Waclaw Filipek was born on 25 October 1917. On 5 December 1939, he was arrested by the Russians for illegally crossing the new border and sent to a slave labour camp in Siberia.  When the ‘amnesty’ was declared, he was released on 30 September 1941. He journeyed south to join the Polish army that was forming there. He evacuated to Persia with the army and served with the Polish 2nd Corps in Persia. He later learned that his brother Stanislaw had also been deported to Siberia and had served in the Polish 2nd Corps in the Middle East and in Italy.

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On 11 June 1942, Waclaw was transferred to the Polish Air Force in the UK, where he served until 1947. On 25 January 1944, Waclaw married Hilda Rose Walduck. They had a son named Stanislaw and a daughter named Anna. Waclaw and his family emigrated to Alberta, Canada in February 1952. They settled in Calgary and later moved to Edmonton.

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Waclaw was awarded the following medals:

• The Polish Air Force Medal

• The British Defence Medal

• The British 1939-45 War Medal

• The Polish Siberian Cross

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The following was written by Waclaw’s son Stanislaw:

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Dad and I were digging potatoes from their warm hills and laying them on the ground to cure. The carrots could wait for another week before they would need to be gathered and gently washed. The drying vines of peas and beans on their trellises made mouse-like skittering noises as they rubbed together in the stir of air.

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At first, we chatted and laughed in the warmth of the day. Soon our words gave way to an easy, comfortable silence. Lost in my own thoughts, I already tasted the sweet bounty of our garden.

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A sharp breeze, reminder of colder days to come, made its way over the fence to breathe a message among the dead, fallen leaves. For a single moment, I took pleasure in the crunchy, rusting noises as the leaves caught in crevices of the land forming ink blot patterns. Abruptly, my father struggled to his feet, dropped the garden fork, covered his ears and in a voice shaking with dread, declared “No, no, I can’t stand that noise. It sounds like clacking of people’s bones.”

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I stood, holding my breath, and stared into his eternity. When I could breathe again, I asked “What are you talking about, Dad?” But somewhere deep in me I knew I didn’t want to hear his answer.

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“The dead leaves; that noise”, he said. The people and children made that noise when they were walking. They were so thin, their bones made that noise when they walked. I heard them from a long way when they came into the camp for food. I hate hearing their bones now” he said, his voice trembling.

 

My dad hadn’t talked of the war for a long, long time and never about this chilling memory. In my everyday world I had forgotten this man’s wounded soul and the nightmare shadows in his sad, blue eyes. For a while I didn’t have any words for him and, as I had learnt to do in other times, I prepared for my journey into his dark night of things past. I made the choice to share his intimacy. I knew that I would be changed; I would never enjoy the sound of rustling leaves again.

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But that would come later. Now, I would become part of his dark places. I shifted my feet on the soft, rich soil that now felt like quicksand and asked him softly, What happened Dad?”

In a terse voice, he said “I made it to Buzuluk where the Polish Army had just left.

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The Red Cross and the Czech soldiers were there. They had food for us. We were so hungry. There was so much food on the tables and real cigarettes. I could smell them – not those terrible Russian horkas. They were on a white tablecloth. A few ragged souls rushed past me to the table making small, whimpering sounds as they fell on the offerings. Soon they were writhing and twisting on the ground, the fatal effects of normal food in a starved body. “No one could help them. Why did those soldiers, in their clean uniforms with real leather boots, do this to us?” he asked.

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“I suppose they didn’t know, they thought they were being kind, Dad” I replied.

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In a flat voice he said “maybe.” Still, after all these years he needed an answer to this unintended cruelty and then, perhaps, its memory would be at rest. He described mounds of rich brown meat on china platters. He hadn’t seen china plates for so long.

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“They looked so beautiful on the tablecloth, I remembered home” he said. He tried to remember what this meat might taste like, but the smell was sickening. Next to the plates of meat were fruit and bread. He looked around quickly and then slyly stuffed the soft pieces into his pockets, to be eaten slowly and savoured, later in private.

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Then came that sound. Long before the lines of children, women, men, and the old were seen, he heard the noise; a hollow, rattling, dry, dead noise. It made him shiver and he couldn’t stop even when he saw them filling the horizon. “They were so wretched, like noisy shadows. They were skeletons with all their bones sticking out. The poor children; like shriveled leaves swaying in the breeze.

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They could hardly stand. There were so many of them and I looked like that”, he said in a hollow voice. He explained they were the survivors from Siberia, the Inhuman Land and were all going home to freedom. He stopped for a few moments, his harrowed gaze looking far into the distance of this abyss. He drew a long, deep breath. Abruptly, he jabbed the tines of the garden fork into the ground as if breaking the bitter tendrils that held his past, saying 

“We’ll finish the potatoes tomorrow.” He had returned to his second life again. I had my father back. It would be another four years before I would travel on this dark journey with him again; it would be the last time.

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Autumn would never be the same for me.

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The following is a transcript of a a conversation with Waclaw’s sister, Maria Jakubowska (nee Filipek), at her home in Iwierzyce, on 17 October 1992.

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My father and I travelled by car with Kazimierz (Maria’s son) from Rzeszów to Iwierzyce early in the afternoon. Auntie Maria was outside the farmhouse to meet us when we arrived. She sent Kazimierz to the house and led my dad and me to the small vegetable garden at the side of the house. She knelt down among the carrots (they didn’t grow leafy veggies as the fallout from Chernobyl affected them but not, apparently, root vegetables – likewise, all the milk was boiled first before using); she looked around twice. We knelt in front of her. Auntie Maria started talking to my dad. My dad said that his sister wanted us to know what happened to Joseph (their younger brother). 

 

Following is the translated version of what Maria told my dad:

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Our father’s sister, Maria, was 88 when she died. She died the day Krystyna (Maria’s daughter) was born. I inherited Jakubowski land. Our mother gave Jan a house on Filipek land. Uncle Jan sold the house, so he now does not have any right to claim the Filipek land. But, I, being a Jakubowski by marriage, cannot claim the Filipek land either. Jan wants to buy his house back, but the owner wants the same price as Americans would pay – $50,000.00 US dollars. If Jan was able to buy his house back, he would be able to claim the Filipek lands. No one seems to know if the original deeds still exist (we have to check out land titles in Rzeszów). With the intense fighting by both the Germans and Russians in the area during WWII, it may be that the land grants, which were registered in Iwierzyce, were destroyed.

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When the Germans invaded the area and heavy fighting (bombardments and battles) took place, Aunt Maria, Joseph, Jan, me, and my mother and father, took the cows and escaped into the forests to the south, 30 km. from Iwierzyce. Sometimes we hid in the forests around the farm. The Germans traveled the roads in threes on motorcycles with sidecars and machine guns shooting anyone they came across.

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The Germans came to the Filipek farm and knew that father owned the farm and demanded he present himself to be taken for slave labor. I told the Germans that my dad was not there and that the two elderly people (my mum and dad) in the house were just farm labourers and did not live there. My mum and dad had to live away from the farm for days at a time and had to sleep in the forest. As most families had to give up a person or persons for slave labour, the family had to make a choice; Joseph, then 17, was sent as slave.

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The Germans blew up the house and a German took over the farm under the German plan of re-settlement. We, the family, had to work for the German who had taken over the farm. The work was very had, and we had to live in a labourer’s cottage. When the Russians came over the border, the battles started again, and the family had to run to safety. After the Russians came, they took all the land in the district and took all the livestock, crops and what was left after the Germans left. The early years after the war were very hard and we were very hungry.

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About two weeks later, with dad translating, Kazimierz told me that when he was a child during the 1950’s and early 60’s he remembers their house being set on fire and burnt to the ground on three different occasions. I asked him who did it. He stated he didn’t know but it was the communists (I have since found out that in the southeastern area of Poland – formerly Galicia, the Ukrainian freedom fighters raided often during the 1950’s.

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Source:https://www.cphsalberta.org/heroes/waclaw-filipek/

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