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.