Irena Protassewicz - A Polish Woman’s Experience in World War II: Conflict, Deportation and Exile

Robert Evans

Never was there a greater need than now to present real stories of human migration, of refugees in the past. Todays levels of dislocation are terrifyingly high, but they have their antecedents. Typically the stories are of forced removal; of physical and mental stress; of prolonged displacement and extended travels. They culminate in some kind of new life: any earlier status quo is rarely recovered, wherever resettlement eventually occurs. But the bitter experience of exile can also be enriching for those involved, both the migrants and those who deal with them.

All this is abundantly illustrated by tales of the Polish migrs of the Second World War: one of the most extraordinary of collective odysseys, which began in mass coercion and was accomplished by a myriad remarkable examples of individual enterprise. It also served as striking evidence of the global implications of twentieth-century conflicts exported from Europe.

Poles, notably those in the privileged society recaptured at the start of this memoir, long tended to be rooted in their native soil, whereas neighbouring communities, of Germans and Jews in particular, were more mobile over the centuries. Gradually the Polish nation extended eastwards to dominate also the Kresy, or borderlands, of historic Lithuania and Ukraine, although it did so mainly by assimilating the local elites there. This is where Irena Zawadzka, ne Protassewicz, lives in the early chapters of the present book. That process long took place in tandem with an expansive migration of the borders of the state: at its prime, the composite monarchy of Poland-Lithuania was the largest country in Europe.

In the late eighteenth century, borders migrated again; but now they were lines of partition, such that the historic Polish polity was effaced from the map and Poles found themselves living inside other states. All this still without their having moved physically, at least until participants and victims of the great insurrections of 18301 and 18634 needed to flee abroad, mostly to France, a few already to Great Britain. Trust in the heritage of their own sovereign statehood was startlingly and dramatically vindicated at the end of the First World War, when the partitioning empires collapsed. An independent Poland could be restored and was able to reincorporate much of the former Kresy.

Envisaged by the victor powers as a bastion against both Bolshevik-led Russians to the east and Prussian-led Germans to the west, this old-new Poland seriously overplayed its hand. It was not inherently weak, as Poles open resistance at home, and their military engagement abroad throughout the next world war would show. However, after a few years of domestic experiment with unstable representative institutions, Polands government fell into the hands of the comparatively benign, but increasingly rudderless, semi-military dictatorship of Jzef Pisudski, a leader much admired by Irena and her family. By 1939, the country had lost its way on the international stage, and its moral compass too, as was shown by its neglect of the growing threat from Nazism, which culminated in Polands egregious share in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia after Munich. It was woefully unprepared for the coup de thtre of the Nazi-Soviet pact.

Irenas world was transformed on 18 September 1939, when Soviet troops arrived in her village. There followed nearly two years of tense and often desperate uncertainty before her deportation to Siberia. Many of her compatriots suffered yet worse from the bestiality of Stalins regime. Irenas involuntary migration began on 20 June 1941. Just a few days later, German troops, in their turn, occupied the Kresy as the first stage of their invasion of the USSR. Ironically, this surprise Nazi-Soviet war proved to be Irenas salvation, just as the unexpected pact between those two parties had earlier ruined her prospects. Propelling Stalin into an alliance with the West, it now liberated many exiled Poles, Irena among them, to return to Europe, if they could organize the journey and survive its rigours. The epic trek of the Anderss Army is a central theme of this book.

In 1945, as Irena and many other Poles settled in Britain, the next wave of East European migration began. It proceeded pari passu with the enforced migration of borders again, this time dictated by the Soviet Union, with the connivance of the West. The German inhabitants of almost all the restored countries of the region were brutally expelled. Some found themselves banished from territory that had been ethnically and politically German for centuries, but which was now assigned to Poland. They were replaced in their former motherland by Poles deported from the eastern borderlands that henceforth were incorporated into the USSR.

As is clear from Hubert Zawadzkis Epilogue, Polish migrants had ambiguous feelings about post-war Britain. Their migr government in London was tolerated but not recognized; and there was often only grudging acceptance of their claims, even of those who had fought with British forces through all or much of the war, to domicile in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, massive provision was made for them at length, by the terms of the Polish Resettlement Act of 1947, the first legislation of its kind, which applied to over 200,000 people (and one brown bear). Now across the whole country, from Scotland to Cornwall as Irenas family themselves experienced dozens of makeshift and spartan residential camps sprang up to accommodate them in the decade and more after the end of the war. Springhill, in the Cotswolds, where the Zawadzkis settled longest, was utterly typical. And most of those who passed through these camps, especially those who (like Hubert) grew up in them, remained in Great Britain.