Epilogue

In con­clu­sion I would like to offer a few reflec­tions and facts about the post-war period. By chance my Mother found Mrs Jad­wiga Wróblewska, who had returned home from India and settled in Gdańsk. She often vis­ited us in Wrocław, and whenever one of us was at the sea­side we vis­ited her in Gdańsk. We liked talk­ing about our time together at Kat­iszcze and in Dzh­am­bul, thanks to which vari­ous details and names have stayed fixed in my memory, and I have included them in my Mem­oirs.

I very much wanted to visit my town, Wołkow­ysk, from which we were depor­ted on 10 Feb­ru­ary 1940. The first oppor­tun­ity came only in 1999, and the next visit took place in 2016. I made the first trip with my wife, Alina, by coach from Wrocław to Grodno, and from Grodno to Wołkow­ysk by local bus. The hotel in the town centre was well below European stand­ards, which forced us to cut our stay short. We vis­ited the house at 5 Kar­czyzna Street (now 19 Moprauskaja Street), our first home in Wołkow­ysk in 1935–1936. We talked with one of the ten­ants of the house. He knew the name of the pre-war owner, Gołgowski, and said that someone from the Gołgowski family had come from Poland a few times to look at the house, to which Gołgowski had lost his title when he left Wołkow­ysk for Poland in 1945. How the house looked in 1999 can be seen in the attached pho­to­graph. The façade looks rather shabby.

We also vis­ited the house at 40 Wileńska Street, where we lived from 1936 to 1940. I talked with a Rus­sian who lived in the flat occu­pied before the war by Mr Zalewski, the owner of the house. The Rus­sian, Ivan Grigoryevich Bashkirev, invited us into his flat and told us his story: during the war with Ger­many he had served in the anti-air­craft artil­lery, and after the war he had stayed in Wołkow­ysk, where there were flats left empty by Poles resettled to Poland. Ivan Grigoryevich invited us to a party the next day, which never took place, how­ever, because we decided to go home on account of the dread­ful con­di­tions in the hotel. I also tried to visit my school friend, Władek Gab­rowski, who lived next door at 38 Wileńska Street, but unfor­tu­nately nobody came out of the house, although Ivan Grigoryevich had told us that his neigh­bour Volodya lived there in that pre-war house. I was very sorry that the meet­ing did not happen.

My second trip to Wołkow­ysk was in 2016. I went with my son Mari­usz and my grand­son Łukasz. We trav­elled by car and had very decent accom­mod­a­tion in a flat for short-term rent in an apart­ment block. We vis­ited the area of the house at 5 Kar­czyzna Street. The house was in good con­di­tion, the façade had been ren­ov­ated and a proper fence put up. We talked with two men living next door who spoke Polish and held the Karta Polaka (Pole's Card). We also went to 40 Wileńska Street (now Per­vo­mayskaya Street) and to the Castle Forest. On Wileńska Street we called at the neigh­bour­ing house to visit my school friend, Władek Gab­rowski. It turned out that we had come upon Zhenya Gab­rowski, Władek's 28-year-old grand­son, who was delighted to meet us. Zhenya told us that his grand­father Władek had died, and that he had inher­ited the old house with its large garden. The house was no longer fit to live in and now served as a dacha, a summer house. Most inter­est­ing of all was that Zhenya lived with his wife and daugh­ter at 40 Wileńska Street, in our pre-war flat. It gave me great pleas­ure to be able to enter that flat sev­enty-six years after our deport­a­tion. How­ever, Zhenya occu­pied only part of our flat, as it had been divided into two smal­ler units, and I had no oppor­tun­ity to see the other part. Zhenya invited us for the even­ing to his dacha, where we spent a very pleas­ant time in the garden with a bar­be­cue and Rus­sian vodka. We spoke Rus­sian, because Zhenya did not speak Polish.

The next day we went up Swedish Hill, from where there was a clear view of the whole town, whose pop­u­la­tion has grown from 17,000 before the war to 44,000 today. We also paid a visit to the sec­ond­ary school where the lan­guage of instruc­tion is Polish. It was a Sunday, but the deputy head was on duty at the school; she showed us round and gave us a lot of inform­a­tion. The school is housed in a modern build­ing built in 1988 with a grant from the Polish gov­ern­ment. We also vis­ited the Polish cemetery, where par­ti­cipants in the Janu­ary Upris­ing of 1863 and sol­diers who fell in 1919–1920 are buried. The cemetery was well kept, and the insur­gents and sol­diers buried there had good head­stones. Wołkow­ysk now has a large Polish com­munity. Vis­it­ing Wołkow­ysk after so many years was an import­ant event in my life.