Galician Trails: The Forgotten Story of One Family

by Zalewski, Andrew

  13. Gazeta Lwowska July 19, 1919, provided information on proposed legislation to reintroduce the Virtuti Militari. There were five classes; some were for commanders and some were for individual acts of bravery. By 1923, there were 6,589 recipients of the Virtuti Militari; Franciscus Sobolewski’s medal was number 477.

  14. Based on documents retrieved from the State Archives in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, my grandmother petitioned the school boards in Stanislawow and Nowy Sacz in December of 1919. Her application seeking a teacher’s position in Stanislawow was accompanied by a short note by her husband. Franciscus pleaded with the authorities to grant his wife a job. In case of difficulties, he offered to resign from his position as a teacher in Bohorodczany (which was awaiting his return), indicating that he had no plans to return to his former civilian role. The official replies trickled in throughout 1920 and 1921. The last negative reply came from Stanislawow in April 1921. That answer was forwarded to Lodz, where Helena had luckily been able to secure a teaching post at last.

  15. Josepha Kiernik, Helena Niemczewska, and Jetti Seinfeld, along with Helena, were still employed at the school in Bohorodczany in 1919 to 1920. Josepha was the school principal (based on documents from the State Archives in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast). By 1924, none of them could be found there. This was probably to be expected, as the town was hardly livable (based on S. Lehnert; Spis Nauczycieli Publicznych Szkol Powszechnych i Panstwowych Seminarjow Nauczycielskich Oraz Spis Szkol; Lwów 1924; p. 76).

  16. Boleslaw (“Bolek”) Durkalec was born March 16, 1920, in Bohorodczany. His parents were Wilhelmina Sobolewska and Franciscus Durkalec. Franciscus was a policeman in town. They stayed in Bohorodczany until the late 1920s, when they moved to Stanislawow, where two of Wilhelmina’s brothers, Antonius and Ladislaus, already lived.

  17. Franciscus returned to Bedzin with the 11th Infantry Regiment. He subsequently served in different positions: commander of the 2nd and 3rd battalions, quartermaster, and briefly commander of the entire regiment (1926). Other deployments included stays in various towns, such as Sosnowiec (1923), Pszczyna (1926), and Zawiercie (1927). From 1928 to 1930, he was the deputy commander of the 83rd Infantry Regiment in Kobryn (today’s western Belarus) and the commandant in Piotrkow. He retired from the military in 1933 (based on records retrieved from the Central Military Archives in Poland).

  18. By 1934, Franciscus Sobolewski was already divorced (based on a job application found in the Central Military Archives in Poland).

  19. Her birth year was “miraculously” altered during the confusion of World War II. During that period, her documents were lost and new ones had to be issued, leading to accidental and intentional mistakes. My mother always jokingly said that nobody knew Wanda’s real age. After she died, it turned out that she had been born in 1907.

  20. In August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union had signed an agreement in which, under secret clauses, they divided up spheres of influence in Poland and the Baltic states. A month later, German forces relinquished power in Bialystok to their ally, the Soviets. The Katyn massacre claimed the lives of 26,000 Polish nationals, including 8,000 officers, who were executed by U.S.S.R. forces in March 1940. Soon Lithuania, which was to remain under the agreed-upon Soviet sphere of influence, was forced to accept a large contingent of the Russian army stationed on their soil. In June 1940, the U.S.S.R. annexed Lithuania, launching a campaign of terror and deportations. Almost exactly a year later, the German army occupied the Baltic states.

  In Lithuania, Franciscus spent three months in the internment camp for Polish officers and then was transferred to a civilian camp for war refugees. During the Soviet occupation, he lived in Vilnus. When Germans entered Lithuania in the summer of 1941, Franciscus was able to return to central Poland (occupied by Germans) to be reunited with Wanda (based on Franciscus Sobolewski’s testimony to the internal security agents in 1954 in Warsaw, Poland).

  EPILOGUE

  1. His original trial took place before a naval military court, which sentenced Captain Boleslaw Durkalec to a three-year prison term. On appeal in 1952, his sentence was increased to five years, with no witnesses examined. The court verdict was expunged from Bolek’s records only in 1977. He retired in 1982 and continued to live in Jawor, Poland. Documents detailing his ordeal were shared with me by his daughter, Irena Szymczak of Jawor.

  2. The information about Franciscus Sobolewski’s prosecution was obtained under a Polish freedomof-information-like act that allows family members to access documents of the former internal security forces. The declassified documents from Lodz and Warsaw that I examined included transcripts of Franciscus’s interrogations, his indictment, and the verdicts of the secret trials that followed (in total, about 1,200 pages).

  3. Franciscus Sobolewski’s trial, with his five “co-conspirators,” took place before the regional military court in Warsaw from November 22 to 26, 1954. The prosecutor asked for a seven-year prison term for Franciscus. The appeal was heard in front of the high military court in Warsaw on March 10, 1955. Franciscus was conditionally released from prison on March 23, 1955.

  4. The verdict overturning all charges against Franciscus Sobolewski and two co-defendants was announced on April 5, 1963. Most ridiculous was the continued fascination with this affair on the part of the internal security forces; the last police document I discovered had been written four years after Franciscus’s death.

  5. Franciscus Sobolewski died on June 6, 1969, at the age of 83. He was buried in Lodz, Poland. Wanda Sobolewska died unexpectedly on October 11, 1982. She was also laid to rest in Lodz, alongside her son from her first marriage, Zbigniew Witkowski.

  6. There were two waves of expulsion of ethnic Poles from the eastern territories of prewar Poland that had been incorporated into the Soviet Union after World War II. The first cycle of deportations took place between 1944 and 1946, and the second wave occurred between 1955 and 1959.

  7. Helena Regiec Sobolewska passed away on June 19, 1977. She is buried in Warsaw alongside her daughter Irena, who died on November 2, 1998.

  A

  Abdank, coat of arms

  Andrychow (Andrychów)

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eszyn, see Teschen Cisleithania

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<
br />   Sobolewska, Anna

  Sobolewska, Carolina

  Sobolewska, Helena

  childhood

  teenage years

  Bohorodczany and WWI

  interwar period

  later years

  Sobolewska, Irena (“Irka”)

  Sobolewska, Sophia

  Sobolewska, Theresia

  Sobolewska, Wanda

  Sobolewska, Wilhelmina

  Sobolewski, Adalbertus

  Sobolewski, Andreas

  Sobolewski, Antonius (grandfather of Franciscus)

  Sobolewski, Antonius (brother of Franciscus)

  Sobolewski, Fabian

  Sobolewski, Franciscus

  Sobolewski, Ignatius

  Sobolewski, Joannes

  Sobolewski, Ladislaus

  Sobolewski, Ludovicus

  Sobolewski, Martinus

  Sobolewski, Michael

  Sobolewski, Stanislaus

  Sobolewski, Theophilus

  Sobolów

  Sobolo(e)wski, Albertus

  Sobolo(e)wski, Michael

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  Szeptycki, see Greek Catholic metropolitan Szymczak, Irena

  T

  Talar, Antonius, prisoner of war

  tango

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  Tatars

  Taylor, Bayard

  Telesnicka (Teleśnicka), Wilhelmina

  Telesnicki (Teleśnicki), Julianus

  Telesnicki (Teleśnicki) Jr., Vincent

  Telesnicki (Teleśnicki) Sr., Vincent

  Teschen (Cieszyn)

  Tlumacz (Tłumacz)

  Toleranzpatent

  Traczewska, Angela

  Traczewska, Thecla

  Traczewski, Valentinus

  Transleithania

  Transversal Railway, Galician

  Trieste

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  Turowka (Turówka)

  U

  Ugartshal