In Iran

On 27 August 1942, around noon, we sailed into the port of Pah­lavi on Ira­nian soil. In later years the Ira­ni­ans renamed the town Bandar-e Anzali. The dis­em­bark­a­tion of pas­sen­gers was exem­plary in its organ­isa­tion. People coming off the ship onto the quay were imme­di­ately dir­ec­ted to wait­ing army lor­ries, which set off as soon as they were loaded. We too climbed up the steps provided onto a lorry fitted with benches, and it set off at once. After a short drive we reached our quar­ters, a huge camp on the sandy beach of the Caspian Sea. We found ourselves in the civil­ian sector, where, par­al­lel to the shore and a few dozen metres from it, long rows of shel­ters roofed with mats against the sun had been put up, and under these shel­ters the people arriv­ing from the port took their places on the sand, family next to family. Many thou­sands of civil­ians were already camped in these shel­ters, and we joined them. In the other part of the beach was the mil­it­ary sector, where the sol­diers were quartered in tents. The junaks, uni­formed young people aged four­teen to eight­een, were quartered there too, as well as women's units of the organ­isa­tion called the Women's Aux­il­i­ary Ser­vice, the so-called “pestki”. This huge camp, which occu­pied three kilo­metres of beach on the east­ern side of the town, was fenced off from the out­side by a low fence, beyond which one could come across jack­als, which were in the habit of vis­it­ing the camp at night in search of food.

This second stage of the evac­u­ation lasted from 8 to 30 August 1942. We man­aged to leave on 27 August, near the very end. In the August evac­u­ation 45,000 sol­diers and 25,500 civil­ians left for Iran, 70,500 people in all. Alto­gether, in the first and second stages, 114,500 people left the USSR, 78,000 of them sol­diers and 36,500 civil­ians¹¹. If we com­pare this figure of 114,500 with the total number of amnestied people, 389,041¹², we find that only 29 per cent of those amnestied man­aged to be evac­u­ated to Iran.

Those who remained in the Soviet Union had to wait for the end of the war work­ing in kolk­hozes or factor­ies, and some joined Ber­ling's army and fought against the Ger­mans along­side the Red Army.

We, mean­while, on the beach at Pah­lavi, enjoyed beau­ti­ful summer weather. The sea was warm and many people went bathing. But the waves were big, and some bathers ignored this, swam out too far and could not get back to shore; there were sev­eral drown­ings. Most import­ant was that we had an army kit­chen close by, which sup­plied rich, high-cal­orie meals from the cauldron. But this rich food did not agree with every­one, for people were under­nour­ished and soon began fall­ing ill en masse, prob­ably from over­eat­ing. Their stom­achs could not cope with such good food. We, on the other hand, had great priv­ileges at our field kit­chen, because its head was Mr Szkoda, a former neigh­bour of Father's from Polesie, from the time when Father worked there as dis­trict for­ester in 1930–1934; Szkoda had been a mil­it­ary set­tler with a farm near us. Our transit camp at Pah­lavi was fenced off from the town and we had no con­tact with the local people, but Per­sian traders con­stantly appeared selling vari­ous fruits, includ­ing pomegranates, unknown in Poland.

Right at the begin­ning my Brother and I joined the junaks, the army's youth units. I would not turn four­teen until Octo­ber, but nobody there asked for a birth cer­ti­fic­ate, since hardly anyone could pro­duce one. As a four­teen-year-old I was put in the fourth com­pany, and my brother, at fif­teen, in the third. As my uni­form I was given a Brit­ish bat­tle­dress, far too big for me, because in almost three years in the USSR I had hardly grown, and in height I resembled an eleven-year-old. I fastened the army trousers I was issued with a belt high up, some­where under my armpits. There were no uni­forms for sol­diers of small stature. We were quartered on the beach in the mil­it­ary sector, with only a shel­ter over­head that pro­tec­ted us from the sun but not from rain, and we slept on blankets spread on the sand. My good friend in the com­pany turned out to be Adam Szkoda, the son of the head of the field kit­chen in the civil­ian sector, who had known my Father before the war, as I wrote earlier. Adam and I marched together and slept side by side in our shel­ter. Adam was the same height as me and also had trouble wear­ing a uni­form that was far too big. Our fourth com­pany was com­manded by a pla­toon ser­geant, a pre-war NCO who gave orders in a mighty voice and who was assisted by a cor­poral, a very calm and even-tempered man. With this cor­poral we marched end­lessly up and down the beach, per­form­ing vari­ous turns as part of our drill and prac­tising our march­ing step. The com­mand would come: “Fours, right turn! For­ward march!” and the com­pany would start march­ing. Then the com­mand: “Com­pany, sing!” and we sang the songs the cor­poral had taught us. Quite often our fourth com­pany of four­teen-year-old war­ri­ors sang this song:

Nie ma wesela, nie ma muzyki, żeby nie było panny Ludwiki!
Panna Ludwika, klawa kobita, każdemu buzi da!
(There's no wedding and no music without Miss Ludwika!
Miss Ludwika, a smashing girl, gives everyone a kiss!)

I felt fine as one of Gen­eral Anders's sol­diers until I was struck by a very unpleas­ant ill­ness, bloody flux, also called dys­en­tery. I went on taking part in the marches, but my con­di­tion grew stead­ily worse. On top of that the good weather ended and the rains began. As sol­diers we were better off than the civil­ians in that we had rubber rain capes, which we hung over our heads, while the civil­ians got wet, because the sun mats over their heads gave no pro­tec­tion from the rain. My symp­toms became so bad that I ended up in hos­pital. The hos­pital was also on the beach, in a sep­ar­ate part of the mil­it­ary sector, and the sick lay in large tents on iron beds set close together in two rows in each tent. My first con­tact with the doctor went like this. The doctor asked: “What's the matter with you?” I replied: “I have bloody dys­en­tery.” And he said: “And where is the blood coming from?” I could not find the right word, so I said noth­ing, but I real­ised the doctor was trying to cheer me up. I spent about a week in that hos­pital, and when I had recovered some­what I was taken with other patients, in a larger group, to Tehran, the cap­ital of Iran. By the end of Septem­ber the transit camp at Pah­lavi was being wound up. The civil­ians went from Pah­lavi to Tehran, and the army to Iraq. A reminder of the Poles' stay at Pah­lavi is the cemetery where 639 people evac­u­ated from the USSR are buried. That is how many were lost of the 114,500 evac­u­ated in all in March, April and August 1942.

At the end of Septem­ber my brother left Pah­lavi for Tehran with his junak com­pany, and after a short stay there he went on to Palestine, from where he was trans­ferred to Egypt, where he was admit­ted to the Air Force Tech­nical School at Heli­opolis near Cairo. The school fol­lowed the cur­riculum of four years of gym­nas­ium and two of lyceum, exten­ded with aero­naut­ical sub­jects. He atten­ded it for four years, and at the end of 1946, when the school was closed down, he went to Eng­land, where after the war he served for another two years in the RAF (Royal Air Force), until the end of 1948, when his mil­it­ary ser­vice ended. He settled per­man­ently in Derby in Eng­land. In 1998 Zbig­niew Bach­miński was awar­ded the Cross of Combat Action of the Polish Armed Forces in the West by the Pres­id­ent of the Repub­lic of Poland.

I left Pah­lavi for Tehran on 25 Septem­ber 1942 with other hos­pital patients. We trav­elled by bus over the high Alborz moun­tains, along the road of “a thou­sand bends”. After the first day we stopped for the night in Qazvin. We were all put in one great hotel hall with no beds, only Per­sian car­pets, on which, fol­low­ing Per­sian custom, we were to sleep side by side. After spend­ing the night there we set off again and finally reached Tehran. Here I found myself in a large Polish hos­pital on the out­skirts of the city. There were a great many Polish patients in the hos­pital, and what caught my atten­tion most were some of them shuff­ling around the hos­pital court­yard, so ema­ci­ated that their skel­eton-like fig­ures stood out. The death rate among Poles in Tehran was high, as shown by the 1,937 Polish graves in the Dulab war cemetery. My stay in hos­pital lasted another ten days or so. I did not return to my junak com­pany, because Mother decided to have me with­drawn to civil­ian life, and on leav­ing hos­pital I found myself in Polish Camp No. 2 on the out­skirts of Tehran, near a mil­it­ary air­field. Living con­di­tions in Camp No. 2 were prim­it­ive: we lived in hut-like shel­ters with no floor, just beaten earth, on which the fam­il­ies crowded side by side, sleep­ing on blankets spread on the ground. I star­ted going to school, in the sixth year. The school was in the open air: we sat on planks laid on bricks, but there was a black­board, which showed that it was a real school. Being next to the air­field was very excit­ing for me, because I could watch the con­stant aero­bat­ics over the air­field. They were biplane fight­ers, not very modern, but their aero­bat­ics were beau­ti­ful. An import­ant event during our stay in Tehran was the visit to Camp No. 2 of the Field Bishop, Józef Gawlina, who admin­istered con­firm­a­tion to a large group in the open air on the square. I also remem­ber that for a few days shots could be heard in the city. Nobody dared go into the city to see what was hap­pen­ing. In our camp the explan­a­tion was that these were riots caused by Kurds, who were sta­ging demon­stra­tions in the cap­ital that turned into exchanges of fire with the army, the aim of these demon­stra­tions being to demand autonomy for the Kur­d­ish people living within Iran's bor­ders.

During our stay in Tehran, Mother and I tried to see the city and observe how the Per­sians lived. Look­ing east from the city one saw the mighty peak of Dam­avand, 5,604 metres high, tower­ing over the city under a white cap of snow and ice. Sev­eral times we went to the city centre, to the main street, Lalezar, looked at the shop win­dows, and also went into a mosque and admired its beau­ti­ful archi­tec­ture. We stayed in Tehran for about three months, until we left for Isfa­han, where Mother had been engaged as a teacher at one of the insti­tu­tions hous­ing Polish orphans.

I remem­ber the jour­ney to Isfa­han quite well. We had over 500 km to cover by bus, stop­ping sev­eral times at road­side places where, behind high walls, there were chaikhanas, or tea­houses. Our driver took the oppor­tun­ity to smoke a nar­gile, a water pipe, in the chaikhana. Some of our fellow trav­el­lers feared that the water pipe might con­tain a drug and that after smoking it the driver would cause an acci­dent. We drove through a barren upland coun­try on a road without many bends, and the driver, as it turned out, had no trouble driv­ing the bus after smoking his nar­gile and brought us safely to Isfa­han.

Isfa­han was a large city with 250,000 inhab­it­ants. It was a city of many mosques, with a his­toric 33-arch bridge over the Zay­an­derud River link­ing the centre with the Armenian quarter, Julfa. I lived with per­haps forty boys in Julfa, in a large single-storey res­id­ence sur­roun­ded by a high wall. Who owned the res­id­ence and lent it to us for our tem­por­ary stay I cannot say. About 2,700 of our refugees, mostly young people, ended up in Isfa­han. They lived in private villas, reli­gious houses and mil­it­ary build­ings. It was a very help­ful ges­ture on the part of the Ira­nian state and people that so many of our refugees could be housed in build­ings of quite a good stand­ard. I began the first year of gym­nas­ium, “skip­ping” the sixth year of primary school, which I had atten­ded in Tehran for only two months. My gym­nas­ium was in Julfa, not far from where I lived. Mother was a teacher at an insti­tu­tion in the city centre, and I often vis­ited her, cross­ing the 33-arch bridge to the other side of the river. Together we explored the city, vis­ited sev­eral mosques and admired, among other things, the work of the local crafts­men making silver objects that were mas­ter­fully engraved. I still have a souvenir of Isfa­han: Father's silver cigar­ette case, which we gave to those mas­ters to engrave. We were intrigued by the Per­sian car­pets dis­played for sale in many places. Since Mother had a modest teacher's salary, we had a few tomans for small expenses, and even for buying an engraved silver brace­let. I should add that through­out our stay in Iran and after­wards our basic food was free, so earn­ings from work could go on per­sonal expenses. Every­where in the street they sold lepy­oshki, a kind of flat­bread made of dark flour, which we often bought because they were cheap and tasty. Of the fruit, we most liked buying pomegranates and dried dates. The covered bazaar in Isfa­han, stretch­ing for more than a kilo­metre, was sen­sa­tional: it had count­less shops and stalls with all sorts of goods, and there was a great hubbub and noise, as the sellers loudly praised their wares, and the noise was heightened by crafts­men in their work­shops ham­mer­ing sheet metal.

Our stay in Isfa­han was short, only seven weeks. It was decided that we were to leave with a group of five hun­dred Polish chil­dren for the Union of South Africa. Around the middle of Feb­ru­ary 1943 we left Isfa­han by bus north­wards to the city of Qom, from where there was a rail con­nec­tion to Ahvaz, a city in south­ern Iran near the Per­sian Gulf, where we were to wait for the ship that would take us to Africa. In Qom there was a three-day break in the jour­ney while we waited for a train to Ahvaz. We were put up in a hotel and had time to see the city. Qom is a beau­ti­ful ori­ental city, and the most strik­ing example of Islamic archi­tec­ture there was a his­toric mosque with a golden dome. Our jour­ney from Qom to Ahvaz was by night train and was excep­tion­ally tiring, because we were crammed into a com­part­ment and sleep was out of the ques­tion. We trav­elled through the high Zagros range, and at sun­rise the train stopped at a small sta­tion, where I got out to admire the beau­ti­ful moun­tain scenery. Besides the beauty of the moun­tains lit by the rising sun, I saw sev­eral Per­sians get off the train, spread their prayer rugs and, facing Mecca, bow down to Allah. It was a scene worth remem­ber­ing. We arrived safely in Ahvaz, where there was a transit camp for Poles wait­ing to leave for Africa and India. 18,000 people left Iran by sea for Africa, and 4,500 for India¹³. Our stay in Ahvaz lasted 18 days, until word came that a ship was wait­ing for us in port. Then we set off by train to the port of Khor­ram­shahr on the Shatt al-Arab. This river is the final stretch of the Euphrates and the Tigris, two rivers that join about two hun­dred kilo­metres before the Per­sian Gulf to form a single stream called the Shatt al-Arab. The river here is deep enough for ocean-going ships. In port the large pas­sen­ger ship Dunera was wait­ing for us; a group of 1,032 Poles boarded her, and on 3 March 1943 we left Iran. Our stay in Iran had lasted half a year.

Sail­ing down the Shatt al-Arab we had unfor­get­table views: on both sides of the river there was a great palm forest. Soon we reached Abadan, where we stopped to take on fuel oil for the onward voyage. After leav­ing the port of Abadan we soon reached the Per­sian Gulf, and sail­ing down the Gulf we reached the Strait of Hormuz. In the Strait there was a stop of sev­eral days, because numer­ous ships were gath­er­ing there to set out into the Indian Ocean in convoy, escor­ted by des­troy­ers.

Form­ing a convoy with a des­troyer escort was neces­sary because German and Japan­ese sub­mar­ines were prowl­ing the Indian Ocean. In the Strait one of our pas­sen­gers spot­ted the Polish ship Koś­ciuszko, which caused great emo­tion, for we saw in her a piece of our Home­land, but it was not pos­sible to make con­tact with her crew. At last the convoy set off, but our Dunera sailed with it for only a few days, because the convoy of sev­eral dozen ships headed south-east towards India, while the Dunera set course for Africa alone. Our ship often sailed a zigzag course so as not to leave a clear wake, which might tell a sub­mar­ine that there was a target to tor­pedo nearby. The Dunera was quite well armed: she had a large-cal­ibre gun on the stern with which to defend her­self against sub­mar­ine attacks, and two twin anti-air­craft gun pos­i­tions, which could also be used to fire on sub­mar­ines. During the voyage there were sev­eral test fir­ings of the gun at unwanted crates thrown over­board, and of the anti-air­craft guns at small bal­loons released into the air. Every day there was a prac­tice alarm, for which we turned out in life­jack­ets. We also had con­stant musters on deck and drills led by a naval officer on what to do if we were tor­pedoed. On the ship I had a place in third class, which meant sleep­ing in a ham­mock and wash­ing under a salt­water shower. Our ship called briefly at Mom­basa, Beira and Durban. The port of Mom­basa made the greatest impres­sion on me; it was there that I had my first con­tact with “black” Africa. At Beira, a port in Por­tuguese Mozam­bi­que, a group of 513 Poles went ashore, whose final des­tin­a­tion and place of per­man­ent res­id­ence was to be Lusaka in North­ern Rhodesia (Zambia). The last stretch of the voyage, from Durban to Port Eliza­beth, was through waters threatened by German sub­mar­ine attack, and we could guess at this danger, because all the while we were patrolled by an air­craft that accom­pan­ied us and watched the ocean waters. We arrived safely at Port Eliza­beth in the Union of South Africa, and that was the end of our sea voyage, which had lasted four weeks. For nine days we stayed on board without being able to go ashore, because we had to undergo quar­ant­ine, during which we were checked for any infec­tious dis­ease we might have brought with us.

Our first place of res­id­ence was the town of Oudtshoorn in the Union of South Africa, where our group of 500 chil­dren and young people, who had come on the Dunera to Port Eliza­beth together with a team of 29 teach­ers and carers, ended up. At the begin­ning of 1944 I left the Union of South Africa with Mother and my Sister for North­ern Rhodesia (Zambia). During our stay in North­ern Rhodesia Mother worked as a primary school teacher in the Polish set­tle­ment at Lusaka, while I atten­ded the second year of the Polish gym­nas­ium in Liv­ing­stone and then con­tin­ued at the gym­nas­ium and lyceum in Lusaka, and in 1947 passed my school-leav­ing exam­in­a­tion. My sister mean­while atten­ded primary school. In June 1947 our more than four years in Africa came to an end, as we had decided to return to Poland. The story of the Poles in Africa is inter­est­ingly told by Wacław Kor­a­biewicz in his book Gdzie słoń, a gdzie Polska (Where the Ele­phant Is, and Where Poland), which also includes extracts from the mem­oirs of my Mother and myself (pp. 70–73). My friend from Rhodesia, Eugeni­usz Zaliński, also described our stay in Africa at length in his book Z Polski do Polski. Przez Syberię, przez Afrykę (From Poland to Poland: Through Siberia, Through Africa). These books are well worth read­ing, as they tell the story of the Poles who, after a short stay in Iran, found them­selves in Africa. I decided not to con­tinue with an account of my adven­tures in Africa, because my main inten­tion was to describe only this dra­matic period of our exile, ending with our happy depar­ture from the ter­rit­ory of the USSR, our half-year stay in Iran and our voyage to South Africa. We returned home to Poland on 25 July 1947, after almost seven and a half years of wan­der­ing.