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THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 02 2023
THE RIVER VIEW
PEOPLE
FROM THE GULAG TO LONDON, AND RIVERVIEW, VIA ANDERS’ ARMY I
n 1941 a handsome young engineering student, Jan Brachaniec, met a pretty soon-to-be nurse, Jadwiga Kamieniecka. The two travelled across the Middle East, fell in love, and were married in Egypt before emigrating to England to start a family and a new life. That would be one way to describe their love story, but it would hardly describe the full truth behind their remarkable tale of hardship, determination, survival, and courage. Brachaniec and Kamieniecka were Poles who were sent to the Gulag, the Soviet Union’s notorious system of remote prison camps, during the early years of the Second World War. They met during the arduous march made by what became known as Anders’ Army from the Soviet Union through what were then Persia (modern-day Iran), Iraq, Transjordan (modern-day Jordan), Palestine (before the creation of the State of Israel), and Egypt, culminating in what became known as the Italian campaign. Their children Jacek and Anna were born in England in 1949 and 1952, respectively. Anna still lives in London; Jacek Brachaniec, who today goes by Jack, lives in Riverview. Recalls Brachaniec, “my parents were both born in what was then Poland. My mother was born in Wilno, which today is Vilnius and is part of Lithuania, and my father was born near Katowice, which is still in Poland.” “As we know from history, World War Two began on September 1, 1939, when Adolph Hitler invaded Poland.” That August, Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact. They agreed they would not attack each other. “On the 1st of September, the Nazis attacked Poland
from the west … the Soviet Union did not attack from the east until September 17th … but Poland was cut in half,” says Brachaniec. “My parents at the outbreak of war both happened to be in eastern Poland. My father was in Lwow … he was studying to be an engineer at the Polytechnic there. My mother was in what is now Vilnius, so they were both on the borderlands between Poland and the Soviet Union. “The Soviet Union had lists of people that they wanted to arrest. The majority were anybody with an education … anybody that in the Soviet mind could be an enemy of the state. They felt that anyone with any kind of an education, anyone with any ability to think for themselves, was going to be a threat to the Soviet Union. “My mother was one of the first to be arrested from the northern part of the borderlands. She was a government clerk, she was not an intellectual, but she was on the list. My father, who was studying to be an engineer, was also arrested.” People were given minutes to pack a few belongings, loaded into cattle cars on trains, and
“shipped off into the depths of the Soviet Union.” Property was seized and never returned to its rightful owners. So began the odyssey which would bring Jan and Jadwiga to London, and their son to Riverview. “My parents did not know each other at that time. They were in labour camps in Siberia, where it is freezing cold in the winter, they were barely fed, the slogan was ‘if you don’t work you don’t eat,’ so if you were too sick to work, then you would just die. They were on starvation diets. It was not a life; it was an existence.” Just getting to the camps involved an epic journey of deprivation, hunger, cold, and the death of many of those around you. “They were putting thirty or forty people in a cattle car” in a train and sending them long distances, sometimes for months before they even reached the labour camps. “They would be in there for forty-eight or seventytwo hours at a time with no water, no sanitation. People would die. At a stop, they would throw open the doors
Jack Bracha
niec of Rive
rview displa ys a medal Monte Cass won by his father Jan ino. COURT during the Ba ESY OF BR ACHANIEC ttle of FAMILY
Continued on page 11
Jan and Jadwiga after
The wedding in
Egypt. COURTE
SY OF BRACHA
NIEC FAMILY
their wedding. COURTE
SY OF BRACHANIEC
FAMILY
