Walerian Jaworski

Walerian was just 14 when his happy life on a farm in the village of Chylin changed forever. The title on his folder of memories, 'Mum, Dad Where Are They Taking Us?' was the cry of hundreds of thousands of children as the Soviet Union's iron hand uprooted entire communities in the Eastern Borderland region of Poland.

"Stalin, and Hitler's, idea was to wipe out the whole Polish nation," Walerian recalled in 2012. "My father had taken part in the battle of Warsaw in 1920 when the Red Army was beaten. Twenty years later they came back seeking revenge, but not simple revenge. They decided to remove anyone who had connections to the State, teachers, doctors, professors.

"My father, mother, my elder brother, sister, and I, were among the thousands who were taken, first by sledge and horse to the railway station, then by rail in cattle trucks. At the end of the rail journey, we were taken on by sledge and horse, using the frozen river as a road. It took us another three days."

More than one million Poles were deported, most to become slave labourers in Siberia. Some, like the Jaworski family, were taken north to the remote forests near Archangel where the men were forced to work as lumberjacks. Conditions were harsh, with several families living crammed together in one room. The food was basic, and scarce. "Dried sturgeon, but no caviar," as Walerian puts it.

He explains the brutal simplicity of the Russian system: "The idea was that we would work for three years and then they would bring in another load of people. They told us that. They did not care what happened to us. They knew that the system worked because they had already used it with their own people. It was clever and simple: 'if you don't work, you don't eat.'

"The only thing you could think of was to keep working. The cold was incredible. It is cold in Poland in the winter but not like it was there. It could be minus 40 degrees. And we were not prepared for it. When they came for us, they gave us an hour to pack. My mother packed all the things that she thought were useful, and as time went by, we would use them or sell them for something else we needed. She swallowed her engagement ring to keep it from the Russians.

"We were there almost two years. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Britain agreed to supply weapons to the Russians on condition was that they let the Poles out of prisons and work camps to form an Army.

"They told us we were: 'free to go!', but there were no roads, and the river became our route out. We had to build rafts which the women and children travelled on, while the rest of the people just walked along the bank. We travelled for more than 100 miles that way, and then we sold the timber from the rafts to pay for rail fares. No one was going to give us anything for nothing. On the train journey I lost my brother when he got off at a station to queue for bread and the train set off without him. I did not see him again until we were both in the Middle East.

"A lot of people stayed behind because winter was coming, and because they had small children. But conditions were very harsh, and of one family with five children I know that only one of the children survived.

"When the Army was first formed, a lot of people died because they had come out of the camps so ill and it was so cold, so it was decided to move the whole training site south to Kazakhstan where the climate was warmer, but a lot of people got typhoid there."

A military college was established and Walerian, now 16, joined. There was no shortage of good teachers to help youths whose education had been cut short. Among the former slaves were mathematicians, scientists, teachers, poets.

However, diseases were rife. and Walerian soon came down with dysentery. Once he recovered, he became one of the thousands heading west to join the British on the far side of the Caspian Sea in Persia (modern-day Iran). Reaching the east coast, he crossed to Persia on an oil tanker and can still almost taste and smell the stench of it.

Walerian’s father also reached Kazakhstan and crossed the Caspian Sea, only to die on the beaches where many Poles were quartered when they first landed. His son believes he probably fell victim to a sudden diet of rich food. Rice and fruit had been undreamed of luxuries for so long that starved bodies could not cope with digesting them.

Walerian fell ill again. "In Tehran I was so ill that I was given the last rights by a priest," he says. As he recalls that time, he is momentarily overcome.

He trained in Iraq and Syria then was sent to tents on the sand dunes in Palestine. He saw the Pyramids. But he was training for war.

At 17, he joined a Polish cavalry regiment, the Carpathian Lancers of the Polish 2nd Corps, which now operated with armoured cars. The regiment fought with many other Polish forces at Monte Cassino. There, Walerian had a miraculous escape when he was knocked out by an explosion and next day noticed two shrapnel holes in his helmet. Taking it off, he found pieces of shrapnel lodged in the folds of his woolly hat. The make-shift lining had saved his life.

In notes for the talks he gives under the title "Unexpected Journey", he writes of: "Italy and the hell of war for the next two years. Savagery at Cassino, freeing Loreto, Ancona and Bologna. The end of the war - dirt, exhaustion and anger, tears as our homes were traded for peace in Western Europe."

When the war ended Walerian, still only 20, came to England, to him an: "unknown country". In his early days he was in Grimsby and says the townspeople's friendly welcome will be "never forgotten.”

He moved on, met his future wife, Glynice, married, moved to Melksham and settled down to raise a family. He did a variety of jobs, including building work, and spent 30 years with the Avon Rubber company before his retirement.

And after all this he says: "What a lucky man I am." With Glynice, his "best friend", he has raised two sons, and the couple have five grandchildren, all now with university education. He lives in a farmhouse on the edge of the town, and this remarkable, positive, ebullient man is generous enough to say that life has simply been a journey from one farm to another "with a few bumps in between."