The General Langfitt Story
Chapter 4 - Amnesty and the Journey South (continued)
The reputation of many of these southern kolhozes was so bad that word spread to other Polish refugees. Tadeusz Dobrostanski told of how his mother chose an equally uncertain path in order to save herself and her sons from this fate. His mother, Janina, had the added advantage of knowing that her husband had rejoined the Polish army and she was hopeful of being reunited with him if she remained close to the Polish relief agencies. When they were taken to Samarkand to work in the cotton fields they slipped away at night and spent time, camping with gypsies before moving to Uzbek, a village on the outskirts of Samarkand. Christmas Eve 1941 remains etched in his memory:
We didn't have anything to eat except a huge beetroot which Mother boiled. We had one slice for each person and we drank the water it was cooked in. My mother wasn't paying the landlord because she didn't have money and he started getting very nasty. Finally in January 1942 Mother went to the Polish centre in Samarkand with the hope of getting some buckwheat or bread and she bumped into my father. He was already in British battledress, with the army issue revolver. When our Uzbek landlord looked at my father he went crazy because in Russia a Commandant is almighty. So he killed a lamb and prepared an Uzbek dinner. Suddenly we were the VIPs! He said to forget about the money we owed him. We were all good friends!
Father managed to get accommodation for us in Samarkand. We had half a house, which was luxury, and he obtained coupons which enabled us to get food in the shops for officers. Then three of us got very sick with typhoid fever. Father got an extension to stay with us and he tended us throughout this time, getting medicine from a Jewish doctor who helped organise Red Cross medicines. With typhoid fever you reach a crisis after ten days and you either die or pull through. Father kept temperature charts of our progress. I still have these. Then, in February, by chance Father met up with mother's stepfather who was an elderly doctor. He took care of us after that and Father went back to his unit.
Tadeusz Dobrostanski went on to highlight the resourcefulness of his mother, even after she learned that his father had died of typhoid fever. Like so many women her main concern became the survival of her children.
She was a very resourceful woman, a very great optimist. Even in the bleakest times she would say, 'It will work out, don't worry about it'. I owe her my life because she saved me many times. Now I know how heroic she was, but she was not an exception. There were many hundreds and thousands of similar mothers. The scenery was slightly different but their stories were more or less the same.
Cotton fields near Bukhara, USSR
(Courtesy of Tadeusz Dobrostanski)
In other families, children had to reverse the roles and looked after their mothers when they became sick. Bogdan Harbuz recalled how, when they reached Tashkent in Uzbekistan:
The NKVD decided we were not to go any further. There were thousands and thousands of people at the station, all trying to go somewhere but they had nowhere to go because there were no more trains. There were robberies and killings, but most of all people dying of hunger. People were forced to eat things they would never normally eat. I don't want to talk about it because it was so horrible.
His older sisters were sent to work on one kolhoz while he and his mother were sent to a Korean kolhoz:
In 1936, 5000 Koreans had been deported from Manchuria. When we arrived there were only 2000 still alive. In that short period of time 3000 of them died. At first, they were very aggressive and unfriendly because they thought we were Russian refugees. When they found out that we were Poles, deportees like them, they became quite friendly. My mother and I were left there with two other Polish families and soon after, my mother became sick with typhoid. There was no doctor or hospital. We were left as we were and our food rations were stopped because Mother could no longer work. The other Polish families must have been frightened of catching typhoid because when I tried to get close to them, to get help or some food, they chased me away with a stick. I know now that they were afraid but at the time it was very cruel. The only thing I could do was to go and pinch turnips from the Koreans, who left large bowls of turnips outside their houses to become sour. They ate it like sauerkraut. They chased me with sticks but they never caught me. It took me a long time to figure out that they didn't want to! Those turnips helped my mother and me, especially in the first weeks of her sickness when she was always thirsty. They seemed to act as medication.
He, like many others, also recalls the kindness of individual Russian officers or families who assisted them by providing food from their own meagre resources, 'I have a lot of gratitude towards Russian people. Even though in my heart they are enemies, as people they were at times very good'.