Week 9: Gone too soon #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

Looking at my own family tree, I can find multiple ancestors who lost one or more children at a young age. That was obviously the norm in past centuries, but despite it being a common occurrence, I expect the parents' grief would have been just as deep. My paternal grandparents lost their first three children - John at age 8 from 'Convulsions due to congestion of the brain' ( nowadays this would be a seizure/stroke),  Jeannie at 8 months from 'enteritis' and George at age 1 from measles, while my maternal grandparents lost a son James aged 1, from heart failure. My great great grandmother Mary Boag died from complications of childbirth, leaving three children under the age of 10 - the new baby son dying one day before she did. Again this was not unusual.

When I compare the ages of deaths of my direct ancestors, I think I am remarkably lucky.

The graphic above is from www.dnapainter.com where their ancestral tree feature allows you to make age at death comparisons. The darker the colour, the older at death.

Compare this to my husband's tree:

You can see, at a glance, that the colours are lighter overall. The inner part of the fan is parents, then grandparents etc. Whereas my grandparents 'colours' are dark, Martin's are lighter. And this brings me to the real 'Gone too soon' story - not one of my ancestors, but one of Martin's.

His grandmother, Janina Ciupka was born in Poland in 1902. She came from a wealthy family background and was the youngest child.

At age 19, she married Wladyslaw Stepek, a WW1 war hero and political activist and, in the coming years, they had three children, Jan Wladyslaw, Maria Danuta and Zofia Weronika. At the end of the war, Wladyslaw was granted farmland at the eastern border, where Poland meets Russia. Life was normal and happy until WW2 broke out in 1939.

Russia invaded Poland from the east and Germany invaded from the west. Wladyslaw was immediately identified as a potential resistance leader by the Russians and was targeted for execution. Tipped off by a friend, he managed to flee into hiding. Meanwhile, the Soviet Red Army rounded up hundreds of thousands of people for deportation to Siberia. Janina and her three teenage children were among them.

They survived the labour camp they were sent to and, when freed in 1941, had to make their own way to a safe place of refuge. This proved to be in Persia, now Iran. It took them four months to reach there,

whilst their malnutrition and exhaustion increased. Arriving in Persia all four were taken to hospital camps. The three children slowly recovered, but Janina was too weak and died on October 25th, 1942, aged 40. Her death record stated causes of death as "starvation and exhaustion". She was buried in a communal grave in Tehran, alongside hundreds of other Poles.

Her husband in the Polish Resistance fell ill and died of cancer in 1943. All three children survived into their nineties.

Decades later, the three children erected a new gravestone for their mother alongside their father's in Haczow, where he was born and they met.

Janina - gone too soon, but not forgotten.