Skip to main content

Week 45: War and Peace #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

My husband's paternal line is Polish and his grandfather, Wladyslaw Stepek, fought in two World Wars.  When WW1 started, Poland was under the occupation of three different empires: German, Russian and Austrian. Wladyslaw's family lived in the Austrian occupied area. In the summer of 1914, twenty-one years old, he had studied chemistry, so when conscripted into the army, he was placed in the medical corps. The following April he was captured by the Russian Army and taken to a prisoner of war camp in Ukraine. He spent two years there before being released - the full story of that is given in my week 11 post "Lucky" https://rootsshootsandstories.blogspot.com/2023/03/week-11-lucky-52ancestorsin52weeks.html 

Wladyslaw's POW camp release form

On his return home he was hospitalised and, when he recovered, he agitated against Austrian rule for the return of Polish independence. This resulted in him being imprisoned again, but for a shorter time. When he was released the war was almost over and the Austrian Empire was crumbling. Wladyslaw persuaded a hundred local men to join with him in disarming the nearby Austrian Army barracks. After WW1 ended, minor wars continued in Poland to establish Poland's borders. In Wladyslaw's region, that meant a campaign against Ukraine.

Wladyslaw in Polish Army uniform around 1919/1920

There followed twenty years of peace, during which time Wladyslaw married and had three children. The family was given land as a reward for Wladyslaw's endeavours during the war. He could now turn to more peaceful pursuits of raising a family and developing a farm. 

This all came to a tragic end in 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west and two weeks later, Soviet Russia invaded from the East.  This was the start of his second world war. 

Wladyslaw was quickly identified as a potential resistance leader by the Soviet Red Army and had to flee into hiding, leaving his wife and children behind. He returned to his place of birth, Haczow, and joined the resistance movement in the region. However, his long-term ill health was such that he was restricted to providing advice and strategy for the resistance campaigns. In late 1942, he was diagnosed with bowel cancer, unaware too that his wife had died two months earlier and not knowing the fate of his children. His condition worsened and he died on the 23rd of June 1943.

His name can be seen engraved on the war memorial in his hometown of Haczow along with others who fought and died for Poland's freedom. 

One side of the war memorial in Haczow


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2024 Week 43: Lost contact #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

 When we research our ancestors and their families, it is all to easy to become a collector of names, dates and places. After all, we want to 'know' who they were and where they lived and when, in order to get a glimpse into what their life was like. We look for photographs of our most recent ancestors to see what they looked like. We trawl censuses, Poor Law Applications, Wills and Testaments to get some detail about their rank in society, their jobs, their financial circumstances. We discover their families, the children they had, the children they lost. We may read their obituaries and gravestones and scan their death certificates for cause of death. Through research, we can slowly start to build up a picture of them, a notion that we know 'who they were'. But something will usually elude us - we will never truly know their feelings/emotions, even if we know the key moments in their lives. Take my grandmother, Christina, who lost her first four children and then anot...
4 comments
Read more

2024 Week 14: Favourite recipe #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

So, despite the heading, I'm not going to write about a favourite recipe that an ancestor has passed down to me, simply because there isn't one. What or rather whom I'm going to write about is my mum, Helen Anderson, who absolutely loved baking. And it is this love of baking that has been passed on to me. My mum. My mum was always baking. Like most children, I got allowed to 'lick the spoon' and taste the raw cake mixture. I got to learn to how to make crispie cakes. I watched how to make pancakes and enjoyed getting the first ones off the pan. I took in helpful baking hints like 'half fat to flour' for pastry or ' 4 4 4 plus 2' for the measurements of flour, sugar,  butter and eggs needed for a sponge cake or little butterfly cakes.  She had learned how to bake from her mother, as many women in her generation had done. There was always something 'in the tin' should a friend or neighbour pop in for a cup of tea. But she didn't just bake f...
Post a Comment
Read more

2024: Week 41: Most #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

Looking at my DNA matches over various platforms and my family tree research, it is obvious to me that my paternal grandmother's line - the Walkers - are the line which have the most descendants (or at least the most descendants who have tested) and who have spread out furthest over the world. My great great grandparents James Walker (1777-1862) and Ellen Muir (1790-1866) from Linlithgow in Scotland had ten children - eight boys and two girls. Such large families were not uncommon in those times. Two of the boys never married, but between them the other eight siblings produced at least 52 grandchildren! The eldest of the siblings, George Walker was, however,  the only one of the children to ever leave Scotland and that was later in life, when he followed his son John, a miner, over to the USA. It is, however, many of the grandchildren of James and Ellen who decide to leave their homeland for the USA and for Australia. Their USA destinations included Kansas, Colorado, Ohio and Maryl...
Post a Comment
Read more