“In 1940 there was a knock on the door,” Krystyna says.
Krystyna and her family, like hundreds of thousands of other Polish people, were rounded up on a bitingly cold night by the Russian military and Ukrainian police and bundled into cattle trains for a month-long journey into the frozen forests of the Ural mountains.
“The train had no windows,” Krystyna says. “There was a hole for the bathroom and there was a coal stove in the corner, and that was about it. There were about 60 people in each carriage and all we had to eat was bread.”
Krystyna’s family were put to work harvesting timber in a Russian labor camp on a starvation diet.
“We didn’t think about anything else apart from food,” Krystyna remembers. “We had nothing to eat, just black bread.”
The family spent two dreadful years there, until Germany attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Stalin, in need of as many allies as he could find, then suddenly released tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war, including Krystyna and her family.
Krystyna’s father, Andrzej, along with many thousands of others, joined a new army, the Polish Army in Exile. But all of the women and children were left behind and since Hitler had now invaded eastern Poland they couldn’t return to their homes.
Krystyna, her mother Walentyna, and siblings squeezed on to a boat full of sick, malnourished deportees and sailed across the Caspian Sea, to find work picking cotton near the Uzbek capital, Tashkent.
There their diet expanded to include flat bread, blackberries, hard cheese and dried melon. But life was still very hard, so Walentyna made the heartbreaking decision to send her children – with the exception of her eldest child, Alice, who was too old – to the safety of the Persian orphanages set up by the Polish Army in Exile.
I wanted to be in the army to drive a car- that was my own stupidity – you see if you’re young, you’re stupid
To reach Iran the children traveled by boat across the Caspian and then joined a convoy of lorries on the journey south to Tehran. They did not know then that they would never see their mother or eldest sister again.
After the dismal conditions they had endured in Russia and Uzbekistan, life in Tehran was much improved. There were clean beds and there was plenty of food – but Krystyna fell terribly ill.
Believed to be dead, her body was sent to the mortuary, where only by chance a nurse saw Krystyna move and realized that she was still alive.
“I had pneumonia in two sides of my lungs,” Krystyna says. “I was half dead, so I don’t remember too much in Tehran.”
When she recovered, Krystyna arranged for her brothers, Teddy and Chester, to join the cadets and sent sister, Natalie, who was just eight, to an orphanage in Africa. Then she enlisted in the Polish Army in Exile.
Click “Next” to find out how her army experience went.
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