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Week 15: Solitude

 For this week's #52Ancestors topic, I am returning to Martin's family tree, this time to his father, Jan Wladyslaw Stepek (1922-2012).

In my Week 9 post, I told the story of Janina, Martin's grandmother, being deported with her children, to Siberia by the Russians. That part of the story ended with her death in Tehran in 1942. Prior to them leaving the Soviet Union, they were stuck in Uzbekistan, free from the camp but uncertain of their future. At this stage, rumour was spreading that there were Polish officials trying to find the refugees and help them. They also were recruiting men into the army.

Janina and her three children were all malnourished at this stage, which gave Jan, (Martin's father) a dilemma. Should he do his patriotic duty and try to find the officials and join the army or stay to help his mother and his two sisters survive?? He was just 19, so he asked his mother what he should do. She said, "Go! Whatever happens to us, happens. You must do your duty to your country."

So Jan set off in the general direction to where the Polish troops were supposed to be and walked barefoot for 50 kilometers across scrubland until he reached the campsite. He was never to see his mother alive again. It would be ten months before he saw his sisters again and would find out that his mother had died two months earlier. By this point, he himself had suffered typhus, dysentery twice and was currently ill with malaria, not expected to live. But... he did.

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