Katarzyna Cichy was cooking New Year’s Eve dinner for friends when she received a text message that she will never forget. It said simply “please phone” and gave a name and a number. Cichy called. The dinner was never finished. The 31-year-old historian spent hours on the phone that night making sure that what had long seemed impossible would now take place: a reunion between her 67-year-old mother and 89-year-old grandmother after a separation that had lasted 66 years and touched four generations of the family. Thanks to Cichy’s efforts, the two women spoke by phone the next day, January 1 2009, and met a week later at her mother’s house for the biggest family party anybody can remember. “At first I could not really believe it was happening,” Cichy recalls. “But as soon as I saw my grandmother, I knew straightaway it was my grandmother. It was all a mixture of joy and sadness. My mother had lived her whole life without a mother.”
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| Ludmila at her home near the German border |
She was put to work on a farm. At first she was able to correspond with her family, but a year later, all contact broke off. As Paulina would later learn, brutal inter-ethnic violence erupted between local Poles and Ukrainians amid the fighting between the Nazis and advancing Soviet troops. Paulina’s mother, Marta, went into hiding with Ludmila.
After the war, Paulina married a fellow Pole called Roman whom she met in a refugee camp, returned to Poland and settled close to Krakow, near his family home. They later had three children.
Meanwhile, in Sokal, Marta emerged from hiding with Ludmila and other relatives. Like millions of Poles in the eastern part of the country, they now found themselves in the Soviet Union; Poland’s borders had shifted west under the terms of the 1945 peace settlement. They were transported on freight trains to territories transferred from Germany to Poland – from which the German population had been driven out – and settled on the new German-Polish border. When Ludmila grew up, she married a local man named Jozef and had five children, including Cichy.
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| Ludmila’s mother Paulina who lives near Kraków |
It might have gone on like this – decades and decades of mourning – were it not for a generation of internet-savvy descendants. Cichy found a website focused on the history of Poland’s former eastern territories; last year she posted details of her grandparents there and asked anyone who might have known them to get in touch. A few months later, a teenage Paulina Wysmulek, the original Paulina’s great-granddaughter, saw Cichy’s note while trying to assemble a family tree. She had just posted an information request about the Jasinski family on the same site. One exchange led to another and on December 31 2008, the family’s long separation ended. “I was looking for information about where my grandmother might have been buried,” says Cichy. “Nobody believed that we would find her alive and in good health. The results of my searches exceeded my wildest dreams.”
. . .
The Polish Red Cross runs the country’s biggest family-tracing organisation, a state-funded agency devoted to connecting long-lost relatives separated during the second world war, or at least establishing when and where people died. It has occupied the same time-worn grey building in Warsaw since the war’s end. The furniture today is simple: metal chairs and desks and a few computers. There is an oldfashioned counter where visitors still complete application forms by hand, although most requests now arrive by post or e-mail – from Germany, the UK, the US, Australia, Israel and all across Poland itself.
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| Elzbieta Rejf, head of tracing at the Polish Red Cross |
“We never turn people away,” says Rejf. “We never say, ‘This is not a matter for us.’” Since 1945, the office has received 4.3 million requests and located 635,000 missing people. It was busiest in the early postwar years, with people returning from military service, prisons, labour and death camps and refugee centres – not least Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. In the 1950s, inquiries again surged with the arrival of Poles leaving the Soviet Union in the thaw following Stalin’s death. In 1989, the end of communism revived interest in finding lost relatives, especially as searches were aided by the opening of archives and the easing of travel restrictions. Later, new German compensation schemes for compulsory labourers spurred interest once more.
And now the internet has prompted fresh investigations. Last year, the Polish Red Cross says it received 3,800 inquiries and located 700 missing persons. “Today, more people are second-generation,” says Rejf, “searching for information about parents or grandparents. Did they survive or did they die?”
. . .
As well as the desire to know about their families, people are driven by the urge to find out more about themselves. This is particularly true for those who were born during the war to parents from whom they were separated. Especially poignant are the cases of an estimated 200,000 Polish children taken forcibly from their parents by the Nazis and given to German or Austrian couples. Most remained with their new families but now, Rejf says, “their cases are emerging because German mothers are confessing on their deathbeds that their 65-year-old son or daughter is not their own but the ‘adopted’ child of a Pole.”
Immediately after the war, there were attempts to reunite such children with their parents. The Red Cross, Poland’s main refugee agency, was given the responsibility for repatriating them – even if their families could not be traced. This caused problems of its own. Yanked from their birth parents, then from their adoptive families, some children spent the years after the war in a succession of homes, convents and public institutions. One such is 65-year-old Anna Zielinska, who was taken from Poland to an Austrian village and later returned to Poland. After decades spent trying to find both her birth and adoptive families, she says: “I have never been at peace with myself. After what I have been through it is impossible. From the age of 12 I have known I was an unwanted bastard.”
The cases of Polish Jewish children, whose families were victims of the Holocaust, are particularly tragic. Unknown numbers of such children were saved by being adopted into Christian families, who disguised their origins to deceive the Nazi authorities. And while sometimes these exchanges were done out of the adoptive parents’ desire for a child, or out of charity, at other times Jewish parents paid Christians to look after a child until the war was over. Often, when no one returned to claim a son or daughter, the new “parents” decided to maintain the deception – and the children discovered their true identity only much later, if ever. Such was the fate of Jachol Zeman, a 67-year-old retired Pole who for most of his life went under the name Henryk Malinowski. “My mother told me on her deathbed that I was a Jew and my papers were under the floor of her house. But she didn’t say where. Her lips kept moving but we heard nothing. It was literally the last moment of her life.”
Zeman says his was a normal home until about the age of 10, when he thinks his adoptive parents realised that his birth parents would not return, leaving them without the money they had expected to be paid, but with the young Zeman still in their care. After that, he says, the warmth he had previously experienced was replaced with coldness, even brutality. “They beat me with gooseberry canes. When I was disobedient, I was bound to the table-leg with a cow rope.”
Even those who were well treated and told in childhood of their true origins grew up with lingering questions: who was my mother? What was she like? Where is she now? Maria Kowalska, a 70-year-old retired bookkeeper whose persecuted Jewish parents asked their Catholic nanny to raise Maria as her own, says: “I was always aching to know about my family. It was awful to live like this, with nobody in the world.”
. . .
I know how important these questions are. My mother, Sabina Dmuchowska, comes from a small town in eastern Poland where my grandparents, Franciszek and Pelagia Dmuchowski, ran a small farm. The happy family suffered a tragic shock early in 1939 when the youngest of the five children, a two-year-old boy, died from influenza. My mother now sees it as a portent of what was to come.
That year, my grandparents had decided to send their second child, 11-year-old Jozef, to a Catholic seminary school in Niepokalanow near Warsaw. In August, my grandfather took his son the 300km by train. It was the last time he saw the boy: when war broke out a few days later, the priests sent the pupils home, but Jozef never made it. My mother, who was then 15, told me: “Your grandfather and grandmother were sick with worrying about him. As soon as he could, grandfather went to look for him. He established that he had boarded a train. The train was probably bombed. He probably died in the bombing. But we don’t know for sure.”
Germany and the Soviet Union then divided Poland and the surviving Dmuchowskis found themselves under Soviet occupation. In February 1940, along with tens of thousands of other Poles, they were deported deep into the Soviet Union and lost any chance of pursuing Jozef. After many wartime trials, the family ended up as refugees in Britain. My grandfather launched another search for his lost son. But he found nothing.
I had always assumed that he had pursued his hunt through the Polish Red Cross, and so, talking to Rejf, I asked about the search and where it had led. But when her archives are searched, in a hunt for one of millions of data cards, no entries are found for Jozef Dmuchowski. Why did my grandfather fail to contact the single biggest tracing service? Rejf can’t offer an explanation. Suddenly a reporting trip turns into something quite different. I fill out a card for my uncle. Rejf warns me: “It is hard to imagine that we can find anything. But we will try.”
. . .
Trying involves searching through yellowing lists and file cards. The Polish Red Cross has lists for everything: for people who passed through prisons, prisoner-of-war camps and refugee centres; for dead and missing soldiers; for people who were deported and for those who were repatriated. As an example, Rejf produces an old hardback book, the size of a broadsheet newspaper. It is a Red Cross directory of thousands of Polish women and children who escaped from their war-torn homeland, ended up in the care of the British authorities and were housed in refugee camps in Africa while their husbands and fathers fought with the allied forces. Inside, under the letter “D”, I run my finger down the columns of names and dates of birth, and find my mother, aunt, uncle and grandmother. On their long road from Poland to the UK, they spent six years in Marandellas, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). I knew this already, of course, but it is still a shock to see it in print.
A few weeks later, I receive an e-mail informing me that Rejf’s office has “started its efforts to establish the fate” of Jozef Dmuchowski. That’s it. Nothing more. Now I must wait for the next communication, which may not come for months, or longer.
If the Polish Red Cross fails to find information in its own archives, it turns to other Polish institutions, including government offices, registrars of births, marriages and deaths, the National Institute of Remembrance and the Jewish Historical Institute. As more organisations transfer data to the internet, the time taken to conduct these searches is reduced accordingly. For second world war information, the single biggest resource is in the German town of Bad Arolsen, which houses the world’s largest archive on victims of the Nazis – 50 million file cards on 17.5 million people.
The Polish Red Cross is one of about 180 national Red Cross organisations that run domestic tracing services and co-operate on international tracing with each other and with the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (ICRC). Like other ICRC activities, international tracing services and most national Red Cross activities are financed by voluntary donations from governments and individuals. The services are generally free to users.
Today, the organisation is active in conflict-torn countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The wars in the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East and in many African states, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, generate constant flows of people searching for missing relatives and the burial places of those presumed dead. In the past decade, the ICRC has received 111,000 tracing requests and reunited 20,738 families – but these figures exclude the many cases handled solely by national organisations such as the Polish Red Cross. “War, disasters and migration split up many thousands of families,” the ICRC says. “The suffering created by such situations is not always visible to others. This global problem is mostly a silent tragedy.”
. . .
It is often a silent tragedy even within families. The survivors of war are frequently too disturbed and too busy with their daily lives to focus on searching for the missing. They try to forget about the past and its traumas, and look to the future. Sometimes, the desire to find the truth surfaces only decades later.
Rejf knows how delicate the searches can be. Investigations can reveal difficult personal circumstances, such as those of Polish servicemen who left behind their wives and children and remarried abroad after the war, without necessarily going through a divorce or even telling either wife of the other’s existence. “Such people often don’t want to be found. Perhaps they don’t want to be disturbed,” says Rejf.
But with the passage of time, a new generation wants to know. Unencumbered by the pain of the past, the children of such divided families want to meet their half-siblings, even when all are well into middle age. “It’s rare today that we are looking for missing parents or children,” says Rejf. “People want to find more distant relatives – or to find information about people they know must be dead, like their grandparents. They want to make family trees or chronicles. These searches may be less emotional than before but there is still a real interest.”
There is also a deep urge to establish identity. Even people born long after a war feel they are incomplete unless they can discover what happened to their families during the conflict. And nothing is more fundamental than establishing who survived, who died and who is still missing. As Cichy says of her search for her grandmother, “Why did I look? To find roots. To know who I am.”
Stefan Wagstyl is the FT’s east Europe editor. Those seeking friends and relations who are missing as a result of conflict and disaster can contact the ICRC at www.familylinks.icrc.org
