Siemienowski Family

This is a tribute to the SIEMIENOWSKI FAMILY and a brief story about their journey to freedom in Buffalo, by Anna Brzuza.

My Parents, Józef and Łucja Siemienowski, together with my brother Henryk (age 1), sister Danuta (almost 3), Grandmother and 2 aunts were living a comfortable life in Słonim in northeastern Poland when the Russians invaded shortly after World War II started. Father was a civil engineer and a lieutenant in the Polish Army Reserves. In Nov. 1939 he was arrested at his office, taken to jail, then deported to a forced labour camp in Kolyma in the Arctic region of far eastern Russia. There he lived in gruelling conditions with bitter cold, hunger, frequent beatings and torture.

Russian soldiers had also pounded on the door of the family home at 1 a.m. on 10 Feb.1940 and rounded up Mother, Grandmother and the 2 children with their bayonets and loudly ordered them go to the lorry waiting outside full of other people. While Grandmother fell to her knees and prayed, Mother’s survival instincts took over and she offered the soldiers vodka, bread and sausage. In the 15 minutes that the soldiers ate, she ran around collecting whatever she could grab into bundled sheets and threw them into the truck. They were loaded into a cattle train car along with 120 others for a 2-month trip to Siberia with little food and only one pail for a toilet. Many people died along the way.

The family spent the next 1 ½ years in Petrovka, east of Novosibirsk, where Mother was forced to make bricks from mud and hay in exchange for a handful of grain as daily pay. She slowly sold her belongings for milk and baked bread from the grain so they wouldn’t starve. There was no soap for washing, no toilet, diapers, running water, electricity, heater or money, just hunger, cold, and despair. When the surviving soldier prisoners were allowed to leave Russia and regroup into a new Polish Army to fight against Germany, Father, thin, filthy, covered in lice, knees swollen terribly and wearing the tattered coat he was arrested in, saw his family for 24 hours before leaving for Kuibyshev to join his troops. He told Mother to escape towards the southwest, so the family walked for several months and over 1500 miles, sometimes hitching rides on ox carts or trains, sometimes stealing or working for food along the way. With one child on her back and the other in her arms, Mother walked first to Tashkent in Central Asia, where she sold more of her things in exchange for food and shelter, and finally to the depot in Krasnowodsk by the Caspian Sea.

The soldiers had already left for Palestine to be nourished and trained before being transported to Italy and taking part in the Italian Campaign. The famished family was transported by ship to the refugee camp at Pahlavi near Tehran, Persia, where their heads were shaved and clothes burned to rid them of lice. Henry, who had been sickly all along, got dysentery and the others’ eyes got infected by flies. Mother sold the last item she owned, a platinum engagement ring, to get some rice to save him.

After about 2 months there, and another long, hard journey through Pakistan and India, they were transported by ship, which docked at the port of Aden before continuing to Mombasa, Africa After travelling through Kenya by a slow train, they arrived in Kampala, Uganda, in the jungle near the shores of Lake Victoria, where they lived in a small Polish settlement named Koja for about 5 years, in grass roof huts with gauze in the window openings to keep out the mosquitoes. Henry was infected with black malaria and got chiggers under his toenails and again the battle was on to keep him alive.

Rationing was the norm, and the family only received one pound of rice and bread each week, along with small amounts of other food. They would at great risk go to the natives at night and exchange the bread for fruit. A school was started for the children and Mother learned English until she was proficient enough to teach to teach in the 1st through 4th grades for a small salary while also leading the choir and playing the violin in the church. She took the money she made and made monthly trips to Kampala to shop for necessities and pick up used clothing that Americans had donated to the refugees.

Father was helping to fight in the war alongside the Allies in Italy when he got a one-week furlough to visit his family in Africa after he located them through the Red Cross. Later he petitioned the Queen of England to allow the family to move to England with him after the war, after he participated in the battle at Monte Cassino where thousands of his fellow soldiers perished. He had been promoted to Captain by General Anders and had sent a letter to Mother proudly declaring “teraz jesteś Kapitanową”. He desperately wanted his family to be together again.

Everyone but Grandmother (for health reasons) was allowed to go to England in 1947, but she joined them in 1948 after finally getting clearance. They were assigned living quarters in old army barracks/ metal barrel Quonsets in Hazelmere near High Wycombe, not far from London. Rationing continued in post-war England with mostly rice, bread and eggs to eat, and the small pension Father was receiving was not enough to buy the family necessities, so Mother went to work in the factories making vacuum cleaners, baseboard heaters and glass lamp components to fight the poverty they were experiencing. My parents applied for the children to be admitted to boarding schools in other parts of England because she knew they would get fed better there, and Henry and Danuta came home to visit occasionally, when finances allowed.

Mother had a miscarriage, was tired of the suffering, but determined to have a better life and convinced Father to immigrate to America. As refugees, they were all finally granted free transport across the Atlantic Ocean and went through Canada to a city Mother picked on the map that looked promising, Buffalo, New York. She heard that other Polish refugees were moving there because of an already established Polish community, and that there were decent jobs and churches and good public schools and felt it was the best place for a new start. And so in November of 1951, the family arrived with only $13 in their pockets and no place to live. They spent that $13 for a hotel room including a corn flake breakfast, and in desperation Mother begged a lady she met on the street to rent them a room until they could get established, with the promise to pay her later. Then she went to a Polish priest at St. Michael’s in Lackawanna who found her a job starting the next day at the Ford Motor Factory, where she started earning $28 a week.

Father had a harder time assimilating to the new life but got a job at Bethlehem Steel Mill. Later they bought an old fixer-upper house on Ellicott Street and the entire family worked hard to make it a home; soon other Polish refugee families like the Dubickis also bought houses close by. I was born in Lackawanna in 1953,

Joseph was born in Buffalo in 1955, Danuta was married, had a son and Grandmother died, all in 1959. Henry graduated with 2 degrees from the University of Buffalo in 1960. Father died of heart failure on 10 April 1962 and Mother again had to raise 2 small children alone in a foreign land. But with the help of family and friends, she again survived and is still alive at age 97 (written in 2009).

Source: polishlegacybuffalo.com

Siemienowski family in Siberia 1942

Siemienowski family in Buffalo 1950s