The General Langfitt Story
Chapter 1 - Pre-War Poland (continued)
Religion was very important to most Polish people and although we didn't have a church we lived on the edge of a great land-holding where there was a chapel. This chapel was open to everyone and my husband was on the church committee.
Stanislawa Jutrzenka-Trzebiatowska (Adamska nèe Grzelak) was born in 1907 in Kolo, west of Warsaw, the second eldest in a family of twelve children.
Family photograph 1931 (Courtesy of Stanislawa
Jutrzenka-Trzebiatowska)
The area we lived in was under Russian rule so there was no schooling in our village, only informal schooling was available. Girls were not allowed to go to school. A friend who was a teacher helped our parents to find a school for my elder brother and me about twenty kilometres from my parents' place. When we had two or three school-free days we would go home by train. We would hold hands because by the time we got to our parents' house it would be getting dark.
In 1925 and 26 I did my teaching training, after which I taught in the next village to where I lived. I taught for six years and then in 1935 I married Henryk Adamski, who was also a teacher. After we were married I changed my place of residence to a village near Pinsk, in eastern Poland, where my husband lived. There was a big school there and we taught there together. My daughter Danuta Teresa was born in 1936. I had only one daughter because we were together for only four years.
Krystyna Jarzebowska and her sister Halina Juszczyk (nèe Kojder) were born in the ex-servicemen's settlement of Niechiewicze, near Novogrod, in eastern Poland. Their father had been only 17 when he joined the Polish army as a legionnaire in the First World War. As a consequence he never finished his studies at business college, choosing instead to take up a land grant in eastern Poland, like many of his army colleagues.