This is a tribute to KRZYSZTOF BRZUZA, the Polish classical pianist who immigrated to Buffalo in 1971, and his Mother Irena. She, her teenage daugh­ter and her husband, Jan Brzuza, a co-founder of the Polish National Bank, lived in Nowy Sącz, a town in southern Poland. Irena learned to speak German during the Nazi occupation to be able to speak with the Gestapo when trying to save her fellow Poles who had been arrested and were in prison awaiting deportation to the hard labor camps in Germany. She would go in and attest as a character witness, and managed to have many people released; therefore she was liked and very respected by the locals.

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After the war had ended in 1945 and Poland was under Soviet occupation, the Russians used this as an excuse, arrested her for her so-called collaboration with the Germans during the war, and deported her along with other suspected people to a prison in Berezovo in far northern Siberia. It was the freezing land of the “white nights” eleven months of the year. She tried to escape but got scared and turned back when the guards fired warning shots. A few months later, the prisoners were marched south over hundreds of miles of frozen tundra to the forced labour factories in Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg) in the western Siberian plain at the base of the Ural Mountains.

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It was there, in sub-human conditions that Krzysztof was born pre­maturely in 1946. Irena almost died in childbirth due to malnutrition, and he was kept alive by other women who took turns breast-feeding him with their own meagre supplies. He spent the first 2 years of his life living in captivity. He almost died when hungry rats bit him while he slept, and when he was severely infested by lice and bedbugs. When Krzysztof got huge boils on his back from malnutrition, from which he still has scars, Irena befriended another prisoner, a German doctor who helped her. Later Irena managed to get work in the camp kitchen, where at great risk of punishment she was able to sneak small bits of extra food for herself and her boy.

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When amnesty was granted to the Polish prisoners thanks to pressure from The West, Irena repatriated to Po­land in 1948. For reasons suspicious to her and Krzysztof’s Godfather, another prisoner from camp, all of the children were separated from the adults and put in the last boxcar of the train. Terrified that they would never see them again, a couple of men decided to go out a hole in the floor and crawl under the slowly moving train to the last boxcar and bring the children to safety one by one. Ire­na did not know why Krzysztof was so wet when brought to her; it wasn’t until 15 years later that his Godfather admitted that in his hurry not to be caught at a stop, he had dropped him by accident in a huge snow bank and couldn’t find him for a long time.

 

Back in Nowy Sącz, life was difficult for Irena as Siberia had taken a great toll on her mental and physical health. She and her husband opened a small shop and sold wedding, baptism and communion clothing and shoes, always under the fear of revisions. After Jan’s death in 1959, she kept the shop and made many sacrifices to educate her son who had immense musi­cal talent. Determined to give him more opportunities, she sent him to America after he received his Master’s degree from the Kraków Academy of Music.

 

Krzysztof lived, performed piano re­citals and worked at Villa Maria College in Buffalo for over 3 years. He was very poor and started teaching piano privately, which he still does today, and has students who have won many national and international piano compe­titions including the Chopin in 1990. He got married in 1974. Irena died in Poland at age 83 in 1991.

 

Source: polishlegacybuffalo.com

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Copyright: Brzuza Family

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