When my grandmother left Bohorodczany in March 1921, her destination was the city of Lodz, in central Poland, where she had found work as a teacher. The reunion with Franciscus, if there was one, would not have been too long. His military career was on the rise, and with this came a postwar deployment back to the Silesia region, where his regiment was posted. A string of other deployments followed for him, all far away from what used to be home.17 Not surprisingly, the marriage became strained, a long-distance relationship rather than what they both had hoped for.
Helena seldom talked about this period in her life, but the few hints she dropped gave away the story of what probably went wrong. Through no fault of their own, Helena and Franciscus had become stuck somewhere between two worlds, with different norms and spousal expectations. My grandmother, a professional woman who had been hardened by the experience of past years, could not accept a life of constant moving from one town to another, following her husband. Putting her teaching career, her hard-won ticket to independence, on hold was not an option for her. But this was not just about professional drive; it was also the way to provide stability and security for her young daughter. The experience of being a single mother in wartime for seven years had unalterably changed Helena; she was now, like it or not, a modern, very independent woman, sure of her skills and her ability to fend for herself.
Map of central Europe circa 1921 with newly established borders of new countries in the post World War I arrangements. In March 1921, Helena Sobolewska moved from Bohorodczany and Stanislawow in former Galicia to the city of Lodz in central Poland.
My grandfather, on the other hand, was a military man used to giving orders rather than finding compromise; he could not have seen married life in a more different way. He was clearly looking for a traditional officer’s wife, at his side regardless of where military life might take him. Rebuilding a life together, then, turned out to be quite difficult for this couple; and it became impossible to fill the gap in their married life. Helena and Franciscus separated in the late 1920s or early 1930s.18
Helena Sobolewska. The photograph was taken in the early 1920s.
For Helena, living alone with her daughter on a meager teacher’s salary would be tough; but she coped as best she could, raising Irena without much help from her husband. Much later, my mother would recall, through the prism of a child’s mind, a few lean years without a Christmas tree or the customary gifts. But despite all the challenges and personal disappointments, I would never hear my grandmother speak ill of Franciscus. Time after time, her quiet resilience gave her the strength to go through life without feeling sorry for herself.
Irena Sobolewska. The photograph was taken in Lodz in the 1920s.
Summer trip to Bohorodczany. The picture was taken in front of the old family house. Seated on the steps are Franciscus Sobolewski next to his mother, Anna Sobolewska, and his daughter, Irena Sobolewska. Above Franciscus (left to right) are Carolina Kubas, and Wilhelmina and Franciscus Durkalec with their son, “Bolek” Durkalec. Carolina and Wilhelmina were Franciscus’s sisters. The photograph was taken in the late 1920s.
Stephania Regiec (1855–1930s). The only surviving photograph of Helena’s mother toward the end of her life.
During Helena’s first few years in Lodz, there were occasional trips back to what had been called Galicia. Perhaps a few weeks were spent on St. Joseph Street in Stanislawow during summer vacations, visiting Stephania and Wanda Regiec. There was also the opportunity for Helena and her daughter to see other towns with Galician-sounding names, like Ottynia and Zaleszczyki, which my mother would mention on a few occasions later in life. Then there would be one or two trips by Irena and her father to Bohorodczany. Irena, like any other teenager, must have felt awkward there at first; her memories of the place and the other Sobolewskis must have faded a bit. But the ice was broken quickly; she posed for a few photographs in front of the old family house before rediscovering the place with her younger cousin Bolek, with whom she would remain close for decades to come. But things were unmistakably beginning to change. After Stephania Regiec passed away in the 1930s, trips back to the former Galicia became less frequent for both mother and daughter. Within a few years, there was no one waiting in Bohorodczany; the remaining Sobolewski clan had moved away.
Summer trip to Ottynia. Seated are Helena Sobolewska (left) and Sophia Telesnicka Kühnberg (right). Standing in the middle is Irena Sobolewska next to her aunt, Wanda Regiec. The photograph was taken in August 1931.
Wanda Regiec. The photograph was taken in the 1930s in Stanislawow.
Helena Sobolewska. The photograph was taken in Lodz in the 1930s.
Irena Sobolewska. The picture was taken in the year of Irena’s graduation from dental school, 1937.
In the 1930s, a new generation was preparing to step into a broader world. While my grandmother continued to work in Lodz, Irena graduated from high school and then moved to Warsaw. For women, times were changing. A wider spectrum of professions was becoming available and socially acceptable, although few women yet had family encouragement or the means to earn a university degree. Irena’s choice was to study dentistry; but it was clear that she would never be able to afford the tuition if she was to be supported by her mother’s salary alone. This time, however, Franciscus’s past came to the rescue, as the law granted children of veterans with the Virtuti Militari decoration the right to an almost-free university education. Later, when Irena graduated with her dentistry degree, we can only guess at her mother’s happiness and pride on seeing her daughter well-prepared for adult life.
By that time, Franciscus had retired from active military service. Not surprisingly, his transition into civilian life was not straightforward; but surviving pictures always show a debonair gentleman, this time in civilian clothes. Approaching his 50s, he struggled for a while to find an appropriate job before finally landing a civilian position linked with the army. In 1936, Franciscus Sobolewski remarried. In many families, this would break any remaining bonds with the first marriage, but not in this one. His second wife, Wanda, was a woman full of life, warm to everyone. But she was also a strong-willed person who liked things done her own way. Soon, she became relentless in her efforts to prod Franciscus into supporting his student daughter. As far as my mother recalled, Wanda’s perseverance apparently paid off.
Over the years, Wanda and Helena developed a very natural relationship. They genuinely liked each other, and Wanda was always considered a close member of our family. If we advance, for the moment, a few decades, I may say that she was the only “aunt” I ever had growing up. For as long as I remember, it was Wanda, not Franciscus, who visited us often. When one year my grandmother became ill while my mother was away, Wanda was the first person I asked for help when I found myself, a hapless medical student, completely lost in the chore of cooking for my grandma. If there was ever some awkwardness in that situation, I never felt it, and the thought of calling anyone else simply never crossed my mind. Wanda arrived a few days later, storming into the apartment and taking charge of everything within minutes.
Irena Sobolewska’s high school diploma (issued on June 10, 1933, in Lodz, Poland).
Irena Sobolewska’s dental school diploma (issued on December 12, 1937, in Warsaw, Poland).
Wanda had only one area about which she was shy, and that was her age. According to family gossip, she had managed to change the year of her birth in some documents.19 At the beginning, this worked well; but many years later, Wanda realized to her chagrin that being “younger” meant working as a bookkeeper for a few years longer than was really needed, before her retirement pension would begin.
Franciscus Sobolewski in civilian life in the 1930s.
With the decade of the 1930s coming to a close, life had more surprises for Franciscus and those around him. Another war loomed on the horizon, and Lieutenant Colonel Franciscus Sobolewski was mobilized for the third time, proving that anyone’s predictions about quiet civilian life were wrong again. In late August 1939
, just days before the German invasion of Poland that marked the outbreak of World War II, he became the commander of air defenses and the military airport in Bialystok, a city in the northeastern part of the country.
By mid-September of 1939, German forces advancing from the west took Bialystok. To make matters worse, a few days later, the Soviets attacked Poland from the east, fulfilling their commitment in a secret pact with the Nazis that had been negotiated the previous summer. Franciscus hid his ceremonial officer’s sword, Virtuti Militari decoration, and honorary certificate underneath the floor of the house where he lived. On September 22, 1939, he crossed the border into Lithuania, narrowly avoiding capture by the Soviet army. Whether this was pure luck or a premonition of what might happen next, we will never know; but it was a fateful decision for Franciscus. Several thousand other Polish officers, taken prisoner by the Soviets, were less fortunate; the majority would perish in a mass execution in the Katyn Forest just a few months later.
Lieutenant Colonel Franciscus Sobolewski at the airfield in Bialystok, Poland. Franciscus is holding the hand of Zbigniew (“Zbyszek”) Witkowski, his second wife’s son. The picture was taken in 1937.
When the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania in June 1940, luck was on Franciscus’s side again. In this war, he escaped deportation deep into Russia and remained unharmed in a Lithuanian displaced persons’ camp until 1941, when the Germans overran the Baltic countries, waging an attack on their former ally, the Soviet Union.20
After the war, Franciscus returned to Bialystok to reclaim his personal belongings. The new owners of his former apartment apparently needed some strong convincing to allow him to remove pieces of the floor—revealing, to their bewilderment, carefully wrapped items that had lain beneath their feet for the past several years.
WITH WORLD WAR II OVERTURNING all plans again, Helena moved to Warsaw to live with her daughter. Years later, she told us that as she had waited for a train in Lodz, suitcase in hand, a German soldier approached. He barked some orders in her direction, but Grandma suddenly forgot all the German she knew; she could only wonder if her papers were in order and whether her modest luggage was arousing suspicion. It turned out to be something about waiting on the wrong platform, but the idea of being unable to reunite with Irena was what had truly frightened her. Besides the uncertainty of wartime, there was another reason she was anxious to be at her daughter’s side; Irena had recently married, and Helena was soon to be a grandmother. Not long after her arrival in Warsaw, my brother George (Jerzy) was born. As my mother described it later, after a few days of watching the new parents, who were clueless about caring for a baby, Grandma stepped in and took charge.
My grandmother is holding the future author. Behind her are my mother, Irena, and my brother, George. On the back of the picture, the dedication reads, “To our dear Grandma Wanda, the family; sister, niece, grandson George and grandson Andrew. October 1, 1952.” As the picture was sent to the Soviet Union, with its intrusive censorship, my grandmother added beneath, asking her sister, Wanda Regiec, who remained in Stanislawow, “write whether you received?”
There was another war story that somehow stuck in my memory. My grandmother recalled that a stray bullet had once entered through the kitchen window, not far from where she was sitting holding George, and whizzed through the air, lodging in the door frame. Hearing this as a child, I ignored the part about her and George being in danger but kept inspecting the doorframe, where the mysterious bullet apparently remained.
After the war, Helena returned to Lodz, where she taught for a few more years before retiring in 1949. By that time, she had spent 43 years in various classrooms, teaching in different schools under at least three regimes. From the moment she retired, she focused her energy on helping Irena, who was practicing dentistry, to manage the household and raise both George and her second grandson, the author of this story.
THE POSTWAR PERIOD WAS a perilous time for the many who suddenly found themselves behind the “Iron Curtain.” A typical case was that of Boleslaw (“Bolek”) Durkalec, Franciscus Sobolewski’s youngest nephew. When the Soviets occupied eastern Poland in September of 1939, Bolek Durkalec was forbidden to live in Stanislawow, as the Russification of these territories began in earnest. After the Germans took over in 1941, he survived by working in construction battalions in the countryside, and was briefly in the anti-Nazi resistance in the underground Home Army. Even with the end of the war, he and thousands of others could not return to Stanislawow; the area had been annexed by the Soviet Union, and a massive exodus of Poles was in motion. Trying to restart his life, Bolek enlisted in the military of Communist Poland and became an officer with an exemplary record. But these accomplishments did not spare him from false accusations during one of the political purges of the Stalin years; having ties to a different political past was enough to put anyone in danger. Bolek’s sins were wartime service in the underground Home Army, which had been aligned with the anti-Communist Polish government in exile; and then refusal to collaborate with Communist security forces at a time when a whisper of suspicion could end someone’s career, lead to interrogation, or worse.
In 1951, Bolek was jailed and, after a secret trial on trumped-up charges, sentenced to prison. When he appealed, protesting this blatant miscarriage of justice, his time of imprisonment was only increased. He was released in 1954, in one of the amnesties common after Stalin’s death. He left prison not only with an understandable bitterness at being falsely accused and never exonerated by the wicked system, but also severely ill with a case of tuberculosis that he had contracted while serving his sentence. After therapy, he luckily recovered and became a forest ranger. But it would be many decades before the unjust sentence was finally expunged from his records. I remember Bolek, in his later years, telling me once about his stamp collection; he was visiting my mother, who kept in close touch with her cousin.1
Boleslaw (“Bolek”) Durkalec, Helena and Franciscus’s nephew from Bohorodczany. The photograph was taken in the 1940s prior to his imprisonment by the internal security forces in Communist Poland.
Another who fell victim to a political witch hunt was my grandfather, Franciscus Sobolewski.2 The story began when he and a few other former officers started meeting to discuss what might happen if the Communist regime should be overthrown. They certainly did not intend to do anything themselves, as none of these aging men had a single weapon. Instead, they wanted to be ready if and when the United States and NATO forces might restore Poland’s independence. Over tea and cakes in their homes, they chatted about who among them would step forward and in which role, in order to fill the vacuum at such a moment of national emergency. At times, the meetings veered more toward where to get good tobacco (these ex-military men were all smokers), rather than how to create a new political order. When Franciscus once asked his friends about the political views of their organization, nobody really knew how to answer.
After several months, someone arrived from another city; the visitor was greeted at the train station and joined a conversation in Franciscus’s apartment. The guest gave a few vague explanations of who he was and why he was there; then he nominated Franciscus for the rank of brigadier general. With a handshake, my grandfather was suddenly in “charge” of the southeastern military district, which was to include the territory of eastern Galicia that had been lost to the Soviets. He stood up and accepted the nomination but cautioned that he had left the military so long ago that he had no contacts among the army officers who would be needed to administer such a large territory. He was simply reassured not to worry about that and to be ready.
Two years after this underground organization began, the country’s security forces got wind of it. In March of 1954, about 50 members were arrested in a sweep across Poland. Franciscus was grabbed from the streets of Lodz; that same day, his apartment was searched for evidence of crimes against the state. In the climate of paranoia that the Communist government perpetrated— with enemies believed to be lurking everywhere—the
se charges could have meant imprisonment, loss of property, and even death, regardless of how ridiculous they might seem today. The photo of Franciscus that remained in the security archives shows not a dapper former officer but an old man with disheveled hair, dirty clothes, and a frightened look on his face. This was exactly how the regime wanted him to look and feel.
What followed were endless days of interrogations about the meetings—no more than five of them altogether—that had taken place in Lodz. Every testimony was stamped “STRICTLY SECRET.” At the end, not much was needed for the security apparatus to brand Franciscus a member of the “central group,” a sinister figure in the eyes of those who wanted to see a crime. He was kept in custody for months; his captors claimed that as an enemy of the state, he was too dangerous to be released. As if this was not enough, the authorities even planted an informer in Franciscus’s prison cell who, after a few days, dutifully reported what my grandfather had said; but nothing earth-shattering was revealed. His former employees were also questioned, just to sniff out any anti-Communist leanings in the accused.
When the indictment came, the regime accused Franciscus and his “co-conspirators” of, among other crimes, plotting a terrorist attack using a car loaded with explosives in order to destroy the Communist Party headquarters. Nobody had bothered to mention that not only did none of them have any explosives, they also did not own, nor could they afford to buy, any vehicle; cars were considered a luxury in Poland at that time. On top of those charges, Franciscus and his co-defendants were accused of other serious crimes against the state, such as an alleged attempt to smuggle a document confirming the existence of the secret organization through an unidentified employee of the French embassy. Any due process was a fiction; that became obvious when Franciscus’s defense attorney was still petitioning the military court for access to the evidence and the accused, a mere three days before the scheduled trial. Clearly, nobody in authority cared about such nuances.
Galician Trails: The Forgotten Story of One Family Page 24