Maria Makowska-Osicka

Polish Air Force in the UK

Maria was born on 17 April 1922 and had a lovely childhood in the Kresy lands of Eastern Poland. She had felt there the wonder of nature and the way her family worked, played, and prayed with many different peoples and religions.

The Germans invaded Poland from the west on 1 September 1939, and the Russians invaded from the east on 17 September 1939. They divided Poland between them. In the Russian-controlled area, the plan to ethnically-cleanse the area soon took effect with the first of four mass deportations to Siberia that were carried out in 1940 and 1941.

On 10 February 1940, the family were forcibly taken from their home at gunpoint, by Russian soldiers. They had been given less than an hour to pack what they could, without knowing where they were being taken. They took what they could carry and had to leave the rest behind.

They were taken to the railway station and loaded into cattle cars with 50-60 other people. This included infants, toddlers, children, teens, adults, and seniors. Most of the adults and seniors were women. The cattle car had two shelves at either end, where people could sit or sleep – the rest had to make do with the floor. There was a cast iron stove, but they soon ran out of wood to fuel it. There was also a hole in the floor that served as a toilet.

They travelled like this for weeks, and were given some water, stale bread, and watery soup, only a few times. When someone died, their bodies were cast out next to the tracks and left there. Many infants and elders did not survive this journey.

When they reached the work camp in Siberia, they were told that this is where they would eventually die, but in the meantime, they had to work to earn their daily ration of bread. Children as young as 13 were set to work in the forests – cutting branches from the trees that had been cut down.

Aside from the extreme cold in winter, and extreme heat in summer, they had to contend with hordes of mosquitoes and black flies, as well as infestations of bed bugs in the barracks. There were no medical facilities in these camps, and diseases ran rampant, leading to a high death toll. Both her step-mother and her younger brother Ryszard died in Siberia.

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 men and boys soon made plans to make their way south to join 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. Maria made this perilous journey with her older brother Boleslaw and younger sister Janina.

General Anders oversaw the army, and he tried hard to get the Russians to provide the food and equipment they had promised. When this became increasingly impossible, he negotiated the right to evacuate the army to Persia, where the British would provide what was needed.

Anders insisted on taking as many of the civilians that had reached the army as possible. There were 2 mass evacuations: in March/April 1942, and in September 1942. Then Stalin changed his mind and closed the borders. Those who had not been evacuated were now stuck in the USSR.

The evacuation took place by ship over the Caspian Sea to Pahlavi in Persia (now Iran). The ships that were used were oil tankers and coal ships, and other ships that were not equipped to handle passengers. They were filthy and lacked even the necessities, like water and latrines. The soldiers and civilians filled these ships to capacity for the 1–2-day trip. When there were storms, the situation got even worse – with most of the passengers suffering sea sickness.

Maria was separated from Boleslaw, who joined the Polish 2nd Corps. She nursed her sister Janina up to their arrival in Persia, then Janina was taken to a sanitorium and the sisters lost contact with one another. Maria was sent to the Tengeru Polish Refugee Camp in East Africa.

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. Established to make the settlement as self-sufficient as possible, the farm accomplished this with great success, combining crops native to Africa as well as – climate permitting – old favourites from Poland.

In late 1943, Maria volunteered to join the Women’s Auxiliary of the Polish Air Force in the UK. She sailed with many other volunteers from Africa to the UK, through waters that were teeming with German submarines and U-boats. In England, Maria was trained to assemble parachutes. It was there that she met and married Jan Osicki, and they had their first child, Richard.

It was only years later that she found her sister Janina and brother Boleslaw, being finally reunited in Canada in 1951.

Maria passed away in Winnipeg on 26 February 2014, at the age of 92 years. She was buried at the Holy Ghost Cemetery.