Helena was born on 5 August 1927 on the ‘Osada Krechowiecka’ military settlement in Równe district, Wołyn province, Poland. Her parents were Klemens and Maria (née Dudelzak). She was the eldest of five siblings: Helena, Ryszard, Henryk, Aniela and Michal.

At the onset of WW2, the Germans invaded Poland from the west, and the Russians invaded  from the east two weeks later. On 10 February 1940, the Russians deported her family to the Dziedowka forced work camp in Siberia, where they endured starvation, bedbugs and lice.

In June 1941, Germany turned on its ally, Russia. Stalin then quickly changed tactics and allied himself with the west so that the allies could help him defeat the Germans. This led to the signing of the Sikorski-Majewski agreement that called for the freeing of Poles imprisoned in POW camps and labour camps in the USSR, and the formation of a Polish Army in the southern USSR.

 

The news of this ‘amnesty’ did not reach every camp, but where it did become known, the families soon made plans to make their way south to reach the army. For most, this meant walking thousands of kilometers and only occasionally getting on a train for part of the journey. Many did not make it, and those who did were emaciated skeletons by the time they got there.

After several weeks, they reached Tashkent, where her four-year-old brother died in her arms. Then they were sent to the Kiziol-Ziol state farm near Turkestan. Her father joined the Polish Army; her mother was left with four children and nothing to live on. To save her children, she handed them over to the Polish orphanage in Turkestan, with the hope that they would be safe and survive. She was left alone with eight-year-old Aniela who was ill. Shortly afterwards, she died from typhus leaving Aniela who survived and returned to Poland in 1946. Meanwhile, Helena, Ryszard, and Henryk evacuated to Persia with the orphanage. 

 

They were sent to the Polish Valivade camp in India. Helena regarded the years she spent there as some of her happiest. Contrary to today’s refugee camps around the world, the Polish refugee camps were equipped with schools – elementary, middle school, high school, and a technical school; a YMCA with sports and recreational facilities and a reasonable library; a cinema covered by a roof on stilts but without walls; and an open-air theatre. There was a co-op bakery, and a co-op store sold a modest supply of sundries along with foodstuffs from the settlement’s impressive farm. To make the settlement as self-sufficient as possible, the farm combined crops native to Africa as well as – climate permitting – old favourites from Poland.

 

In September 1947, Helena and Ryszard came to England to join their father who had ended up there with the Polish 2nd Corps. They lived in military barracks in Cark, Lancashire.

Helena soon found work in a munitions factory in Chorley where she met her future husband, Franciszek Jaskowski. They were married in 1948, and settled in Blackburn, Lancashire. They had five children: Halinka, Elzbieta, Artur, Andrzej, and Robert.

Helena helped in the Parish, in the Club, in the Catholic Centre; she belonged to the choir and to the Polish Combatants’ Association. She was the Headteacher of the Polish Saturday School in Blackburn for many years.
 

She passed away on 8 February 2016 at the age of 89 years.

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Copyright: Jaskowski family

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