My Family

My family – mother, stepfather, a younger brother and sister, two stepbrothers, and a brother from my mother’s marriage to my stepfather. Mother married twice. Her first husband (my father) suffered severe injuries in a motorcycle accident in 1964, and died a few weeks before my 10th birthday. Life suddenly became challenging, not least because my mother spoke only broken English. For the next 8 years, I was the translator for our family and helped to deal with all official correspondence.

Background – how my parents ended up living in England. Following the partitioning of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939, my mother and her family were deported to the East. Thus began an extraordinary ordeal that took them, and many thousands like them, on a journey stretching from Siberia to Pakistan, and beyond. Their male relatives endured a parallel journey; arrested, exiled, and held as prisoners of war. Countless numbers were summarily executed by the Red Army. They saw the Russian steppes, they were put to work in labour camps, they built sections of the trans-Siberian railway, they cleared forests, they toiled on collective farms. They knew hunger, exhaustion, disease and death.

Persecuted by the Soviet Union, Poland was to become its unexpected ally following the German invasion in 1941. A new Polish army, ‘The Anders Army’ was assembled in Palestine. For a brief moment, in Kazakhstan, families were reunited, before being evacuated; to India, to Britain, to Mexico and East Africa; and from there, across the world. The experiences of these Poles had consequences far reaching and enduring, both to Poland, to Polish identity, and to the families that survived; reverberating through generations.

The remarkable thing about my mother’s story is that, in Polish terms, it is not particularly unusual. Almost as remarkable is how little most of the indigenous British know about these stories. Large numbers of Poles have been living among us since the Second World War. Over 160,000-strong at the time, they made up the biggest group of political exiles to settle here since 1918.

The election of the first Polish pope, the rise of Solidarity (driving force behind the independence movement in Poland) and the downfall of communism all played a part in reviving a sense of pride in Polish roots among the second and third generations in the UK.

The original settlers kept alive the belief that one day they would return to an independent Poland. But relatively few lived long enough to see the collapse of communism and the election of Lech Wałesa as president of Poland in 1990.

Many of those who did outlive communist rule have returned on nostalgic and often painful journeys. For the majority, their former homes now lie in Ukraine or Belarus, and the Poland of a new millennium is not the place of idealised childhood memories. Few have gone back to live there permanently.