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Polish deportees recognized

BY HEIDI ULRICHSEN In 1940, Mieczyslawa Szymkiewicz was a happy 10-year-old living in Eastern Poland when Soviet invaders deported her family to Northern Russia. More than 60 years later, she is being honoured for her suffering.
Szymkiewicz_Mieczyslawa
Mieczyslawa Szymkiewicz receives her Siberian Deportees Cross.

BY HEIDI ULRICHSEN

In 1940, Mieczyslawa Szymkiewicz was a happy 10-year-old living in Eastern Poland when Soviet invaders deported her family to Northern Russia.

More than 60 years later, she is being honoured for her suffering. Along with 10 other members of Greater Sudbury's Polish community, Szymkiewicz was awarded the Siberian Deportees Cross last week at the local Polish Combatants Hall. The award was established by the Polish parliament in 2003.

During the Second World War, the Soviets deported 1.8 million Poles to Siberia, Kazakhstan and Northern Russia. The deportees, many of whom were wealthy landowners and merchants, were seen as being against communism.

Szymkiewicz, 77, says her family was singled out because they were "rich." They were in exile from 1940-42.

"We were rich people, and Russia didn't like rich people. They sent us away to get rid of us," she says.

"I didn't like it in Russia. I almost died. It was like a concentration camp. We suffered. We had no shoes. We had no food. I don't know how we survived."

The family was eventually freed. They immigrated to Montreal in 1949, where Szymkiewicz met her husband, Domenic. The couple moved to Sudbury, where Domenic worked in the mines.

Walter Dalecki, 84, also received a Siberian Deportees Cross at the ceremony. He lived in exile in Siberia twice during his lifetime.

"My parents were deported to Siberia from Poland before the First World War. I was actually born in Siberia," he says.

"My parents were deported because the Russian Czars were occupying Poland. They thought that my parents were subversive and were tending towards communism. That's where the irony is.

"When the communist (Soviets) occupied Poland (during the Second World War), I was suspected of being anti-communist. At the age of 18 in 1940, I was arrested at 2 am by eight KGB.

"I was put in prison with criminals and murderers, and actually, the criminals were treated better than the political prisoners. In a cell designed for 20 people, there were 120 people.

"From there I was sent up to Siberia, to the most northern place you could get, which is a place called Vorkuta."

Dalecki was forced to work as slave labour in a Siberian coal mine for a year. The workers were given 1,500 calories a day, and the guards cut off 10 percent of their rations if they didn't mine enough coal.

Some of the food was whale blubber. Dalecki figures he survived because he could stand to eat the blubber. Those who couldn't eat it starved to death.

"When the Germans attacked Russia, the Russians let us all go hoping we would join their army. But it didn't work out the way the wanted it. We formed our own Polish unit and we went to Persia, Iraq and Iran."

Dalecki lived in England after the war for eight years, where he met his wife, Christine. They immigrated to Sudbury in 1954, where Dalecki hoped to get work as a machinist.

Unfortunately, he was unable to work in his trade, so he instead got a job as an orderly in the mental hospital. Over the years, he's also worked at a furniture store and Woolco.

Dalecki says he's grown detached from his homeland over the years. Even the fall of the iron curtain in 1990 didn't really interest him.

"I didn't really feel one way or the other, because I felt more Canadian than Polish. It didn't affect me that much."

Henryk Antonowicz, Krystyna Dalecka, Irena Dembek, Zofia Fedec, Henryk Komar, Boleslaw Korzeniecki and Janina Mrozewska also received the Siberian Deportees Cross at the ceremony. Family members accepted the decoration on behalf of the late Slawomir Berlinski and the late Jozef Korzeniecki.


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