Kazimierz was born in born in the small town of Jaroslaw (then in Galicia, a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) in 1908, the son of a Polish wholesale merchant, whose trade in flour, timber, horses and agricultural produce stretched throughout Central Europe and western Russia. His elder brother, who was to be killed in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-20, studied medicine at the University of Lwow (Lemberg), while the younger 'Kazik' studied law as an external student.

 

In 1934, Kazimierz married Janina Ribbenbauer from the neighbouring town of Sieniawa, and they had a son, Andrzej. Kazimierz worked as a solicitor’s clerk touring the towns and villages of the region. He received a nomination to become a junior judge in 1939, but his legal career was cut short by the outbreak of war.

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Poland was invaded both by troops from Germany and the USSR under the Nazi-Soviet pact. Kazimierz found himself on the German side of the line but walked through the woods at night to the Soviet side to join his wife and infant son.

He was picked up by Stalin’s secret police, condemned in a perfunctory trial to penal exile for being a bourgeois enemy of the people, and deported to a forced labour camp in Siberia.

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His wife and son, Andrzej, were deported without trial to the wastes of Kazakhstan as the relatives of a political convict. After being transported in a cattle truck they were dumped without food or water into deep snow beside the railway line. They were saved by Kazakh horsemen, and survived the winter in a yurt, frying cockroaches and grasshoppers to survive.

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In the summer of 1941, following Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union, Stalin changed sides and issued an 'amnesty' to his Polish prisoners (who were allies of Great Britain!). On his release, Kazimierz made his way, without tickets, supplies, or money, from Pechora in the Arctic Circle more than 2,500 miles to Uzbekistan to join the Polish Army. Learning from another released prisoner that his family was in Kazakhstan, he again set out on foot on another journey of more than 2,000 miles to rescue them.

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They returned to Uzbekistan in 1943, and were later evacuated to Persia with the Polish Army which joined with the British in the Middle East. His wife and son were sent to a Polish refugee camp in India where they spent the next three years. Kazimierz served in the Polish 2nd Corps in Persia, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. The Polish 2nd Corps sailed to Italy in December 1943.

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Kazimierz served in the Italian Campaign, fighting in the Battle of Monte Cassino as well as liberating Ancona, Bologna and Loretto. The Poles were very happy to fight the Germans who were wreaking havoc in their occupied country, but not to hear the sickening propaganda about Britain's wonderful Soviet allies. At the end of the war, Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Minister, urged the likes of Kazimierz 'to return to their homes in Poland', not realising that most of their homes had been transferred, with British approval, to the Soviet Union

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After the war, on arriving in England, he worked in the Cherry Blossom shoe polish factory in London before moving with his family to Oxford in 1953. He went onto become the manager of foreign books at Blackwell’s and then a curator of the international law section of the Oxford University Law Library.

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He retired in 1973, and was active in local Catholic circles, in the Polish Veterans Association, and was a regular member of the congregation at Blackfriars Priory, in St Giles. He always maintained a connection with the town of Sieniawa in Southeast Poland – funding libraries and educational charities there.

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Kazimierz Michalski passed away on 12 April 2012 on a visit to Poland, at the age of 104. His was buried in Sieniawa, Poland. The whole town turned out as the flag-draped coffin of Second World War veteran Kazimierz Michalski passed by. He was honoured by hundreds of schoolchildren, officials, the town’s mayor, military representatives, and an orchestra. Unfortunately, his son Andre missed the funeral because he is not eligible for a passport. After arriving in Oxford in 1953, aged 10, Andre never registered as a British citizen but is not recognized as a Polish citizen either because he has not lived there since the outbreak of war.

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Copyright: Michalski family

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