Who Art in Heaven… or the Other Place!

I wrote an essay about my father for a creative writing group I joined in Newcastle-under-Lyme in 2017. It was in the period when I was undertaking much voluntary work, prior to returning to professional employment. We were set a task to write five hundred words based around the word “resolution.” The essay here is based upon stories my father told me about his late childhood / early adulthood.

Closer to the truth is that I wrote the essay for my mother, who used to say I was a chip off the old block.

Essay

​My father, Jozef, was born in the southeastern flank of Poland in 1928. On 1st September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded his fatherland from the west; sixteen days later on 17th September 1939 (when Jozef was eleven) the Soviet Union invaded Poland from nearer to his home in the east. On 10th February 1940, all of the people in his village were arrested by Soviet soldiers and given thirty minutes notice to prepare to leave. Jozef and his family were shipped over 6,000km on cattle trucks in painfully cramped conditions to Talmenka in Siberia (Russia). The journey took seven weeks on the trans-Siberian railway, where he was surrounded by the dying and deceased – the Soviet soldiers didn’t permit the train to stop to allow the dead to be taken away. Jozef told me that cattle, which the train was intended for, had more dignity than the Poles on their journey to death. Jozef summarised the predicament as “Being shipped off into the cold and bleak unknown – thousands of miles from home, where overseers treated them with revulsion.”

After a year in Siberia, Jozef’s elder sister Veronica (she would have been my auntie) died at the age of nineteen (Jozef was thirteen), after being separated from her family. Soviet authorities recorded that Veronica died of malnutrition; Jozef also had a younger sister, Sophia, die of dysentery while in Siberia. Amelia (my grandmother) wanted visual confirmation that Veronica was dead, so she sent Jozef on a six-hour train journey to the mortuary. Jozef clung to rails on the outside of a cattle truck (seemingly the optimal mode of travel in the Soviet Union) in bitterly cold conditions. When Jozef arrived at his destination, he had partially lost consciousness and his arms were frozen to the carriage, he couldn’t move at all and needed a bystander to help snap him away.

Jozef had arrived late at night and there was no lighting in the mortuary, so he had to feel around the numerous dead bodies until he sensed a birthmark which he knew was on Veronica’s thigh. Jozef was a farm labourer, not a doctor, but the sight of his emaciated sister (she’d likely starved to death, not suffered a fatal illness) confirmed the sad news he’d been sent there to determine. I believe this episode demonstrates Jozef’s resolution.

In June 1941, the German Nazis turned their aggression towards the Soviet Union. While withering under the onslaught of Operation Barbarossa, the Soviets ‘generously’ released their Polish captives, so that they could fight their now common enemy. At the age of thirteen, my father forged his age to fourteen in an application to join the Polish Free Army (PFA) and give Amelia one less mouth to feed; death from starvation would have been the likely outcome for one of her children in late 1941. Jozef’s first posting after joining the PFA was in Palestine, where it might be expected that the most significant changes to his living environment would be the temperature, the desert sand and the sea. Jozef advised me that certainly wasn’t the case, he now had the opportunity to see the horizon for the first time in over two years. My father said it was by far the biggest adjustment to his life, after living in the depths of horizon free Siberian forests.

Jozef emigrated with his family to the UK after the war. Despite being a gifted communicator, he appeared content to take unskilled labour positions. Jozef used his oratory skills in representing other Polish immigrants when they had cause to be challenged by authorities over often trivial matters. Jozef was never more passionate than when defending someone who he felt had been unfairly treated. Jozef displayed contempt for any party which he felt was treating a fellow immigrant unfairly, he was resolute in their defence.

I’ve attempted to correlate Jozef’s essential qualities to some of my own characteristics. I was determined enough to be successful by many yardstick measures in life, such as those listed here – while these are substantial achievements, they DON’T evidence my resolution.

  • I achieved a first-class university degree
  • I held senior professional roles in both the public and private sectors
  • I was recognised as an expert in my field (IT security) by my peers

I’m telling this story in December 2017, as a happy and healthy forty-eight year old. In July 2015 I was injured in a bicycle accident, whereby I suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and was airlifted to a hospital. At one point the critical care doctors advised my closest family to expect my imminent death, and had relevant paperwork signed for organ donation.

In just four months, I rather rapidly overcame the clinical limitations resulting from my brain injury and was discharged home from hospital after learning again to walk and use a toilet without assistance. The really hard part began in earnest when I attempted to get on with living a normal life. I was still mentally limited in so many ways it’s not worth starting to describe them. I used to be a professional high-flyer, but now it seemed that my high-flying was book-ended by a trip in an air ambulance helicopter.

I refused to allow myself to appear miserable, never-mind become depressed. My resolution pricked my conscience into driving me. I knew my loved ones had been prepared to sacrifice their better lives to care for me with no guarantees (or even likelihood) of a positive outcome. There was no question of allowing myself to become a burden upon them after I’d witnessed their determination to care for me. I’m content I’ve evidenced how bloody-minded I am, or I could put it another way, I have demonstrated resolution.

Three years after writing the above essay, I discovered that in 2008 I’d transcribed conversations with my father about some of his wartime experiences.

Random Muses From / About My Father

Funeral Eulogy

My sister, Susan, gave a eulogy at our father’s funeral in May 2016.

Jozef’s Mantra

Whenever my father and I were working together on a task, he wouldn’t contemplate putting anything off for even a day. He used to say “There is no tomorrow”, it was his mantra for the way he lived his life. I feel that observing my father’s doggedness rubbed off on my becoming a purposeful, results-oriented and gainful person.

Humility Begins at Home

When I was sixteen, I was arrested for shoplifting and held in police custody. While collecting me from the police station, my father told me how he’d had to leave my weeping, heartbroken mother at home. My father recalled how my mother had given all of her love and support to me, and her reward was that she’d parented a common thief. It was the most knowing way I could imagine to deal with the situation, it completely re-orientated me.

Russian Suspicion

My father always said that Russian citizens were as good as those of any other nation. However, my father felt that Soviet / Russian politicians were pure evil, personified by Joseph Stalin, who he said had moral equivalence to Adolf Hitler. My father often associated World War II aggression to Russia, as that was his first-hand experience. He’d seen his sister die due to them, which made it personal. My father recounted how perhaps five million Ukrainians starved to death due to Soviet agricultural policy during World War II, even greater numbers than the murderous plague of Nazis. My father attributed most major post World War II conflict to Soviet influence, such as the Korean and Vietnam wars. He recounted numerous times that on one night in October 1962, he kissed my mother goodnight and told her how much he loved her – this was during the period of Cuban missile crisis where a nuclear war, and the likelihood of collateral death, was a distinct possibility. My father could never understand why the hammer and sickle, or the term CCCP (equivalent to Soviet Union – USSR), became trendy in the 1970s as my father always associated these emblems with their evil connotations.

While with young friends aged between twelve and fifteen in a Siberian forest, he played hide and seek with a Soviet soldier. The soldier shot dead a friend when he found him, my father stayed hidden under a fallen tree while the soldier walked across the trunk.

The BBC produced a narrated documentary about Poland, entitled “The Invention of Poland.” Episode 3 was labelled as ‘Stalin from the right, Hitler from the left.’

WikiPedia Article

During World War II, after the Soviet invasion of Poland the Soviet Union occupied vast areas of eastern Poland followed by further large-scale forcible deportations to Siberia, Kazakhstan and other remote areas of the Soviet Union.

Birth Date and Place

​My father was born in Chortkiv, Poland on 24th July 1928 – about three hundred miles east of Krakow. He spent most of his early childhood in nearby towns by the name of Teklowka and Ivane Puste. Following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland during the first month of World War II, this region became part of Ukraine. The arrow on the first map indicates the approximate location of Chortkiv in 2023, the second map shows the portion of Poland (dark green colour) which was incorporated into Ukraine from 1939.

While in Siberia, he lied about his date of birth on application papers to join the Polish free army. He changed it to 13th November 1927, making him eligible to serve as a fourteen-year-old. Despite all of his ensuing identity paperwork such as immigration documents, passports and driving licences, as well as his retirement age / status referring to 13.11.1927, he only mentioned his date of birth to me as 24.07.1928.

My father was demobbed to England and applied to become naturalised, he eventually became a UK citizen in the late 1960s.

Poles / Polaks

My father didn’t get the opportunity to return to Poland until 1977, thirty-eight years after leaving in 1940 as an eleven-year-old. My father took great pride in his Polish ancestry, as I do also. I have begun distilling this interest in my teenage daughter and am delighted that it is already working, she told me that she enjoys the fact that she’s a little different.

We had a family friend (Jo Woch) who in 1944 fought for the Polish infantry with the Allies at the World War II battle of Monte Cassino in Italy (roughly between Naples and Rome). Mr Woch had his right elbow shattered in a gunshot wound, which caused him discomfort for the remainder of his life and resulted in him wearing a special brace. Regardless, whenever there was building work which required plastering or pointing of cement on outside walls, he was always the person to do it. I recall when I bought my first house, Jo Woch did all of the plastering of my two chimney breasts and pointing a part of the outside wall which required him to use a full ladder to reach. Like lots of Polish workaholics I knew of, he didn’t complain or consider reasons why he couldn’t do something – he simply got on and did it.

When I started work as a seventeen-year-old engineering apprentice, I was given the nickname of ‘cabbage eater’ on account of the seemingly primitive food association with my Polish ancestry. In defiance of the crude stereotyping, I eat cabbage whenever the opportunity arises. 😀

Uncle Karol – my Father’s Elder Brother

The following is a recollection from my Uncle Karol, to his daughter Sophia (my cousin). “While on the journey to Siberia, the train stopped at a station where Karol was told to get off and collect some food. Without any prior notification, the train set off and he had to run to catch it up. When he reached the carriage where his family was, he jumped onto a step and clung onto an outside rail. A Soviet guard was seemingly bemused by Karol’s efforts and repeatedly struck his hand with a spade in an attempt to make him let go, this continued for an agonising period. Karol told of how he clung on through the pain because he knew that if he fell off the train, alone in the depths of Siberian forests, he’d face certain death. He said that the guard eventually got bored of hitting him, enabling Karol to clamber back into the carriage.”

Vera Wozny

In May 2023, Susan and I helped produce the following video commemoration of our mother’s life.