Week 10: Translation #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

My husband's paternal grandfather, Wladyslaw Stepek, was born in 1893 in Poland, at a time when that area of Poland was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When WW1 broke out in 1914, he was conscripted into the Austrian Army. We knew he had been a POW, taken prisoner sometime in 1915 and later released.

In 2017, Martin wondered if there would be any records held somewhere in Austria which could give us any more information, given that Wladyslaw had served in the Austrian Army. So, he dictated a letter to me in English, which I translated into German, and we sent it off to the Austrian State Archives. We thought there was only a slim chance of anything coming from this, but we waited on a reply.

A couple of weeks later, in came the reply. They would search their archives for a fee of 45 Euros for the 30 minutes work they believed it would entail. All we had to do was agree to this and wait. They estimated we would hear if they had found anything or not within the next eight weeks.

Then we got the reply we were hoping for! They had found his POW card from the Russian camp. The photocopy from the archives gives his name, place of birth, his regiment, where he was captured and when, where he was imprisoned and his date of release. The larger writing on the card is from the Russian camp, the smaller from the Austrian authorities.

This record had lain in the Austrian Archives for over 100 years. It was only unearthed because of our query. What else is lying out there to be discovered??

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