FROM THE GULAG TO LONDON, AND RIVERVIEW, VIA ANDERS’ ARMY

In 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

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Continued from page 10 and say, ‘give us your dead.’”

In June of 1941 Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, its massive but failed invasion of the Soviet Union. Being attacked by Nazi Germany, which violated the two countries’ non-aggression pact, persuaded the Soviet Union to fight alongside the Allied nations. The Soviets and the western democracies made common cause against Nazi Germany and its satellite countries in the Axis.

Operation Barbarossa was the largest invasion force in history, involving millions of soldiers. Responding to an assault of that magnitude required all the men the Allies and the Soviet Union could muster – including released prisoners from labour camps if necessary.

Explains Brachaniec, “what Operation Barbarossa did was, it gave the Soviets the idea that they are being attacked, and they have all these men in the camps. Why not release these men to fight against the Germans?”

Polish General Wladyslaw Anders was released from the Lubyanka prison in Moscow to head up what would become the Polish Army in the East; formed from Polish prison camp inmates, the force became known informally as Anders’ Army, after its commander.

The recruits came directly from prison camps and initially were what Brachaniec describes as “a ragtag group of men who were poorly clothed, untrained, filthy, lice-ridden, emaciated. They faced again a trek in cattle cars to meeting points where they would amass these ‘were-to-be soldiers’ and start feeding them and giving them a little clothing.

“My father was one of those. He was freed from a work camp and ended up in what would become the Second Polish Corps (in Polish, Drugi Korpus).”

As the Polish army-underconstruction grew, it needed to be housed, clothed, fed, and armed, which provided a strain on already-stressed Soviet resources. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin agreed to allow the force to leave the Soviet Union and to pass into British control.

Anders’ Army marched across the Soviet Union to the Caspian Sea and then into modern-day Iran, known then as Persia.

“There were also women in these labour camps,” notes Brachaniec. The women were not considered at that time for combat, but “the Soviets realized they were going to need women as nurses, as cooks, for clerical roles, for administrative roles, so they also freed groups of women.

“My mother, who was only in her early 20s at the time, was one of those who was freed and who also trekked to join Anders’ Army. It was a long trek for these people, across Persia, Iraq, Transjordan, Palestine, and into Egypt.”

Jan and Jadwiga had made the long journey as part of the same group of Polish ex-prisoners but did not meet until later in the trek.

“My father met my mother in Egypt. They were stationed there for quite a while. My mother trained to be a nurse and then they were married in Egypt. They were married in an army tent.”

Now under British command, the newly formed Polish units were better fed, trained, armed, and organized. They began to form into the combat-worthy Corps that would fight with General Anders under British General Bernard Montgomery in the Italian campaign, including the decisive Battle of Monte Cassino.

Both Jan and Jadwiga participated – Jan as a meteorologist and aerial observer and Jadwiga as a nurse.

“There were many British casualties, Indian troops suffered casualties there, and finally the Poles took the mountain which was held by the Germans. My father was awarded a medal from Monte Cassino.”

The Polish army continued up the coast through Ancona all the way to Bologna. “They were instrumental with the British, including Canadians, in forcing the Germans out of Italy.”

After the Italian campaign Jan and Jadwiga stayed on. Although not a pilot himself, he participated in flying missions over enemy territory, using his engineering skills to analyze weather patterns that could affect troop movements and battle conditions.

“My mother was an ambulance nurse. She and her sister, who was also a nurse, followed th e forces along the whole campaign.”

Many Polish units were demobilized in the United Kingdom after the war. By 1946, after their long journeys first to the prison camps and then to Egypt and finally in combat through Italy, Jan and Jadwiga faced another odyssey – to what would become their home in London. Other family members arrived in the years following, while others joined what became a large Polish diaspora as many Poles relocated to countries around the world.

Based on their military service, Jan and Jadwiga were given permanent resident status in the United Kingdom. They bought a home on Oakley Avenue in the London suburb of Ealing in 1949. Anna continues to live in the family home with her husband Stephen.

Jan worked as a civil engineer and Jadwiga took care of the family.

Tragically, both died young, Jadwiga in 1955 and Jan in 1963. Jack and Anna were raised by aunts after the death of their parents.

Brachaniec completed physiotherapy training and worked in London. “But I had a bit of an itch to travel … there were lots of physiotherapy jobs around Europe, but there were always jobs in Canada advertised in the physiotherapy journal. So, I applied for one in Halifax, and they accepted me.”

Brachaniec came to Canada in 1979. “I arrived with no idea if I was going to stay, but here I am.”

He met his wife Mary in 1983 and they married in 1985. Their daughters, Claire and Elizabeth, live in Halifax and Toronto respectively; Jack and Mary eventually settled in Riverview.

Reflecting on the hardships and deprivation faced by his family, and millions of others, and the courage required to endure them, Brachaniec says, “there is a basic human drive to survive. The strongest survived, the family units looked after each other, and of course many did not survive. But there is a basic human will to survive.”

Brachaniec participates in memorial services at the Polish Canadian Brotherhood of Arms monument in Dieppe, New Brunswick, which honours Polish sailors who saved the lives of 85 Canadian soldiers during the Dieppe Raid in Normandy in August 1942.

“Thinking back on everything that has happened since 1939,” he recalls with a smile, “if there hadn’t been a war, I might be a Lithuanian or a Ukrainian.”