Dear Eve-Marie, welcome home, we have all been there and are struggling with information and research to understand and bring forth the truth to the World about the hidden history of ‘THE LOST TRIBE’.
My own parents, father from Warsaw Calvary captured by Germans 1939 and my mother from a family of Nobility, trapped and brutalized by Soviets on other side of Riga Treaty Line 1921, came to Australia in 1949 as Indentured Workers, Displaced Persons, under a two (2) year work Contract to repay their travel expenses, as Australia was part of the British Commonwealth and three (3) years later, took Oath of Citizenship to Australia as New Australians, allowing them to be employed and their children find jobs as Naturalized Australians.
They never forgot about Poland, but knew they could never go back while Poland was under Communism, creating a LITTLE POLAND here in Australia, which we as children hated because the customs and way of life of the locals was so much different and we were ostracized if we were WOGS.
They had to learn the language, take what jobs were given to them, laughed at by the locals as WOGS, no Polish Mass, no Polish Community, only the once a month Polish Dance in a run down hall, so the locals in a backward Bush Town, could get together and teach their children something of the Polish culture, food, music and St. Nicholas. Outside this we had to fend for ourselves, going to Aussie schools, some went to Polish Saturday School, if the parents could afford it, but you were outsider to the Australian Community if you did go, with many denying their Polish Heritage, even changing their names, just to get employment.
My parents never spoke of the horrors to us children, protecting us from the nightmares, which we had anyway, because our parents, mainly DAD watched War Films and mother avoided them, but she herself would have nightmares every night.
We grew up not belonging to our own kind and not belonging to the Community of Australia.
Truly I was lost and searching, not knowing what my Heritage was, who my Ancestors were, felt like an orphan on this Planet, until I started research, found Kresy-Siberia, a people the same as myself and finally felt at home.
Now for the first time in my life, I am comfortable with myself and proud of my Heritage and have been open with my children, who found this to be a huge strength and comfort, explaining all the hurts and craziness in the family and giving them courage to face the hardships and excel in all they do, as I have noticed all other children of Exiles, whose parents, explained and communicated honestly with their children have also excelled in Education and quality of life. They have a bravery, motivation, courage, unique to Kresy Survivors and not understood by the local community. We are proud of who we are and have no need to hide anymore.
In this Kresy-Siberia Group, you will find the warmest and most helpful people, assisting you with everything that is possible and actually caring, because we have all been there and I am personally thankful for the Group, when they held my hand, during my first steps of painful discovery.
Warmest regards
Lenarda, Sydney, Australia
From: Kresy-Siberia@... [mailto:Kresy-Siberia@...]
Sent: Sunday, 14 February 2016 8:36 AM
To: Kresy-Siberia@...
Subject: [Kresy-Siberia (Yahoo)] Marcin Chamot
Feb 12/16
from:- Eve-Marie Galka
<mailto:eve.marie123@...> eve.marie123@...
to:- Kresy-Siberia Group
<mailto:Kresy-Siberia@...> Kresy-Siberia@...
re:- Marcin Chamot
Hello again, sorry I've been away for a few days.
First, thank you to everyone for all the help, I know a lot more about my family's history this week than I did last week!
Second, I really dislike Yahoo (both mail and groups), it is so difficult and temperamental to use,
plus there seems to be a cold-war between Yahoo and Google which does not help!
(However if you use the Firefox platform and then select Yahoo as your browser it helps a lot.)
Third, please do not post any more in my Introduction thread,
I've decided to split my research into a separate thread for my grandfather, Marcin, and my father, Henryk.
Also for now I would prefer to focus on my grandfather, Marcin,
and to tie up some loose ends about missing kinfolk
and wait until I can get my father's army registration number from his id tags
to get more documentation on his history.
Hopefully this thread for my grandfather will help others with a similar history to do their family research.
My family's history is actually rather straightforward and not as convoluted and amazing
as some of the others I've seen here
plus my grandfather and my father and uncle were in the Polish army at various times
so there seems to be more official records available for them.
You need to understand the context in which my very short oral history of my family developed.
My parents both arrived in Toronto in about 1948 from Europe and although they were actually Polish war-refugees
they were admitted only as "indentured labourers" (which was a form of semi-slave labour!)
under a system which Canada finally abolished legally in 1949
and which apparently was the last country in the British Commonwealth to have this notion of "indentured labourer".
My parents both came to Toronto because all their friends in Europe were doing it, they both would rather have gone
to America but they were not accepting any Polish war refugees until 1949 and later, after learning a bit more about the world, my mother decided that it would have been better to go to Australia or New Zealand but by then it was too late
and here they were trapped for the rest of their lives (and I'm still regretting it!).
Toronto already had a small Polish community dating back to 1905 but Polish immigration stopped in about 1930
when Canada closed the door at the start of the Great Depression.
The new Polish war refugees flooded into Toronto and they completely overwhelmed the older Polish population
with Toronto's Polish community increasing many times over and becoming much more visible
although European immigrants of any type were distinctly unpopular
in this little and very provincial backwater of Toronto in those days:-
as very small child I still vividly remember having anglo-Canadian children screaming at me:-
"Go back to where you belong, G*d-damned DP!" (a "dp" was a "displaced person").
Sometimes the older Polish community would "pull rank" on the new arrivals and talk condescendingly to them
but my mother would humorously refer to them as the "Stary Kolumbusy"
since they sometimes acted as if they had come over with Columbus!
Many of these people were military veterans and still quite young but very energetic resulting in a lot of rapid community development including new churches, new credit unions, new newspapers, new Polish schools, new Polish community halls, new Polish legion halls, a big suburban picnic park (Paderewski Park), a rather vast scouting system
with permanent camps near Barry's Bay in Ontario where there were many Kaszubian people living in semi-wilderness, and later Polish retirement homes and so on plus many new businesses and they also revitalized many declining older Polish organizations (including the Polish National Catholic parish which was nearly dead by 1945).
They scraped their pennies together to pay for building materials
and often pitched in personally helped to build much of this community infrastructure with their own hands.
This was very much a Polish émigré community with a lot of community infrastructure
and it was totally dominated by Polish war veterans and I grew up in this very Polish milieu
complete with its own unique creole Polish derived from Galician Polish
and heavily influenced by military jargon, and borrow words from Russian, German, Italian,
and British and Canadian English.
I heard endless personal war stories and sat on many knees
while various of my father's friends showed me their medals and pictures and explained where they all came from
and I basically spent the first 20 years of my life in this very intensely Polish military milieu.
At first, as children we could not make any sense out of this torrent of personal histories since much of it seemed to come from another planet and we were too young too understand anyway and then when we became old enough to understand we tended to have nightmares about it so the adults learned to hold back the less pleasant stuff
when children were around.
By my teens I started looking for formal histories to provide a framework to organize all this massive personal detail
and I could find very little since we were essentially the "lost Polish tribe" who had been systematically written out of the history books (although at the time I did not understand how massive that conspiracy of silence really was).
I finally found a book on the battles at Monte Cassino published in about 1956 and written by a former German major in the Wehrmacht who was not there himself but who was a military historian and he included a rather extensive and sympathetic chapter about the history of the Polish troops and that was all the formal history I could find about my parents and their friends for many, many years after that but it helped me to start understanding what they were talking about but it was not until the arrival of the Internet and especially Wikipedia that I could start finding out even much more.
My father died in 1974 before I could understand what to ask about and so my information about him came later second-hand from my mother who tended to garble it a bit
plus a bit more from my uncle who almost died in an epidemic in Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan on his way to Iran
and that seemed to affect his memories of times before that.
My uncle had actually stayed in Britain until about 1953 but finally came to Canada and Toronto and while there he tried to trace his family members through the Red Cross but without any result at all and he gave up after he got here
since the Canadian Red Cross was not at all sympathetic to us.
My mother made it clear that there was no hope of finding any documentary evidence about his side of the family during the Communist era since they all believed that old records had been destroyed deliberately or during combat
and the Communists were not sharing whatever was left with anyone and least of all with Polish war refugees
from the Kresy:- essentially Communism was a big black-hole which swallowed up everything and everyone
and it was impossible for anyone outside to find out about anyone or anything inside so we just gave up.
Thus I put together my little oral history of my family on that basis and there it stayed for a long time.
Having this oral history was important in local Polish society in Toronto because in those years when two Polish people met for the first time they would first establish which friends they had in common and then if they shared common ancestors in Poland:- the Polish community in Toronto and southern Ontario was quite large but in some ways very close-knit and everyone seemed to know everyone else.
This was a kind of greeting and bonding ritual in what was essentially a "lost Polish tribe"
which had been exiled from their ancestral homeland to Planet Canada which did not really like us
and who had been disowned and excommunicated by Planet Poland which was very intent on forgetting all about us
(and apparently even revoked en masse the Polish citizenship of expatriate Poles in 1956
leaving us all as stateless citizens) and everyone had written us out of the history books
and we still meet many recently-arrived mainland Poles today
who still suffer from this Communist-era amnesia about us.
And so my parents' generation created a little offshore replica of the Second Republic
from which they had been forcibly expelled and that is where we, their children, grew up
and perhaps culturally we are actually closer to the traditions of the Second Republic and the Stara Rzeczpospolita
since we have never been oppressed daily by the alien ideology of Communism
which subjugated mainland Poles for so long:- sometimes I feel like an old Polish living fossil,
a relic from the era of "Ogniem i mieczem" ("With Fire and Sword")!
The first major document was entry #979 on the list of osadnicy at
which shows my grandfather as "Marcin Chamut".
The gentleman who provided this suggested that my original family name was thus "Chamut"
but I'm not really sure and this might actually be a simple transcription error
made when they transcribed the original records by hand into digital format.
The Polish way of handwriting "o" and "u" are quite similar except the "o" is supposed to be closed at the top
but someone writing quickly might leave it a bit open and looking like a "u"
so we really need to look at the original records or photocopies thereof.
Nevertheless this was the first time I saw any document like this in my life
and it really "blew me away" and I was amazed at how much of my oral information was actually correct
(including my grandfather's first name) since memories were starting to fade when I collected this information
and I always had serious doubts about its accuracy.
Now I also know that my grandfather was a "bombardier"
who in that era was essentially an artillery sergeant
who directed an individual artillery crew
and since the guns of that era were precision weapons
he would have had some technical knowledge and education.
It also gave me the actual military settlement where he and his family homesteaded
and now I can trace where he lived and who his neighbors were:- amazing!
Likewise the document at
gives me more information about my grandfather's home at Aleksandrówka
and it also continues the spelling "Chamut" which is a bit confusing.
The next major document was the deportation list at
and this shows more information but also becomes even more confusing.
It confirms that my father, Henryk, was indeed born in 1927 and he was telling the truth about that
but now I would really like to find his birth certificate so we could finally know his actual birth date
because it's certainly not Jan 1, 1926 as it appears on all his official records subsequently and on his gravestone
but he did indeed "lie" his way into the army like so many others and no doubt the officers knew that
but turned a blind eye:- they needed to make their numbers
and no one wanted to babysit restless teenaged boys who had already been badly traumatized
so the Second Corps seemed to include quite a few boy-soldiers like my father.
According to my mother's recollections of what he told her there were more boy-soldiers like him
and they used to pass around a bottle of vodka or whatever to loosen up the kids before a battle
to relax them and calm them down as they went into battle.
It also continues the spelling "Chamut" which perhaps suggests that might be the original spelling of the family name
but I would really need to see my grandfather's birth certificate to be sure.
My family name somewhat resembles the Polish word <> "chom?to" or "horse collar"
so perhaps some of my ancestors made horse collars and other harnessing equipment .
"Chamot" seems to be a more common name in Poland
while "Chamut" is less common and seems to be associated more with Jewish people.
This document also show that my grandfather's father's name was "Jan" and he was born in 1896
while "Anna" who apparently was his wife was the daughter of Michal and was born in 1897.
However this contradicts my uncle Bolek's hazy recollection that his mother was name "Maria"
but she does not appear on this listing.
This document also shows the family were deported on Mar 2, 1940 and were consigned to Lensk rayon in northeast Archangelsk oblast and were freed on Sep 12, 1941 but by then seemed to be resident in Chkalovsk town in Tajikistan
which was far to the southeast so obviously they were moved around quite a bit.
My uncle seemed sure that they had actually gone to Vorkuta and my father remembered about standing in cold water
while cutting brush which gave him some mild arthritis at the time
so perhaps they were detoured en route to Vorkuta to work on clearing brush and trees
to build the new townsite of Vorkuta and the railway line to it
and we know this was a well-known and notorious forced-labor project in Russia for many years in that era.
However later they seemed to have found their way far to the south to central Asia.
The next major document in this history is found at
<>
and this is apparently a listing of soldiers enlisted into Anders' Army at its temporary headquarters at Buzuluk
which is about 500 km east of Moscow along with their kinfolk.
Keep in mind that General Anders made a decision
that only enlisted soldiers and their families would be transported out of the USSR to Persia:-
this was a hard decision to make but the Soviets were barely co-operative
and it was the best that could be done in those circumstances.
Apparently my uncle Bolek who was clearly old enough to enlist reported to Buzuluk and joined
and advised them of his relations who now resided in Yuzhno Kazakhstan oblast in the Suzakski rayon
on the Stalin kolkhoz at the time he enlisted which would have been sometime in late 1941 or early 1942.
This seems to be the first documented spelling of "Chamot" in this history.
However that list fails to include my grandfather Marcin but now we see "Maria"
so who is this mystery lady whom my uncle remembered as his mother?
She might actually be Marcin's sister or a cousin or perhaps a sister or cousin of Anna
who somehow reconnected with her kinfolk and joined them.
My mother told me that according to my father he had spent time in a kolkhoz in Kazachstan first baby-sitting children (which did not agree with him!) and then later he was transferred to "baby-sitting" camels (ie a camel herder)
and then finally he just got fed up and left on his own and apparently found his way somehow to Persia.
I remember as a child coming home from school with my school atlas to do homework
and he saw it and opened it on a table to the page for central Asia and traced with his finger
his route from north Russia to central Asia and then to Persia
and I was totally confused and mystified about what he was talking about
going through historical places like Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, and so on
but I realize now that he stole rides on the railway which connects these places with Krasnovodsk (now Türkmenba?y)
in Turkmenistan and that is how he somehow got to Persia on his own:-
he literally sneaked in through the "backdoor" when no one was looking,
a young Polish lad full of guile and moxy living by his wits!
From there he progressed to Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, and then to Italy and Britain and finally to Canada
and I still have a picture of him (very young and skinny and quite serious-looking!)
and about a dozen other teenage Polish boys
and on the back it is marked "na pustynym w Iraku":-
long before the Polish deployment to Iraq in 2003
there were other Polish soldiers going that way
and I wonder if those later Polish soldiers knew anything about their predecessors.
I remember my mother telling me that he told her that he left on his own
and that he got to Persia before his brother Bolek
and I thought this was just a bit of youthful bragging by him
but perhaps it was true, he simply took a shortcut
and avoided all the official channels
and no one would bother a vagabond boy "riding the rails"
even in the Stalinist era of the USSR.
My uncle Bolek apparently waited in Buzuluk for his travelling orders
and finally reached Persia but he became deathly ill on the way either in Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan
and apparently almost died and apparently crossed to Persia in a somewhat zombie-like state
and it seems to have affected his memories of everything before.
So now we come to the remaining loose ends:-
what happened to grandfather Marcin
and to my grandmother Anna and grandaunt Maria and my uncle Jozef?
Marcin apparently did not reach Kazakhstan and possibly died along the way
either at Vorkuta or perhaps even before at Katyn or one of the other execution sites.
The cold and wet conditions at Vorkuta might have made him ill and he died there
or perhaps even before then he might have been arrested and sent to Katyn et al
and been finally executed.
I did not think he would be important enough to send to Katyn and he was already a civilian by 1939
but he was an artillery sergeant
and I read that the Soviets did subsequently arrest a large number of former veteran officers and sergeants and so on
in Dec of 1939 so perhaps he was arrested in late 1939 or early 1940 on that basis and sent to Katyn et al.
How can I establish if he was sent to Katyn et al, can that be done?
Finally, what happened to Anna, Maria, and Jozef?
My uncle cannot clearly remember if they accompanied him to Persia so where did they go?:-
perhaps they finally reach Persia and somehow went missing
although my uncle could never trace them through the Red Cross after the war
and perhaps they died from illness in Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan
or perhaps they remained behind in the USSR or remigrated to Poland after 1945.
By now Anna and Maria have long since died and even Jozef is probably dead
but if he survived and married and had children
then perhaps I still have unknown cousins and nephews and nieces on that side of the family:-
where could I look to find out about that?
My family's history is a bit like a "matryoshka" doll:- one mystery inside of another and another and so on
and as soon as I sort out one mystery it introduces yet another
but I'm really quite amazed that now I can actually get some documentary information to answer these questions:-
I had a dream some time ago with a premonition that such a day would arrive
but I thought it was just wishful thinking but here it is happening.
Thank you.
<>
<>
Have found some information regarding Henryk Chamot some of which you might be aware of. From the index of the repressed there is a record of Anna, Boleslaw, Henryk, Jozef and Marcin (see attachments) being deported to Wo?yńska and exiled in Archangielska.
a
<>
Have found some information regarding Henryk Chamot some of which you might be aware of. From the index of the repressed there is a record of Anna, Boleslaw, Henryk, Jozef and Marcin (see attachments) being deported to Wo?yńska and exiled in Archangielska.
