Wladyslawa Tokarska

Seven members of my family, one by one, are buried in mass graves in the Soviet Union. Their location remains a mystery despite the nearly seven decades that have passed. Of my family, I am the sole survivor. I am their witness, to tell our story, one of deep personal tragedy- a story never told. Until now...

My family was a loving family. We lived in the eastern part of Poland. where there was neither crime nor corruption. We were eight of us: my father Jozef Tokarski, my mother Franciszka Tokarska (nee Habiciak), my sister Paulina. and my brothers Jozef, Franciszek, Henryk, and Teodor. My cousin Genowefa had been staying with us during the war: her family, my father's brother, was moving closer to his mother. We lived in Polotnica, near the town Słonim, about 40 kilo meters from the Russian border. We also had a home in Słonim.

Our lives changed irrevocably on 10 February I940. Very early that morning, when it was still dark outside, several Russian soldiers came to our home and gave us 15 minutes to get ready to leave. The war will be fought here," a soldier said, referring to the invasion of Poland by the Germans and Russians and the collapse of the Second Polish Republic in September I939. "Don’t take much with you because you will return in three days."

A soldier looked at my father. "Before you leave, give us all of your guns and ammunition," he said. "I don't have any," my father replied. But I knew differently: he had buried them a few days earlier, behind the shed. I saw him do it. "We will kill you if we find guns that you

don't tell us about," he said. My father said nothing, nor did I. The soldiers found no guns.

My mother was baking the bread as she did every Saturday morning. She left it in the oven. She packed crackers and some fruit. The soldiers let us take nothing else – only the clothes on our backs. The Russians brought two large sleds for all of us. Mother laid one qu1lt down on the bottom of each sled. It was very cold. We could lie down in relative warmth for the time being.

The soldiers put us aboard a cattle train bound for Leningrad. We stopped a few times for our personal needs. We ate snow as we were thirsty and there was no water. At Leningrad, we slept on the floor of the railway station with hundreds of others. When the next train arrived, everyone got up to board and pushed upon each other because of the thick crowd. I ran after my mother and fell on a dead man. He was so very cold. What a terrible feeling!

The train began to move, and one young girl tried to climb on. She fell and the wheels of the train cut off her leg. A Russian soldier s picked her up and threw her on the back of the truck. The truck carried the dead that the soldiers picked up inside the station and outside near the tracks. There were many. We all cried for her. But we could do nothing while she screamed, pleading for help.

The boxcar was filled - standing room only. A potbelly stove stood in the middle of the car. There were no bathrooms- only a hole in the floor in the corner. The train etopped now and then so prisoners could relieve themselves and eat snow along the railroad tracks. The soldiers gave us dry bread to eat.

My little brother, Teodor, was only a few months old. Mother had trouble nursing him. There was nothing to eat so mother had no milk to offer him.

The train took us north through Vologda, all the way to Porog where we boarded a sled pulled by two horses. The Russians said the sled was too heavy for the horses to pull. My brother Jozef, and my father took turns walking behind the sled.

At least we were covered from head to toe. After several hours, Jozef looked behind the sled. "1 cannot see our father!" he said. "Whoa," the driver said. The horses stopped and stood, panting. Steam rose from their nostrils.

The land stretched to the horizon in that whiteness. Two soldiers got off the sled and walked several hundred feet past our sled. They found our father lying on the road, half frozen. They brought him back to the sled; his arms slumped around their necks.

Our mother reached for him, brought him back to life by rubbing his body and by lying on him to keep him warm. We stopped at the first village where the soldiers left us with a Russian family overnight. The family had a communal bed on which the woman put some blankets for us to sleep on. She made the bed, then left us alone in the room.

“Let us kneel and pray and thank God for our father’s life”, our mother said. We kneeled and prayed in thanksgiving. The Russian woman returned and saw us praying. Mother was terrified that the soldiers would execute us in the morning, when they found out that we had been praying the night before. Prayers were strictly forbidden by the Russians. The woman motioned us to follow her. Downstairs, she opened the curtain behind the steps. A statue of Jesus stood on a little altar. She made the sign of the cross, smiled, and led us back to bed. We knew that she meant no harm.

In the morning, we continued our journey by sled to the forced labour camp called Kubelo. It was a far outpost in Siberia. The address was: Arkhangelsk Oblast. Ustiyanskiy Reyon, Pochta Byshtuzewo, Posiolek Kubelo.

The camp was in the vast Siberian forest. There were 500 of us. The soldiers removed the children and sent them to an orphanage. Somehow, my family stayed together. Six families in one large room. Our family had a single, thin bunk bed. Four of u slept on the top board and four on the bottom. There was a large clay stove for heating. We got wood for it from the forest.

Father did not stay with us for long. He was sent to work on the river – ensuring that thousands of logs drifted freely down to designated towns.

Children had to go to school. During the summer months, our supper was a soup made from weeds and dry bread. We prayed before each meal.

One day Henryk said, “Mother we should pray to Stalin because he is God – he drops candy in the classrooms for the children that pay to him. Mother was very angry to hear this and told him never to believe such things. The next morning, she kept the children from going to school. The soldiers came to see why we were not in school. Mother told them that it was her responsibility to teach us what to believe, not the school’s. The soldiers answered that we would have to make do with a single loaf of bread for three days, and then we would see how well we would do. That is what happened. So, we gathered berries, mushrooms, and weeds to make soup.

We sometimes got potato peelings from the kitchen. We also ate stray dogs and fish. Once, the men stole a horse from the Russians, buried the skin and bones in quicksand, and we ate the meat. During that first summer, my brother Teodor died in his sleep.

Bed bugs were our constant companion – crawling over the bed boards while we tried to sleep. We would pour boiling water on the boards to kill them. The bathroom situation was a nightmare. It was a large hole, covered with a roof, and had a wide board over the hole. One had to be very careful not to fall in.

Soon after Teodor’s death, my brother Franciszek also died. We did not get to see him buried either. Every morning a truck would come through the camp and pick up all the dead bodies. They took the bodies to a mass grave somewhere. There was no funeral, no last rites, no loved ones present. When my sister Paulina died, she was also taken away to a mass grave. Since my father was working far away on the river, he was unaware that he had lost 3 children in such a short time. All of this was very hard on my mother.

One day some men brought our father back to the camp. He had fallen into the river and became very ill. Our mother hoped that when he recovered, he would stay at the camp and work at cutting trees, but that was not to be. He was sent back to work on the river.

Our mother had failed to tell him how very ill she was. She showed Jozef and me her very swollen legs and told us that once the swelling reached her heart, she would die. She looked forward to joining young Teodor, Franciszek and Paulina. "They are in heaven," she said, 'Where they are happy and hungry no more."

She told us that we should never stop believing in God, no matter what the Russians do. She assured us that we would be together again soon. We feared that she was contagious, so Jozef, Genowefa, and l washed ourselves in the frozen river. Jozef cut a hole in the ice for us and Genowefa and I washed our clothes.

In August 1941, General Sikorski signed the Sikorski-Majski Pact that released the Polish prisoners in Russia, including us. But by Deeember, when the Pact took effect, we had no money to pay for our transportation on sleds to the train station.

In January 1942, we left Kubelo for Parog. We stopped at different villages along our route where our father made shoes for the villagers to earn money so that we could keep traveling. At Parog, soldiers took Genowefa and sent her back to Poland to her family. We never found out if she arrived there safely.

On the train, we were all very sick. Henryk and our parents were sicker than Jozef and I. Henryk was the first to die on the train. When the train stopped, soldiers took Henryk's body from the train. They put it on the truck with the rest of the dead picked up before him. I don't even know the name of the Russian town in which he was buried. No one knows.

The Russians eventually stopped the train in a wooded area. The locomotive pulled away, leaving us locked inside. It was gone for two days. Meanwhile, inside the train, two men chopped a hole through the door and got outside. The doors were wired shut from the outside. The men cut the wires and helped people escape the train to get snow to eat, as we had no water inside the train.

Two Polish engineers, who were part of our group, walked the tracks toward the next town. Three days later, they returned with a locomotive. They connected it to our train and drove us back to the previous town. There we boarded a different train bound for Vologda.

In Vologda, the train was supposed to stand for three days and three nights. Jozef told our parents that he would travel to buy medicine and food. Father told him to take the passport, "You might need it and your life without it could be more difficult than mine." He promised to return. The train began to move again that very same evening. I never saw Jozef again.

My parents died within two weeks of oner another. My father died almost as soon as we left Vologda. Soldiers took his boidy away for mass burial. Two weeks later, my mother died.

I was put into a Russian orphanage. The Russian children were very mean to me. I cried every night, hoping to find Jozef somehow, to tell him not to look for our mother and our father because they were already gone.

I felt very lonely, crying often and praying to God to take me to join my family. Only the thought of finding Jozef gave me strength. In the orphanage, boys were climbing over the eight-foot concrete wall a few times a week to get on the other side and steal apples from the orchard. One time, when they were getting ready to go over the wall, I asked to go with them. "No way!" they said. "I will tell on you then," I said. "I will tell the guards that I have seen you with your shirts filled with apples!" "We will kill you then," they said. "l care not," I said. "l do not want to live anyway." I thought for a moment. "Besides if you kill me," I said "You will have to explain what happened to me."

They took me over the wall. On the other side, the boys made me walk opposite them. I spotted a man walking toward me along the road. He looked at the orphanage behind me. He looked at me and nodded. “So, you are running away, huh?" he said in Russian. “What is it to you?" I said "Furthermore, you speak lousy Russian."

“That’s because l am not Russian." “Neither am l," I said. “I am a Polish soldier."

I am a Polish orphan, l have lost my entire family,” I said. "Do you want to leave Russia?" he asked. “Yes”

They are forming the Polish Army,'' he said. "The children related to soldiers will be put in a Polish orphanage. They will leave Russia on the train with their soldiers." Do you want me to be your uncle?" Yes!" I said, "Yes."

The man took me to meet soldiers of the Polish Army. Each of the 125 soldiers donated one ruble to put me in the orphanage with the rest of the Polish children. The orphanage and soldiers left on the train headed for Lenin-Dzol. where we were to join more orphans and soldiers.

I was watching the scenery - the train headed toward our freedom across a very high bridge, when a mute boy seated next to me began to point out the window. He noticed a train coming toward us from the other side of the bridge. He was unable to speak so no one was paying any attention to him. The other train suddenly hit the fourth car of our train - a carload of soldiers.

I recall lying on the ground under a shaded tree. I saw bodies covered with white sheets. Someone told me that the mute boy had carried me to safety. Train cars were still falling where we had landed. Four car wheels fell where l had been. I would have been crushed to death. The whole train had toppled over into the dry riverbed under the bridge. The Russian engineers executed the conductor of the other train.

We waited a few weeks before the bridge and the tracks were fixed. Another train was brought in to take us to Lenin-Dzol. After we joined the other orphans, I wanted to see the soldier who was to be my uncle. "We have some bad news to tell you”, the soldiers told me. "Your uncle was killed in that accident. He was in the fourth car that was hit."

We traveled to Krasnowodsk by train and from there by a ship called "Zhdanov," which took us across the Caspian Sea to Iran. In Pahlavi, we received plenty to eat. We got blankets, which we placed on the sand to rest. After breakfast, we took showers. Our hair was shaved, and we got clean clothes.

I was taken to the hospital because I had typhoid fever and dysentery. With God's grace, I recovered. Many did not and were buried in Pahlavi.

We boarded trucks that look us through the Elbrus Mountains. The roads were very narrow. One truck in front of us, full of people, rolled down the slope and everyone died.

We spent Christmas 1942 in Tehran. Next, we sailed through the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Oman to Karachi, India (today's Pakistan,) We stayed at Camp Malir for a few months. In Bombay, the Polish ship "Batory" anchored and I recall that Polish sailors from the ship gave us a lot of candy!

In Bombay, we boarded the "U.S.S Hermitage" and sailed through the Arabian Sea to the Indian Ocean. We stopped at the port in Melbourne, Australia, where we stocked up on vegetables, fruits, and then sailed across the Pacific. We arrived at Bora Bora before sailing for San Pedro, California. Army trucks took us to Santa Anna where we were under close watch. After five days, we left by bus to the train station at San Pedro where we boarded a train to Texas.

In El Paso, we got off the bus and walked through customs into Mexico. On the afternoon of October 31, 1943, we crossed the Sierra Madre Mountains on a Mexican train. We arrived in Leon, Guanajuato State, on November 2nd. There we boarded buses that took us to Colonia Santa Rosa, where we lived for more than two years. We went to school. It was a good life where it was warm and sunny. We were 265 Polish children in the orphanage in Mexico, halfway across the globe from home.

We left Mexico for the United States in May I946. We arrived at the Felician Sisters Convent in Chicago and two weeks later, I went to St. Joseph's Orphanage in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I spent three years at the orphanage and was adopted by Dr. and Mrs. Walter L. Krygier in 1949. I graduated from Pius XI High School in Milwaukee in I95l.

My life took a wonderful turn that year when I met John Bernard Andruscavage at a dance at the Eagles Club, a popular spot along Wisconsin Avenue in downtown Milwaukee. John was a carpenter from Pennsylvania. We were married that October. Our first child, Thomas John, was born in a small rural village northwest of Milwaukee, and we lived there until our daughter Debra Lynn was born on June 24, 1965. We enjoyed many wonderful years together as a family, especially during our summer vacations when we traveled across the country.