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Week 41:Travel #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

Nowadays, the word 'travel'  conjures up pictures of holidays, of good times spent with those we care about. In past times, for our ancestors, travel would have meant something very different - a search for work in a different part of the country or a start of a new life in a far away place. For others, however, travel was something they undertook to save their very lives.
It is the 11th September 1941. This morning, Janina Stepek (38) and her three children, Jan (19), Zofia (16) and Maria Danuta (14) make a momentous decision. Some weeks previously the family and the other prisoners in the Charytonowo Labour Camp in northern Russia had been informed that they were now free to leave, due to the German invasion of Russia. So today, the youngest child is now well enough to undertake the journey.
They have to head south - north leads to the Arctic, west leads to the frontline and east is the vast wastelands of Siberia. They have also been told that Polish officials have been permitted to help Polish citizens who have been released, but that they are in southern Russia. The plan is to aim for Crimea in the south of Russia.
They have no money and only a few extra raggy clothes. They are 65 km from the nearest town, Kotlas, but it is already winter in that part of the country and the roads, tracks and rivers are beginning to freeze. It is a long walk but they are also helped some of the way by local people. They beg for food while waiting for any possible transport to get them south. Hundreds of other freed prisoners are also amassing at Kotlas. Finally they manage to get on a goods and cattle train heading south, but they don't know where it is going.
One thousand kilometres further south, they reach the outskirts of Moscow in December. By this time, Janina is barely able to stand, due to hunger, cold and exhaustion.
Over the next two months, they continue their journey - walking, stealing carts and getting on cattle trains. But they have to stop at villages to beg for food, relying on the kindness of strangers. They have no sense of direction as to where they are travelling. Finally they find themselves in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, 3000 km from Moscow and 4000km from their starting point. There they are placed in a communal farm and forced to work.
Jan leaves his mother and sisters to join the Polish Army in Russia and find the Polish officials, who then go to the farm to help them continue their journey. They are only one family among hundreds of thousands, attempting to do similar. The last part of their journey to freedom has begun, but it will take six months, owing to the sheer scale of refugees now in the area. The officials are overwhelmed by the scale of the task and Soviet officials are impeding the process.
It is in the August of 1942 when, finally,  on three separate ships, crammed with refugees, the four members of the Stepek family leave the Soviet Union and cross the Caspian Sea, arriving on the north coast of Persia (present day Iran).

All four are hospitalized in three different hospitals and this is where Janina's journey ends. She dies on the 25th October 1942 in Tehran, where she is buried.
Janina's grave in Dulab Cemetery, Tehran, with flowers added by family friend in 2012

The three children survive. Jan rejoins the Polish Army in Iraq, transfers to the Polish Navy and ends up in Liverpool Docks in 1943.

 His two sisters recover and are transported overland to Palestine, where Zofia learns English and becomes a translator for the rest of the war. The younger sister, Maria Danuta, resumes her education in Palestine.

After the war, in 1947, the sisters leave the Middle East for England, due to the beginnings of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Thus all three siblings finish the journey they started in Siberia in the United Kingdom, where they lived for the rest of their lives.

The full story of this journey is told in my husband Martin's forthcoming book, due to be released later this year.

 



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