Roots, shoots and stories

 My husband Martin could have been a fluent Polish speaker given that his father, Jan, was Polish. However, Jan made a conscious decision not to teach any of his children his native language.  He had come to live in Scotland at the end of the Second World War, having been given a grant to study in Glasgow. It was while there he met Teresa his wife to be. She was Scottish from an Irish background. Jan had lost so much through the war - his father, his mother, his home and the independence of his homeland - and being unable to return to Poland, he had lost everything. As a result, his focus was entirely on building a new life in Scotland and becoming "Scottish" - though his accent never changed! So his children were never taught Polish, something Martin regrets. Polish was only heard in the house when Jan's sister Danuta or other Polish friends came to visit, and at Christmas time, when Jan was on the phone arranging presents for the children from Poland. Martin's fathe...

My father-in-law Jan Stepek, along with his mother and two sisters spent two years in a Soviet labour camp and as refugees during WW2.  Amazingly, despite this, they were able to correspond to family back in Poland. Often these letters were censored or just not delivered, but some still got through. The Red Cross was responsible for delivering letters and parcels, something that still happens in parts of the world to this day which people are unaware of.  After the war, one of the sisters, Danuta, was the first to return to Poland, some 24 years after she had been deported to the camps. There she met her father's two sisters for the first time. After an emotional reunion and conversation one of the aunts left the room and returned with a box. In it was a collection of photographs, documents and some of the letters which had got through to Poland from the labour camps. This was the first time Danuta has seen an image of her parents for over a quarter of a century. Most poignant...

 At 2 a.m. on the 10th of February 1940, Janina Stepek and her three children, Jan, Zosia and Danka were woken up by loud knocking at the door of their home in Eastern Poland. It was the Soviet Red Army and Ukrainian Militia, the Soviets having invaded Poland some five months earlier. The family were ordered to pack what they could and be ready to leave within thirty minutes. One officer, in an act of kindness, told Janina to pack as much as they could for cold weather. They were taken by cart to the nearest train station, along with the entire population of the village. There they discovered that the inhabitants of many villages had been similarly forced to leave their homes. After several hours in the freezing cold, they were bundled on to cattle trains. Each wagon took fifty people, crammed together. There was no toilet, there was a stove in the centre of the carriage and there were some shelves which could be used as beds for some. The doors slid shut and locked everyone in, le...

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...

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 permi...