Janina Kowalczewska | polishexiles

Janina KOWALCZWSKA

It was June of 1941, not long after Janina (nee Carewicz) Kowalczewska’s 17th birthday, when the Soviet secret police pounded at her parents' door in their town of Krynki in eastern Poland, where Janina's father had been mayor. Under Joseph Stalin's plans for ethnic cleansing of occupied Poland, Krynki was taken over as quarters for Red Army officers and their families. By some estimates, as many as two million Poles were deported from the Eastern Borderlands of Poland between 1939 and 1941.

The news from London became scarce as Janina and her family traveled east to Siberia by freight train for one week, then two, then three. They had only occasional sips of soup to eat and a hole in the floor for a bathroom.

She remembers the police ignoring a mother on the freight train, crying out, "Help me, help me, my baby is dying," and then how they took the dead baby away so unceremoniously. She remembers the taste of the salted tomatoes on a ship from the city of Novosibirsk to their final destination of Tomsk.

The prisoners had no radio, no idea what was going on. They could only do their best to stay alive. Janina and her family would steal potatoes while they worked in the fields, foraged for berries and mushrooms in the woods, and fished in the stream.

Janina's daughter, Yvonne, has researched the gruesome political theatre of World War II, from both the macro level and from the firsthand view within her family. She transcribed, and translated from the Polish, four hours of interviews with her mother and her father, Jess Kowalczewski, who had been in the Polish resistance (the Home Army) during the German occupation.

"He never left home without a cyanide pill," Yvonne said of her father. Later, when Jess was dodging the Communist secret police, he "ended up leaving Poland on foot through the mountains into Czechoslovakia until he reached the American forces. Then he was safe."

A pivotal moment in the war came in 1941, when Germany attacked Russia and the Soviets subsequently joined the Allies - but even that was poorly understood by Janina, her family, and the others in the Siberian camp. They only knew the officers in their camp started treating them nicely. The officers gave them the news: They were free. "We could go anyplace we wanted."

Except they were in the middle of Siberia. Most families had no money, no ability to fend for themselves, and many were afraid to attempt to journey out.

Her family persevered. Janina remembers a woman saying to her mother that she would get used to winter in Siberia. Her mother's reply: "I don't want to get used to it."

The family made it as far as Krevosheyno, still in Siberia, when the river froze over. Her ever-enterprising father found work painting skis for the Soviet army.

The family might have been there longer had it not been for Janina's brother-in-law, Edward Kwiatkowski, who had been a former prisoner of war. Once the Soviets changed sides, Edward journeyed south and joined the Polish army being formed in the USSR. He sent an officer to take care of the family, and they departed Siberia by passenger train. "He saved our lives," Janina said of her brother-in-law.

Through Kazakhstan, Janina stared out the window at the "miles and miles of red poppies," and felt: "We're free, we're ready, we're happy." Arriving in Uzbekistan, a mustering point for the newly formed Polish Army, they found themselves part of "a huge exodus" of Poles. At Sunday Mass, the crowd sang Polish hymns. "Everybody was crying," Janina recalled.

Janina and her parents eventually made it to a refugee camp in Tehran, where they lived in a tent for 2 1/2 years. She recalls meeting two "very nice" Scottish soldiers who took Janina and her mother out to dinner. "We were speaking Polish, they were speaking English, we moved our hands. Somehow we managed."

To avoid being shipped out again to India or Africa like many other Poles, Janina's father feigned illness to stay in the area. They were among the last of the refugee camp inhabitants to travel in a truck convoy to Lebanon. "It was beautiful there, in the mountains by the sea," she said of Beirut. "I learned to swim there."

When the war came to a close, millions of people were still being shuffled around the continents. Janina's family was briefly moved to Egypt, then finally to England. "In the meantime, Poland had been taken over by Communists. Most people didn't want to go back," Yvonne noted.

Janina's five brothers and sisters all survived the war, "some in worse shape than others," she said. Her three brothers had been arrested and imprisoned. One escaped, was rearrested and then sent to an Arctic gulag. "He was a broken man."

The two younger brothers fought in the resistance (the Home Army) against the Germans; one was later rearrested by the Soviets. One of Janina's two sisters, Lodzia, had stayed in Poland, but she worried herself sick without contact with the family. Bronia, Janina's other sister, did return to Poland, deciding only when she saw Lodzia at the port to get off the British ship. But Bronia was soon imprisoned. "They ruined her health," Janina lamented. The family's dispersal was "collateral damage" of World War II.

Janina met Jess in a Polish hospital in Wales in 1949, where Jess was being treated for ulcers and where Janina was a nurse. They married four years later.

As to why they settled in Montclair? They had friends in Bloomfield, where they first moved to from England, but Janina and Jess soon found a house they loved in Montclair. They moved there in 1960 where they raised three children, Dorothy, Yvonne and Christopher. These days, Janina, whose 90th birthday is in May 2015, enjoys the porch swing on the veranda. "I sit there all summer," she said.

Yvonne has long held an interest in her parents' history. But Janina only recently began recounting the stories to her grandchildren and her neighbors. Her 28-year-old granddaughter, Christine, said she was glad to know it. "I don't think anyone really knows about that side of the war," Christine said.

Janina started to talk about it so that she could be better understood, so her story could be validated as the path of coming to live in the United States. “I feel American," she affirmed.

In September 2014, on the 74th anniversary of the Soviet invasion, Yvonne and her parents went to Warsaw to visit the Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East, erected in memory of Stalin's ethnic cleansing of Poland.

Sometimes Janina's memories go back to the poppy fields of Kazakhstan. The poppy flower, in Poland and many other countries, signifies the blood of soldiers. "I'm talking about, and I see it. I really do," Janina said. "I've never seen anything like it. The memories stay with you. You remember forever."