Hello again and again and once again!
This time I want to trace "Eddie" and this one is a real mystery.
Eddie was my father's best-friend-forever whom he met somewhere after leaving his family in north Tadzhikstan
and they became essentially adopted brothers.
I know he was Polish and his last name apparently was either "W?ódczyk"
or "?ódczyk" or possibly "Wódczyk" (although that variation looks a little bit strange even to a Pole)
and Eddie was apparently also a deported kresowiak and possibly also an osadnik child.
They apparently did attend a Polish military school together in the Middle East,
and possibly joined the Polish army together
but at some point Eddie accidentally connected with or met an explosive device
(either a grenade or a landmine) and was killed when it suddenly and unexpectedly exploded
or possibly he simply took a direct hit from an incoming German shell somewhere.
I also know that Polish boys in military schools did sometimes steal munitions and play with them and sometimes did get hurt or killed when these things suddenly exploded so perhaps this was an unfortunate instance of such an event.
This actually happened within sight of my father and he was very distraught (to put it mildly)
and kept talking about Eddie long after the event and he actually named my younger brother after him
and continued to have nightmares about him well into the 1950s.
I actually did not learn about Eddie until about 2001 shortly before my mother's death when she casually told me about Eddie one night while we were watching the evening news on television:-
my mother would routinely simply start talking about things like this that happened long ago without any prompting from me when we were alone, I was her "sounding board" and "psychotherapist" from early childhood in this way.
After my father died in 1974 she was the only one who knew anything about Eddie until she told me in 2001
and now I'm the only one who knows anything about him (even my brother does not know how he got his own name) and I think this was my mother's gentle way of ensuring that Eddie did not disappear completely by being totally forgotten:- "Nie umieraj? czy których nie zapominamy." and I think she just wanted to keep him alive in memory by passing this information to me although she was a bit hazy on details and could not answer more detailed questions since this was all second-hand information she had gotten from my father ~50 years before.
So, how do I find documentary information about Eddie to verify and demonstrate that he actually existed
and perhaps to trace his family as well.
Eddie was young and did not live long and obviously could not accomplish much in his young life
and although many Polish refugee children have disappeared into oblivion Eddie is my special responsibility
and his life was worth as much as anyone else's and I would like to do what I can to reclaim his memory and keep him from also disappearing into oblivion.
I did try to contact the Polish Red Cross and their tracing service a few years ago about Eddie
but apparently since I live in Canada I must first go through the Canadian Red Cross and they are totally unsympathetic and refused to help me:- it was no good trying to explain to them that this was a "Polish" thing,
they could care less.
Perhaps someone here can help me trace Eddie even though he is very much at this point a small "needle" in a very large "haystack" and I have so little factual information about him but I am absolutely certain he did exist
so who was he, where did he come from, and what were the exact circumstances of his untimely death?
Thank you.
