43 Addresses: An Odyssey-Przemyśl to Oakville

By Andrew Walczak

These 478 pages take the reader through the many highs and lows of the author's chameleonic life. As he was adapting to constantly changing environments through six decades on three continents, the book progressively reflects his astute awareness and keen observation of the gross trends as well as the subtleties in the milieus in which the writer finds himself while pursuing a career in a number of technical fields. He sagaciously depicts them and the multitude of characters he encounters, with hardly a dull moment. His ability to recall so many details of his past and the perspicacity of his observations of people and places are truly remarkable, as is his ability to present them with skill interspersed with humor. In reviewing his nomadic past, he counted up forty-three locations which served as home during his life, leading to the title of this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781636307824

Book preview

cover.jpg

43 Addresses

An Odyssey-Przemyśl to Oakville

Andrew Walczak

ISBN 978-1-63630-781-7 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63630-782-4 (Digital)

Copyright © 2021 Andrew Walczak

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books, Inc.

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

Table of Contents

Algeria Years 1940 to 1945

Italy 1945 to 1946

Great Britain Years 1946 to 1963

Canada Years 1963 to 1968

Canada Years 1968 to 1975

USA Years 1975–1980

Back in Canada 1980–1983

Canada 1983–1988

Canada 1988–1995

Canada 1996–2001

2002…

Prologue

For many years, I have entertained, sometimes amused, and frequently bored friends and members of my family with accounts of various events in my life and occasionally been told that I should write them down as a chronicle of my peripatetic destiny and its concomitant human encounters.

Years of pursuing a checkered career, a busy professional schedule, frequent moves (hence the title), travels, and a simultaneous commitment to fulfilling my responsibilities to those dearest to me all became factors contributing to the procrastination of putting words to paper while hundreds of photographs and small memorabilia, reminders of my nomadic trail, waited in various albums and envelopes in the back of my dresser drawers.

Having now passed the biblically bestowed threescore and ten years of living and with my professional days behind me, I have put together the following screed as a record which some of my descendants may one day care to read. Beyond what is in these pages, many more quirky episodes are firmly embedded in my memory, but if I were to include them here, then not only would it take another three hundred pages but would likely become even more tedious to any reader.

Algeria Years 1940 to 1945

Algiers 1

The Beginnings

My first conscious recollections are at the age of about four. It was 1941 or 1942.

My mother and I were living in a suburb of Algiers called El Biar, at 35 Boulevard Galieni to be exact. Funny how I can remember that—it was mentioned frequently by the residents. I also recall the enameled number plate, blue on white with the number 35, attached to one of the two street entrance pillars. The property was located about halfway up the sloping boulevard, which rose from the city of Algiers to El Biar, and on most days, you could see the Mediterranean as you looked over the city. The address was that of an estate that I was told later had been loaned for residence to a group of Polish refugee women and their children, my mother and I among them, by a French colon who had departed in advance of the approaching Germans.

With friends, 1941

There was the large main building that consisted of two or three rooms and a kitchen on the ground floor and a huge hall upstairs (which, thinking back on it, was probably used for parties and receptions in the past). For us, the hall was divided into cells about four meters each, formed by large white sheets hanging from ropes which had been strung overhead in a matrix. Each cell was occupied by one of the women and her child or children (I don’t think any of the women actually had more than one) with all their earthly belongings. There was visual privacy, but everything else was communal; you could hear the mother scolding her child, the coughing, the snoring, the giggling, the farts.

35 Boulevard Galieni, view from the walkway, next to kartofle

There were many great features about this estate to a kid of that age, and for the five years, we lived there we felt it was home. It was set back from the road by about 250 feet, with a set of wide concrete steps up to the building area itself. In the 100 or so feet from the street frontage to the steps and to the left of the walkway was a small field, which we called kartofle, i.e., potatoes in Polish. The reason for this was simple: it was wartime, food was in very short supply, so the mothers planted potatoes there, which we kids dug up and picked for them at harvest time. Since the kartofle was some ten to twelve feet below the main living level, there was a sheer drop of that height other than where the steps led down. Right next to the drop in the kartofle area was a huge fig tree, which was best accessed from the upper level. We kids spent many hours sitting in its giant branches while gorging ourselves on the ripe purple figs, some of which were as big as a man’s fist. Early on during our stay, there we watched through the windows, crouched inside, as soldiers and other people were running up and down Boulevard Galieni, shooting at each other while taking cover behind the steel telegraph poles that lined the boulevard. I was never sure what it was all about, but it only lasted for two or three months. During the next year or so, we were witness to night raids by what I was told were allied airplanes while searchlights illuminated them and tracer bullets from the ground whizzed by all around them. To us kids, it was just an entertaining fireworks show, and next morning, we scoured the grounds for pieces of shrapnel. The one who found the largest piece was considered the winner and showed it off proudly to everyone, then adding it to his collection, a collection which each of us kept. Again, I was told all these raids had something to do with liberating North Africa and that the ground fire came from somewhere around Casablanca.

The building we occupied had a lot of interesting external areas, nearly all covered in glossy ceramic tiles. Along the main long side was a solid attached tiled bench that could accommodate about twenty people; and on the adjacent side of the building, there was a large covered veranda where my friends and I wasted many hours just sitting, talking about important stuff, and munching on the only fruits that were available—figs, apricots, and loquats.

With my mother and the janitor

The mothers took care of the cooking in the large main floor kitchen, having established a cooking duty rota among themselves. Food was in extremely short supply, so they mostly relied on the potatoes and other vegetables that they grew in the front and remote side section of the estate. In addition to that, each family, i.e., mother and child or children, owned a hen. This provided us a steady supply of free-range eggs, I guess, with the aid of a rooster that was common property. In addition, each family had a pair of pigeons that lived in individually owned hutches which were mounted on the main outside wall at a height if about twelve feet and could only be accessed by climbing a ladder. The pigeons knew which hutch was theirs by having their flight feathers plucked when they were first brought in and kept there until they grew back. Their value was in producing a pair of chicks. These were slaughtered just as they were ready to leave the coop and provided us the only meat available. As kids, we thought this perfectly natural, and although we felt attached to our particular pair of parent pigeons, we experienced no remorse at having their chicks killed.

The actual killing was done by the janitor, another Polish refugee, a man who lived in a separate small building on the estate. He had a unique way of disposing of the little birds: he would hold the body in his left hand while he grasped the head between the forefinger and middle finger of his right hand. Then with a twist and a sharp jerk, he would pull the head right off. It all seemed quite humane. It was wartime, and we had to eat.

My father

As time passed, my mother would tell me about my birthplace in Przemyśl, in the southeastern part of Poland where we lived because my father, a lieutenant in the Thirty-Eighth Infantry Regiment, was stationed there. He had been orphaned at the age of fourteen, but prior to the death of his mother from typhoid fever, he himself was close to death from scarlet fever.

Apparently, his mother, at that time, prayed fervently for his recovery and promised God that if he recovered he would dedicate his life to him by becoming a priest. So when my father reached maturity, aware of his mother’s vow, he entered a seminary. It seems he met a very understanding Father Superior, who, on learning of the circumstances that brought my father there, released him from his mother’s vow, seeing that he clearly did not have a calling to the priesthood. My mother showed me photographs of him in full uniform, including some of him holding me as a baby.

When Russia stabbed Poland in the back weeks after Germany’s attack from the west, he was sent into battle against the Soviet hordes invading from the east. Along with thousands of others facing the overwhelming Soviet onslaught, he was captured and sent to one of their slave labor camps. Through the intercession of the International Red Cross, he was able to get some postcards out to my mother in Algiers, but then there was silence, and later, she learned that he had been murdered together with thousands of others in the infamous Katyn massacre.

I also learned later that my mother was born in 1915 in Siberia close to the border of Mongolia. Her parents, both Polish and from Warsaw, had each been sent there into exile for various acts of resistance against the Russian occupying regime during the period of Poland’s occupation under the country’s tripartition. In my grandmother’s case, she was caught at a railway station carrying some bombs under her large crinoline hooped dress. I don’t know what caused my grandfather to be sent there, but that is where they met and married, having two daughters—my mother and her sister, who was two years older. It wasn’t until 1924—some time after Poland regained independence in 1919 following the Treaty of Versailles, which was ratified by the League of Nations—that the family was allowed to return to Poland, spending three weeks on the Trans-Siberian Railway and settling again in Warsaw.

My mother’s and my sojourn into our own exile that landed us in Algiers began in 1939 when news of the approaching Russians reached Przemyśl and an order was given for all civilians to leave immediately. She took only her large leather handbag, which she stuffed with photographs and essential papers and a small pistol. With the bag hanging off one arm and a large pillow tucked under the same arm, she carried me, ten months old at the time, on her other arm and boarded the back of a large open truck which headed off for Romania, together with a group of other refugees. Apparently, they stayed for a week or so in the Romanian towns of Ploesti and Dragasani, after which another truck took us all through Yugoslavia and Italy, finally to be transported by a small ship to Algeria. The first major stop was in a tiny village somewhere in Algeria’s Atlas Mountains. Recounting my mother’s story, there, she was befriended by an Arab family, whose patriarch implored her to leave me with them to raise as their own and, when the war was over, she could come back and reclaim me. She declined, but that story and my encounters later in life with Arab people have very much endeared them to me. I don’t know how we got from there to El Biar.

With my mother, 1939

After the air raids stopped, life seemed pretty normal to us kids. There were no Germans around, on Sundays we walked up Boulevard Galieni inhaling the subtle scent of blooming Mimosas which towered overhead, to a large French church (I was told it was a Basilica) and sometimes stopped on the way back to get a horsemeat sausage from a street vendor. Those sausages soon disappeared when all the horses had been eaten.

During those carefree preschool days, we mostly played outside; there were about half a dozen of us boys. The only girls, about four or five of them, were in their early and midteens and had nothing to do with us.

Mrs. Wartanowicz’s preschool

My friends and I were frequently taken to the house of a Polish doctor who lived in a pretty villa some distance away as a kind of preschool. His wife, Mrs. Wartanowicz, had been a primary school teacher before the war and took it on herself to give us our first taste of school. It was mostly play but very organized and interspersed with some wonderful activities such as getting each one of us to put together our personal album with drawings stories and photographs. I have mine to this day.

The oldest one among us boys at the El Biar estate was thirteen, and we regarded him as a sort of wise man of the group even if not the leader; he was the one who instigated some of the crazy pranks we got up to. For example, he would steal a couple of cigarettes from his mother and impress us with his sophistication by lighting up and pretending it was perfectly normal. This latter activity prompted me to also steal a couple of my mother’s stinky French cigarettes and puff and cough along with him and the rest of the crew. Of course, my mother soon discovered that some of her cigarettes were missing, and I was banned from associating with the wise man for a couple of weeks. Another time, he came up with a scheme to stop a nasty old cat, which belonged to the mother of one of the girls there, from climbing up to the pigeon hutches and taking some of the chicks. The stubborn old woman would not hear anything bad said about her fat cat, so the thirteen-year-old got us to kidnap the animal one day. He got us to put it in a cloth bag and then start coughing like crazy while we kicked the bag with the cat inside it all over the grounds. When we finally released the pigeon killer, he sprinted to the old woman’s lap and just curled up there. Afterward, whenever anyone coughed, the damned animal would immediately take off, and nobody could find him for several days. Looking back, I often wondered who introduced our oldest member to conditioned reflexes. He also invented a new game, where we were divided into two teams, lining up to face each other at about fifty feet apart, and would throw rocks and stones at each other while taking cover behind primitive little earth mounds which we had built. I think I still have a couple of scars on my forehead gained in some of those games of dodge rock.

During that time, our little refugee settlement got visits at various times from different military units that docked in the port of Algiers and heard of this group of women and children living at the El Biar estate. One time, it was a group of Polish sailors from the destroyer Błyskawica (meaning lightning), which included Commander Tyminski, their skipper. (Decades later, I had the pleasure of meeting him in Toronto, where he had settled after the war and recently passed away.) Then we had some GI’s of Polish extraction visiting us, providing the mothers with considerable amusement at the way they mangled the language in trying to speak Polish. Another time, a few Polish paratroopers visited, young men most of whom, I was told, were subsequently killed as part of their involvement in the Allies’ action in Italy, also some commandos attached to the British units fighting in North Africa. I remember some Polish members of the French Foreign Legion coming by, in particular one sergeant who always brought his large German shepherd dog that chased me once and ended up biting me in the backside.

Algiers 2

School

My formal kindergarten was French, located in El Biar, where I was taken not knowing a word of the language.

My kindergarten

Later, I was sent to primary school run by an order of French monks; it was some distance away, and it took about half an hour to walk there. Within three months, I was speaking French fluently and indistinguishably from the French kids.

That school! The day ran from nine in the morning to four in the afternoon, with a two-hour break for lunch. The discipline! Any infraction risked having the teacher monk running up and fanning one’s face with a series of back-and-forth open-hand slaps. I remember being a timid boy at the time and never getting into any kind of trouble, so much so that I acquired the nickname Petit Gentil.

The lunches were something else: we all sat in a large dining room and were expected to clean our plates of everything that was placed in front of us—it was good typical French fare, but some dishes were just impossible to force down the gullet. I particularly remember the tripe stew that even the French kids could not face. But those crafty monks were probably aware that some of us would find some dishes inedible, so they allowed their dozen or so cats to roam the dining room at lunchtime. We could surreptitiously slip them the offending morsels, thus satisfying the requirement of having a clean plate at the end and saving the supervising monks from having to make a fuss of anyone who had not finished everything. The long tables at which we sat were covered with white tablecloths, and at every two or three places, there was a carafe of red wine and a carafe of water. We could mix the water and wine ourselves in our glasses in any proportion we chose. Some even drank the wine straight, but I never remember anyone acting funny of falling asleep during afternoon classes. Years later, it was explained to me that the wine was provided to disinfect the water, which was of suspect quality (in fact, I remember that all the water at home was always boiled before being used).

The education! After a full day of lessons, we were given about one and a half to two hours of homework every evening. This consisted of having to read a page of each of the various subjects taught that day and then memorizing a summary of that page which was printed in heavy type at the bottom of the page. The next day, we were tested by having to recite the summary from memory. All this at the age of six and half! At that age, I was able to recite all the multiplication tables up to twelve in French. But…it meant that when I got home each day, I would have about an hour to play, then dinner and homework, and then to bed. As much as I detested this, looking back, I have frequently felt grateful for that experience providing me with the learning ability and excellent memory with which I have been blessed since.

Algiers 3

Final Memories

Summers were glorious. The holidays were four months long, and for that whole period, my mother would take me by bus every second day to the beach on the Mediterranean at Sidi Ferouche.

During the lazy summer afternoon hours, I sometimes wandered outside the compound and made friends with some of the local Arab kids, communicating with them through a mixture of broken French and sign language. It did not take long for me to learn all the worst swearwords in Arabic.

Algiers, 1944, note the sandals

It was wartime, and there was a shortage of just about everything. You couldn’t buy the simplest items such as a teaspoon or a pot without resorting to the black market. For a long time, our shoes were sandals made entirely from old car tires, cleverly cut so that one section formed the bottom and strips were stapled or stitched to it to form the top and heel-hold straps. I remember one afternoon going with my mother to the city of Algiers, walking through the narrow streets of the Kasbah, up a dingy staircase to an Arab’s flat to buy a couple of forks and a saucer. It was explained to me some years later that the shortages were due to the fact that Algeria having been a colony for many years, the French colonizers ensured that the Arab colony would have no aspirations to independence by not building any manufacturing facilities there, thus making them totally dependent on importing all manufactured goods from the mother country. Of course, after France fell to Germany, the flow of goods stopped.

Other memories of our life in Algiers include a few swarms of locusts, which literally blackened the sky, turning bright afternoons into dusk; after the locusts settled, we kids went out trapping some for our collections. We would do this by running in a grassy field just outside our compound, each swinging a small wooden bat left and right in front of him; the sound of our approach would cause the locusts to fly up out of the grass only to be swiped by our swinging bats. Each one of us would have a collection of a few pinned to corks, after we finished them off by spraying them with our mothers’ cologne.

Locusts look very much like grasshoppers, about two inches long, with what looks like an engraved design on each side of the hard armor shell that is between the head and the rest of the body. By chance, some of these designs look like numerals, and those were the ones we kept, trying to build up a set with all the numbers one to nine. To do this, there was some trading of different numbers between us.

I once found a chameleon in the big fig tree. It was about eight inches long including tail, and I only spotted it because it had moved to a spot of a different color from where it had been, and its own color change had not yet been completed. I kept it as a pet and showed it off to everyone in the settlement. We watched in fascination as it changed colors, swung its bulging eyeballs independently of each other, and made flies disappear with the incredible speed of its long tongue. A visiting soldier told me never to place it on anything red, as this is one color that chameleons cannot change to and it kills them. I never tested this, and to this day, I don’t know if it’s a myth; but I do know that when a stupid local Arab kid whacked it with a stick, it curled up and, in its death throes, turned red—and that’s how it remained.

Our neighbor to the south, i.e., down the hill from us, known to us as the Spaniard, separated from us by a high chain-link fence, had a large fruit and vegetable garden. We all hated him because whenever one of our chickens got it into its head to fly over the fence and into his garden, he would roughly grab it by the feet and toss it back to us with a prolonged tirade of yelling which we assumed was Spanish cursing. Every time the locusts came, he would rush out into his garden and march up and down the rows, banging with a stick on a large metal lid trying to drive them away and save his crops, to the accompaniment of us kids on our side of the fence jeering and laughing as loud as we could and waving our arms about in motions mocking his drumbeat.

In 1945, news came that the war had ended. We heard that there were celebrations, but I remember seeing my mother weeping, together with some of the other mothers. The war was won, but we could not go back to Poland, thanks to the perfidy of Churchill and President Roosevelt, who sold out our country to the Soviets in order to gain a temporary peace.

With General Sosnkowski

I don’t know how it came about that our little community of mothers and children was given the opportunity to leave Algiers and move to Italy, to join the Polish armed forces that had fought so valiantly as part of the British Eighth Army and whose pilots had played a pivotal role in the Battle of Britain under the slogan For your freedom and ours. What a cynical sham that turned out to be!

We boarded a ship (I heard it was two thousand tons, whatever that meant) and spent the next two days crossing the Mediterranean.

We shared the vessel with a group of Italian prisoners. I don’t know if they were criminals or prisoners of war, but I do remember the frequent announcements over the public address system on the ship calling "Attenzione attenzione, prisonieri Italiani, blah, blah, blah…" We recognized them by the large red circular patches on their backs and noted their rapid dispersal after each announcement.

Our port of arrival in Italy was Naples.

Italy 1945 to 1946

Italy 1

Military Camps

Our arrival in Naples toward the end of 1945 was inauspicious except for the actual debarkation process. Getting onto Terra Firma involved walking down a long gangplank, to have our suitcases containing all our earthly belongings carried down by some local young men. We had been warned about the Neapolitan porters’ tendency to dump the occasional suitcase into the water only to have it retrieved later by another member of the gang, so each porter was accompanied by a husky Polish soldier from a group that had come to meet us.

We were then transported by trucks to a transit camp outside Naples. The camp consisted of a group of unheated wooden huts. We were there for three days. As kids, we were mostly interested in playing outside, kicking a ball or playing tag. The adults pointed out to us the outline of the Mount Vesuvius volcano on the horizon.

Next we were moved, again by truck, to a Polish military camp just outside the town of Barletta. The camp consisted of about two dozen cement block buildings, mostly housing military personnel who had fought in various Italian campaigns, including Monte Cassino. There was one larger building that served as the officer’s dining room / canteen, and another for the ranks.

The war was over, but by all accounts, the situation was uncertain, and the military worked and acted as on continuing wartime service duty. By then, most of the mothers had become widows and were housed in two or three of the camp’s concrete buildings, each of which contained several rooms, with no toilet facilities (which were in a separate building outside) or cooking area. As refugees, we were assigned to have our meals in the officers’ dining room, the mealtimes being announced by short rings from the public-announcement speakers located atop high poles dispersed throughout the camp.

Camp Barletta, 1946

Each room was assigned to be shared by two women and their children; my mother and I got a room with Nuna Reinstein.

I don’t know what Nuna’s real first name was, because that’s all everyone ever called her. She had a daughter Barbara, or Basia, and the four of us shared this room for about three months. This led to many comical moments, not the least of which were the daily rituals of dressing and undressing. Turn your back and face the wall! were the commands that Basia and I received every time one of the other three persons either got ready for bed or started the day. Nuna and Basia had not lived in our little El Biar colony in Algiers—they occupied part of a small villa in a leafy suburb. I understand it was because Major Reinstein was on active duty in one of the Polish squadrons with the Royal Air Force and that accorded them certain privileges.

My mother and I had visited them a few times; and Basia, who was a year older than me, and I played outside while the mothers chatted and gossiped.

Some time after our arrival at the camp, a certain lieutenant started paying attention to my mother. They would occasionally go out, sometimes with other officers who also kept the company of some of the other widowed mothers. As time went on, Lieutenant Jozef Haberling became a more frequent visitor, and he and my mother were out during the evenings more and more. He had a Jeep at his disposal, so was not limited to the camp but took her to Barletta and other towns during this time. The lieutenant insisted that I call him by the Polish diminutive Józio. He would occasionally take me out in the open Jeep as a treat.

With Basia

In the early, cool spring of 1946, I became ill with measles. To make sure I would not infect anyone else, I was taken to a hospital at another Polish military camp in Trani, which is about forty kilometers from Barletta.

During the two weeks that I spent in the hospital, I was visited a few times by my mother and Józio. But on the day the hospital decided to discharge me, there was no one. I was just told to get dressed and leave. So here I was, a seven-year-old boy wandering in the middle of a military camp, not knowing anyone. I remember the situation well to this day and don’t know why I didn’t panic. I just started talking to some of the soldiers going about their work and asked them if any of them were going to the Barletta camp. One of them told me that a truck at the other end of the camp was going there in a little while and that they would probably take me. Sure enough, I found the truck, and after explaining my predicament to the driver, he told me to jump in the back, and that was how I found my way back. My mother could not believe what had happened when I walked in. When Józio found out, I heard that he raised all kinds of hell with the hospital authorities in Trani for having just pushed me out. As for me, I couldn’t understand what the fuss was about.

Józio was considerably older than my mother. He was born in 1896 and had been a warrior since World War I. In the most recent war, he had originally been in intelligence, but after being betrayed by a mole, he had been arrested in Romania, where he was tortured and, among other things, had had his nose broken and all his teeth knocked out. As a result of all this, he ended up with a nose that looked like the classical depiction of Shakespeare’s Fagin and a strange emotional makeup that was a mixture of cold indifference to pain and suffering (primarily his own) and a fatalistic sensitivity to any wrongs that he perceived as being dealt him.

Józio

In the latter part of the war, he served in the Second Polish Corps, which was a part of the British Eighth Army, and was in action in the Middle East and at Monte Cassino in Italy. In the process, he got wounded six times—among others a shrapnel hitting him between the eyes, a bullet piercing his left palm, and another bullet passing through his lower back, barely missing his spine. I learned all this in later years as he recounted some of his war experiences and showed me the scars, not with any bravado but because I insisted.

He picked up another scar about that time. One evening, he and my mother were coming back in his Jeep from dinner in Foggia when they encountered a group of locals standing on both sides of the road with rifles aimed at them. Józio slowed down as if to stop; and when the bandits lowered their rifles and approached, he sped up, which was followed by a fusillade of shots. As luck would have it, even though the bandits were lousy shots, one of their bullets somehow entered the Jeep; hit the ignition key, thus turning off the engine; bounced around inside; and, in a pretty mangled form, ended up burying itself in Józio’s calf. By this time, they were about a half mile from the bandits, so they left the Jeep and ran to a nearby farmhouse. The doctors next day decided they would do more damage to his leg if they tried to remove the fragmented bullet and so just put a dressing over the wound.

Ironically, many years later, after he and my mother joined me in Canada in 1971, he had reason to have that calf X-rayed after falling and spraining his ankle. The doctors in the emergency department were puzzled at the metal object in his lower calf and clearly thought I made up the story about the 1946 incident.

One day, my mother announced to me that she agreed to get married to Józio. I was seven, and the significance of this did not fully register with me. The practical result of it was, though, that we moved out of the camp to the upper floor of a sandstone farmhouse, which Józio had previously rented from an Italian farmer who occupied the ground floor with his four adult sons and where Józio had been living for a few months. The farm was relatively close to the camp, so he could commute daily to his military duties.

Living at the farm provided a mass of new experiences and left a myriad of lifelong impressions on me. The house itself was built of solid foot-thick sandstone blocks, with unfinished walls, ceilings, or floors. Outside, the old farmer mostly cultivated tomatoes and potatoes, but there was also a small vineyard with the sourest grapes I had ever tasted. There was no livestock, so looking back, I wonder how the farmer ever made a living. As a kid, I made friends with the adult sons and used to watch fascinated as they would have their lunches of bread and tomatoes washed down with swigs of red wine. Occasionally, they would fire off their shotguns into one of the trees on the farm and pick up the little birds knocked down, hardly bigger than sparrows, and then pluck them and bring them inside for their supper.

The summer was hot, and only screen doors would be used. At nights, I would watch fascinated as groups of salamanders would attach themselves to the outside of the screen door to my bedroom. This was sometimes interrupted by a knock on the front door by the old landlord farmer who came to see Józio. The purpose of his visit would be to give us a large bunch of really sweet grapes which he had just stolen from his neighbor. He would stand there barefooted, clicking his heels in the way he had seen Polish soldiers do it; and standing to attention, he would pull out the grapes with a flourish from under his jacket, which was a khaki battledress top that Józio had given him. The gift of grapes was also in recognition of the various canned food that Józio had requisitioned from the camp and given him.

It was in this period of my life that I tasted butter for the first time, and how I loved it! One day, when I was alone, I took a whole lump of it from the pantry, must have been about half a pound, and ate it all at one sitting. It made me quite sick, and it took years before I would ever touch butter again.

Another time a stray mongrel, large and shaggy, wandered onto the farm. The landlords did not want it, so we adopted him; and not knowing his name, we called him Stary, i.e., Old Man in Polish. Soon he became part of the family and liked nothing better than ride in the back of Józio’s open Jeep whenever we would go anywhere.

Józio had a fascination with handguns; he owned two, a large 9mm Walther semiautomatic and a .22-caliber Browning semiautomatic. He would carry the Walther with him to work and always in the Jeep. Soon after my mother and I moved to the farmhouse, I noticed some strange-looking gouges in the stone floor and walls of what was to become their bedroom and which had been Józio’s bedroom during his bachelor days. I found out later that Józio used to sleep with the Walther under his pillow and a flashlight next to him. Apparently, the house had been infested with rats that enjoyed a nightly run across the bedroom at the meeting of the wall and floor across from his bed. When Józio would hear the scurrying, he would shine the flashlight across the room from his bed with his left hand and start firing at the rats with the Walther in his right hand. He said he was a good shot with a pistol and claimed to have nailed quite a few of them, but looking back, I wondered that he never shot off any of his toes or that none of the ricocheting bullets found him too. After we moved in, Józio would treat me by emptying the Walther into the air through one of the windows. Stary would find the farthest corner to hide, and I’m sure the farmer and his sons became convinced that he was totally crazy. One time, he was driving me in the Jeep toward the camp when we got stuck behind a farmer sitting on top of a huge pile of hay on a horse-drawn cart. There was no other traffic on the two-lane road, and the sleepy horse had wandered off into the left lane. Józio could have easily passed him on the right, but he was a stickler for the rules, which did not allow passing on the right, so when prolonged beeping of the horn only had the effect of the farmer pointing to his horse to indicate that it was in charge, Józio pulled out his trusty Walther and aimed it at the farmer’s head. I’m not sure if he would have pulled the trigger, but it only took a few seconds for the cart to find the right lane.

Italy 2

The School

To make sure that my education was not completely neglected, I was made to copy pages of Polish text from a book every day while my mother and Józio decided which school they should send me to. I dreaded and hated every moment of that activity.

There was a Polish boarding school in downtown Barletta. It was a huge gray four-storey building formed as a quadrangle, with a rectangular inner courtyard. I don’t know what it was before, but it had been taken over by the Polish armed forces after the war to provide education interrupted by the war to an assortment of Polish kids who had been scattered all over the world during the war and somehow ended up in Italy; some had been through Siberia, some through central Africa, most whose travels were dictated by the fate of their parent or parents, like myself, and some who were orphans. It was all boys, with ages ranging from seven (I was the youngest and smallest) to late teens, and there was even one twenty-year-old who had been imprisoned and beaten in Russia. He was a very large young man who sat with the youngsters during classes, but outside the classroom, he was the lawmaker and occasional bully whom everyone avoided. I think there was a total of about three hundred of us there. The teachers were all officer ex-servicemen, who had been teachers in Poland before the war. That is where I was sent.

It’s hard to know where to start describing the life and conditions at that school.

We all slept in dormitories, which were located on the top floor. The dormitory rooms were fairly large and accommodated around forty boys in each one. The dorms were along the outside wall of the building, with a wide corridor running past our doors. On the other side of the corridor were some very large windows which overlooked the inner courtyard. Around three walls of each dormitory were double bunks arranged in a radial pattern, i.e., like spokes, with the head ends against the walls. The bunks themselves were spaced about three feet apart. They were made of unpainted wood with sparse, lumpy mattresses laid on top of two inch slats spaced about two inches apart. There were a few wooden benches at the foot end of the bunks. One of the bedtime amusements was to go hopping around the dormitory, bunk to bunk across the top, an illegal activity subject to punishment of being confined to dormitory for three days during nonclass hours (that is if one got caught in the act by a wandering monitor or teacher). A hard landing during the hop sometimes resulted in one of the slats in somebody’s upper bunk getting cracked, but no one complained as that would give away what happened and the whole dormitory would be punished.

We were all to wear military khaki uniforms during the day. That was all right for the bigger kids, which was pretty well all of them, since they could get some to fit them, even if imperfectly, from the military stores at Camp Barletta. In my case, my mother had to make one for me, sewing it by hand.

With Artur and Teacher

My one close friend was Artur, who was five years older than me. We had been together since Algiers, as our mothers and we shared a room when we first got there. He was an only child as well, and his mother, Gabriela, or Lala, was also a Katyn widow. Throughout our stay in Algiers, Artur was my substitute older brother. He was not particularly assertive, so I could not count on him to protect me from the occasional instances of bullying at the school. He was a very serious, studious boy. I learned some years later that after our stay in Italy, his mother decided to return to Poland in 1947, notwithstanding the Soviet-dominated Communist regime there, and he subsequently became a doctor. Most of the rest of us went to England at the end of 1946, under a repatriation program for those military ex-servicemen who had fought with the Allies, together with their families.

The daily routine at the school started with a porridge breakfast in the first-floor dining room; then morning lessons in classrooms, which were located on the second and third floors; and then followed by lunch, again in the first-floor dining room. As I recall, the food was very basic—bits of overcooked meat with boiled potatoes, all washed down with a mug of cocoa. Afternoon lessons lasted till about 4:00 p.m.; and then supper was at 6:00 p.m., which usually consisted of thick slices of hard crusty bread spread with dripping, accompanied by a mug of hot unsweetened tea, which was served in the basement cafeteria. In the evenings, we would do what little homework was set, working with the exercise books on our laps, while sitting in our bunks. The rest of the day was devoted to the usual time-wasting activities that young boys are so good at. At 10:00 p.m., it was lights-out, and we had to be in our bunks in our pajamas.

In my dorm

There were no bathrooms as such, just toilets at the far end of the long corridor, comprising a few stalls and a long communal urinal. This presented no problems during the day, but at night, literally all lights were out, and if you needed a pee, you had to walk the 150 or so feet in total darkness to get relief. Along the way, some of the older boys from the dorms that were being passed would be waiting to start screaming and pushing you around just for a scare.

As a result, some of us would simply pee into the wastebasket that was located just inside our dormitory door. This was regarded as a major transgression, and unless the miscreant or miscreants confessed when morning inspection revealed the evidence, then the whole dorm would be punished. Other than being dorm-confined, the other punishment consisted of being denied passes to leave the

school premises for various periods of time. This last punishment stemmed from a system of passes which existed in the school: if anyone wanted to go into town for whatever reason, be it to buy an ice cream or maybe just look at the shops, he had to write a note describing his intention and specifying the date and time of departure and return and take it to the principal for approval. If approved, the note would get a blue rubber stamp with a capital L on the note, which would get one past the guard at the main door. At one time, some older boy made a replica stamp out of a bottle cork and issued passes to those he considered his friends. Of course, the forgery was soon discovered, and there was hell to pay by all those who had used it (including me once).

Every month on a Saturday morning, we all had to take off our mattresses, carry them across the corridor, and throw them out of the large windows to the courtyard below. This was an exercise in disinfection, meaning that the mattresses were subjected to fumigation or delousing by a giant machine brought in for the purpose. After that, we had to find our own mattresses and carry them up several flights of stairs back to our bunks. On some other Saturdays, we were taken by truck to camp Barletta and lined up outside a communal shower building; this was to ensure we at least got some personal ablutions since there were no baths or showers at the school.

One incident which happened fairly early after starting at the school particularly sticks in my mind, and its lesson has stayed with me for the rest of my life. There was one boy, two or three years older than me, who had his bunk on the other side of the dorm and who seemed to enjoy bullying me. Now, it was common for us all before going to bed to kneel on the floor beside our bunks to say our prayers, starting and ending with crossing ourselves. One night, I decided I had had enough of his bullying, so I watched him saying his prayers, and just as he was about to end and cross himself, I bounded over all the top bunks separating us and landed down next to him. I then started to pound him over his back and head with my fists flying like locomotive pistons. He just kind of slumped forward onto his lower bunk and pleaded for me to stop. When I finally did, he turned his head toward me with tears down his face and an expression of terror and disbelief… Since he had just finished praying, maybe he thought it was the wrath of God punishing him for his sins, but I was never bullied by anyone after that. Word had gotten around, That kid’s crazy. He attacks you when you’re praying.

Italy 3

Final Memories

Camp Barletta, with Józio (in shorts), 1946

I was often allowed to leave the school for weekends when Józio would pick me up in his Jeep and take me to the farm. To make up for the lack of washing facilities at the school, he would often grab me on a Saturday evening, then force me to get undressed and held me under a cold water tap which was located on the outside of the farmhouse. How I hated him for this!

Toward the latter part of 1946, word came through that the Allied military camps were to be liquidated, and the inhabitants were given a choice of immigrating to England, staying in Italy as part of the civilian population, moving to Argentina under some relocation program, or just going back to their native countries. My mother and Józio decided that since we could not risk going back to a communist Poland, he having been in the armed forces, England was our best choice. Accordingly, in November of that year, we boarded a train, along with dozens of other Polish soldiers and officers, and set off for Calais in France. I don’t remember the details of that train journey, just that it took several days with prolonged stops in various cities and a change of train when we crossed into France. I do remember that when we stopped in Bologna for several hours, Józio asked one of the junior soldiers to go into town and sell his