the Middle East (known also as the Polish Armed Forces in the West; PAFW), as both the family’s fate and that of the military, were intertwined through the years of war.

In 1944 the 2nd Corps was the major operational unit of the Polish Armed Forces under the command of General Władysław Anders. The 2nd Corps was created in 1941/1942 and included predominantly thousands of Polish soldiers released from the Soviet gulags and labour camps, very keen to join this newly established Polish Army. Following the agreement between the Polish Government in Exile and Stalin, the Polish soldiers released by the Soviets formed a 70,000-strong Army, initially stationed in Totskoye, then in Yangi-Yul near Tashkent, and later in Buzuluk in Uzbekistan. (6)

After the termination of the Soviet support for the Poles (when the Soviet Katyń massacre was discovered), the troops were withdrawn to the Middle East (Iran). On 18th of March 1942 Stalin granted permission to evacuate Polish soldiers and civilians across the Caspian Sea to Pahlevi, a small town in Persia (now Iran), then under British control. From there, they were moved to Palestine and Egypt where they joined the 3rd Carpathian Division formed with the soldiers who had escaped through Romania and Hungary from occupied Poland. This newly created Polish Army, the 2nd Corps, fought under the command of the 8th British Army in all major Allied operations against Germany, around the Mediterranean Sea, in the Middle East, North Africa and Italy (notably the Battle of Monte Cassino on 18th May 1944, the Battle of Ancona in July 1944, and in the final Allied Offensive in March-April 1945 with the liberation of Bologna on 21st April 1945). Over 11,000 Polish soldiers lost their lives during the Italian Campaign. (7) (8)

Let us return to the story of my Great-Uncle Romuald (Romek). He fought during the German invasion of Poland in 1939, later was deported and imprisoned by the Russians, and following the amnesty declared in 1941, joined the British Army in the Middle East.

In spring 1943 Romek was drafted into and trained by the Royal Air Force, and in the autumn of that year transported to England. Lola followed her husband and also travelled to England in 1943, where, after some training in Manchester, she was stationed in Newton Camp in Nottinghamshire, working for the Women’s Air Force Auxiliary Service (WAFAS), preparing parachutes.

In the meantime, Romek was trained as an air gunner and joined the 300th Bomber Division, with bases in Ingham and Faldingworth. He took part in bomber sorties over Northern France, Belgium, Holland and Germany. From March 1944 he was in a team operating a Lancaster bomber, a heavy, 30-ton aeroplane, dispatched in support of the Normandy landings.

On 2nd January 1945 around 500 bombers, among those several Lancaster bombers operated by the Polish crews, took part in a sortie and a massive air raid on the German town of Nuremberg. This was a well-known site for the Nazi production of various war equipment such as planes, engines for U-boats and tanks.

The heavy Allied bombers were escorted only by 7 assault planes. Ten bombers were lost that night. Among them was a Polish Lancaster PB823 BH-T with a crew of seven, shot down during its return flight from the sortie. Romek was among the crew, apparently volunteering to replace a sick colleague. The Polish bomber was shot down by the German fighter, Hauptmann Martin Becker, known as ‘Tino’. The aircraft exploded and crashed near three French villages, south-east of Longuyon, not far from the border with Luxembourg. (9)

The bodies of the crew were initially buried at a temporary US military location in Grand-Failly, only to be reburied later at the Pierrepoint French National Cemetery and finally reinterred in 1964 in the Polish military section of the Cimetière de Dieuze, in the department Moselle of the Lorraine region of Eastern France. (10)

A war memorial with the names of the seven crew members was erected in November 2003 in one of the villages, Ville-au-Montois, near the site of the original crash. All the crew of the Polish bombers wore the official RAF uniform and belonged to the Squadron 300 of the Polish Air Force.

Between 1939 and 1945, 1,900 Polish airmen lost their lives and destroyed over 1,000 enemy planes. (11)

Aunt Lola, by then a widow, met her future husband, Stanisław Stępień, in Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire. They settled in Shipley on the outskirts of Bradford. Lola worked at the Bradford textile mill. Their daughter Barbara was born in 1956, read social studies at university, and worked as a social services development manager in the Shipley area, supporting many Polish families through her work. Sadly, Lola passed away in August 2014 after long suffering from complex health problems. Stan (Stanisław) died in spring 2015.

Great-Uncle Leopold (Poluś)

Poluś (Leopold) Drozdowicz, born in 1916, died in the United States at the age of 68 on 29th December 1984. He was the youngest son of Feliks and Anna Drozdowicz.

Poluś enlisted in the Polish Army before the war, and during the war was imprisoned in a German POW (prisoner of war) camp. In large measure thanks to his linguistic skills (he spoke Polish, Russian, German, French and English) he managed to escape and set off on a perilous journey across war-ravaged Europe, ending up in Britain. Once in Britain, he enlisted in the Polish 1st Armoured Division created in Scotland in 1942 under the command of General Stanisław Maczek.

In the summer of 1944 this division was transferred to Normandy, attached to the First Canadian Army. It was involved in the wartime operations known as the Battle of the Falaise Pocket. Subsequently it liberated a number of Dutch cities, amongst many of which were Ghent and Breda. The liberation of Breda in October 1944 is famously known for not causing any civilian casualties. In the years 1945-1947 the First Polish Division undertook occupation duties until it was disbanded in 1947. (12)

I don’t have any records stating in which of these battles was Poluś personally involved. Apparently he served as an aide-de-camp in the role of information/signals engineer.

While in Scotland he met his future wife, Margaret Lawrence, and they married in 1945. After the war a large majority of Polish soldiers did not return to Poland, which was by then under Soviet rule. Poluś helped in the effort of resettlement of Polish nationals on British soil.

For his war duties he received the highest Polish military decoration known as the Cross of Virtuti Militari (the War Order of Virtuti Militari, class V, the Silver Cross).

This cross was awarded to officers and ordinary soldiers for acts of outstanding courage and risk to life in the battlefield. More than 5,000 soldiers received this award for exceptional bravery in the 2nd WW. (13)

The cross of Virtuti Militari, the highest Polish military decoration for heroism during war activities, was created in 1792 by King Stanisław II Augustus Poniatowski (the last of the Polish kings). This award, consisting of 5 classes (from the golden class I, awarded only to a commander-in-chief who achieved major victories in war campaigns, to the silver, class V), is comparable to the British Victoria Cross. For example, the Polish General Władysław Anders, the Commander-in-Chief of the Polish 2nd Corps, received the category II merit of Virtuti Militari.

Interestingly, after the overthrow of the Communism in Poland in 1989, several such awards bestowed during the totalitarian system were revoked, like the one given to Leonid Brezhnev, head of the Communist Soviet Union in the 1970s. Since 1989 there were no new awards of Virtuti Militari and a new rule was introduced that this cross could only be given within the timescale of 5 years after any war.

Let us end this digression on the topic of the Virtuti Military Cross and return to the life story of my Great-Uncle Poluś.

In 1949 he became a full-time student at the Scottish Woollen Technical College. Following four years of study he was employed as a textile designer by Morton Sundour Fabrics Ltd. Some of his designs appeared in Vogue magazine and were used by Liberty’s in London. In 1962, having recognised his talent, the company Burlington Industries in the United States recruited Poluś as their textile designer. He emigrated with his family to the USA and settled in Clarksville, Mecklenburg County, Virginia. His three children, daughter Danuta and two sons, David and Chris, completed their education in Clarksville. In the USA Poluś was known as Paul and displayed a great love for the outdoors, showing a significant ability and knowledge about wild foods, such as mushrooms and edible plant roots. (14) It is likely that this ability to find edible plants in the forest or fields helped him to survive