In late August, under the blazing sun, I walked through the streets of Warsaw’s Zoliborz neighbourhood.
In the northern part of the city, Zoliborz is one of the most beautiful parts of the capital. Unlike other Warsaw districts, it was spared total destruction during the Second World War. Its local architecture infuses Art Deco elegance with socealist realism.
In one of these modern houses, I met with a war survivor, a wandering soul who in postwar Warsaw found a new life amid other lives shattered by the devastating conflict.
Andrzej Chendyski was a child when he faced the Soviet repression. He told me about his odyssey from Poland to India, where he lived in a refugee camp in the village of Valivade, near Kolhapur, a city in the west Indian state of Maharashtra.
“I was almost four years old when I was thrown into the infinity of the Kazakh steppe,” Chendyski told me as we sat in his Warsaw apartment. “In the Kazakh steppe, so poor and primitive, there is nothing but a lonesome landscape.”
Chendynski was born in Lvov (today, in Ukraine) to a well-to-do family. His mother - a native of Krakow and a housewife - passed away in Uzbekistan following a typhoid fever outbreak. His father, who at that time was fighting Germany’s Wehrmacht in Warsaw, learned about his family fate only after the war.
“My mother and my older brother died in Uzbekistan and are buried in a mass grave," Chendynski said.
The Soviet invasion from the east left millions of Poles displaced and homeless. The worst hit were those who lived in Kresy — territories regained after the Great War of 1918 and Polish-Bolshevik War of 1921. Nearly 1.7 million Polish citizens were deported from eastern Polish territories to deep Russia, where the world was pine and steppe.
Adults, the elderly and children suffered one of the worst human rights violations in the history of mankind. Yet, the postwar world order wiped these events from collective memory. “The Soviets deported the Polish people and the Western historians deported the event from history,” writes Anuradha Bhattacharjee in The Second Homeland: Polish Refugees in India.
In August 1941, the Polish Armed Forces in the east, informally named the Anders Army after its commander General Władysław Anders, had ordered the evacuation of the Polish deportees. The orders were promulgated following an ‘amnesty’ granted by the Soviets, and after the Axis forces invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. First collection centres were established in Yangi- Yul in Uzbekistan, and then in Turkmenistan.
“People were heading south from all directions: from Kazakhstan, from Siberia and other parts of the Soviet Union, far east using all modes of transport,” Chendyski explained. His childhood memories are filled with images of emaciated women, men and children who were waiting in collection centres in Ashgabad (Turkmenistan), to embark on a journey home.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
