..... stories that hopefully will never be forgotten .....
Along with John Pater, we were able to establish contact with Mrs. Elizabeth Drozd – Director of the Australian-Polish Community Services.
Thanks to her, we’ll be able to read stories that hopefully will never be forgotten.
Stories about people with POLISH decent, who migrated to Australia and other parts of the world.
Stories of people that were greatly missed.
People who missed where they came from and the people they left behind.


Genowefa Dziewierz
God was with me everywhere

I was born on 14th August 1917, in Kielce province.
I was the youngest of my siblings and am now 86 years old.
My father was a gamekeeper and worked in the forest. He was a very hard working man, he could do anything, and from him I have learned the same.

We had a very large farm and, as a child, I used to help until my father sold it in 1927.
After my father sold the farm the family moved to Kresy. I also lived in a place called Inwarowa, which is located about 20km from Baranowicz. It was in Inwarowa that I got married.

For us, the war started at the beginning of 1940. People were saying that whole families were taken away somewhere deep into the Russian country, but nobody knew where.
On 10th February 1940, they started taking people from our region. We knew about it, but no one ran because there was nowhere to run to and no one wanted to leave their farms.
On that same day, my parents and my sister, who were in a village next to ours, were taken away. We thought that they would take us away too, so I prepared a bag of rusks.
My husband took half of them, and in a second bag I put flour, cereal, a loaf of bread, a chunk of bacon and meat.
With all of that on our backs, we walked for 6km across meadows, to our people. When we reached the station, Mickiewicz, there was a cargo train there.
My husband and I noticed that there were a lot of people and they were being pushed off the tracks like animals and were surrounded by the army.

We were not allowed to approach the train carriages so when the village “predsiedatiel” (Russian word for administrator) came over to us, I asked him to pass the goods to my family. Holy Mother! To this day I feel like crying when I think about it, when they came out and saw me, they started screaming,

“Gene, Gene, where are they taking us?”

but I did not know. I could barely recognise my family, they were cold and hungry and they were not allowed to take anything. They were simply taken away as they stood. I wasn’t allowed to talk to them so I just said good-bye from the distance and went back home with my husband.

I remember in the spring of the following year, it was April 4th 1941, when the war between Russia and Germany began.
One day six Russian men and two Russian women came to my mother-in-law’s place and established a hospital as they had three people wounded.
They piled their machine-guns up and claimed that they were very hungry so I had to cook for them.
I did not have enough food to cook for all of them, but I had some cabbage and bones, so I made cabbage soup. One of them, the older one, said to me “it was the best meal in my life.”
They went out at night and stole food from people, slaughtered a cow and a pig, brought it back and told us to cook it.
I went to the well for water but had to run back home quickly because the neighbour yelled out, “Burnowa, run and tell the others, the Germans are rounding us up”.
I got back and told the Russians about it but they only believed me when the German machine gun bullets started hitting our house.
They kept shooting at our house but they were too scared to come in. They killed those three patients at my mother-in-law’s. I was scared that they would come back and notice that we had Russians in the house, so I took their guns and the bullets and threw them in a hole with the potatoes. I also put a big piece of pork under the bed. My husband hid in the basement when the shooting started.
Then, it went quiet.

The next day the Russians came back asking what had happened with their guns. When I showed them where the guns were they praised me because I didn’t give them away. They took the guns and went back into the forest.

Our neighbour’s Wrona’s family farm started to burn. Almost the whole family was burned alive. The mother saved her two children by throwing them out of the window onto a blanket and escaping into the forest. The fire was set by the Russians because, apparently, one of the family members gave them away to the Germans.

Later the Germans lined us up against the barn to execute us for helping the Russians. The machine guns were ready to shoot but one of the Police officers asked the German officer to spare us, and after a while he agreed. I stayed alive and that’s because God was with me everywhere.

There were no peaceful nights. Either the Germans or the Russians were passing through and robbing us of whatever they could. Airplanes were continually flying over us and we were forced to hide in the forest or the basement.
This is the sort of a life we had to live. I managed by myself when most of the men left. I made fabric out of flax, could plough and sow, made soap from wood ashes. I also know carpentry, can be a butcher and I know how to thresh.

During harvest time, I hammered a scythe to reap the buckwheat, which I loaded on the cart on my own, and I even helped my neighbours. Women did everything because their husbands were gone. They were taken away or fighting in the war, or with the underground army.
After the war in 1946, with five other families, we left for a village, Augustynowo, in Poznan region of Poland.

I was not emigrating as I was waiting for my husband to come back from the war. But when I got the message that he died in a hospital near Dachau, I cried all night and left for the regained territories where my neighbours and I were given a farm. The locals there were horrible thieves, people like us were not liked over there. We knew this because we were constantly sworn at. They called us repatriates from the other side of the Bug River. It was not until I got married that my life improved.
I came to Australia in 1974 to be with my daughter. It’s very good for me in Australia. I have two daughters, 11 grandchildren and 8 great-grandchildren. I attend meetings at two Polish Clubs, as I want to be independent and to meet people.
To this day I cannot stand the word “war”.

edited by
Monika Wiench and Elizabeth Drozd

Cover Design by Katarzyna Krupa
Typeset by Katarzyna Frankiewicz
First published in 2004 by:Australian-Polish Community Services Inc)

www.apcs.org.au/html/pl/main.htm