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2024 Week 25:Storyteller #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

When in 2001 my father in law Jan Stepek had the first of a series of strokes, my husband Martin realised that if Jan died, he would not know much about his past. Martin already knew some basic facts about his father's early life: Jan had been born and raised on a farm in Eastern Poland, he and his family were deported when WW2 broke out, his mother had died during the deportation period and somehow later on he served in the Polish Navy. The bare bones of a story which Martin has only recently fully told in his book "Jan Stepek  Part 1 : Gulag to Glasgow".
So... Martin determined that if his father recovered sufficiently, he would ask him to share the whole story of his early life. Thankfully this was the case. And what a story emerged!
As well as interviewing his father, Martin interviewed and filmed his father's two sisters who had also been deported. This meant he had three different perspectives. Over and above this, he researched online and discovered various key points of information which even the three Stepek siblings either didn't know or remember. These included the location of the labour camp to which they had been deported,  background information from others whose family members had also been deported, military records from Iran of the medical reports of the conditions of the Polish refugees as they arrived from the Soviet Union. Amongst other documentation from other sources he obtained the dates of their arrival and departure from the camp, a photograph of the headstone of Jan's mother, Janina, buried in Tehran and Jan's whole military record after he joined the Polish Navy in 1943. This research was done over a period of 22 years and finally published in book form earlier this year.
While researching, Martin also discovered a lot about Jan's father, Wladyslaw Stepek, who had been  politically active in seeking the resumption of Polish independence, but that's another story waiting to be told!
Reviews of the book have included many references to Martin as a great storyteller. He is proud to have been able to connect all the dots and write the story of his father so that Jan's extended family, his friends and colleagues in Scotland and the wider Polish diaspora, whose families experienced similar odysseys, can know the full story behind the man who was Jan Stepek, father, grandfather, successful businessman and philanthropist.
Martin's book is available to buy on Amazon.

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