Sybirak Starszy Sier?ant Walerian Julian Stopnicki, after being released from a Soviet prison (Starobielsk) was assigned to an Agricultural Battalion on 12th January 1942 in D?yzak in Uzbekistan prior to evacuation; we are not sure if it was in March or April 1942. He was certainly at Pahlavi by early May 1942, where he met his daughter (my sister) Krystyna for the last time. He arrived in Scotland at the Kirkcaldy Polish Army Distribution Camp on 17th October 1942 (via the Near East and Capetown) and was assigned to the 1st Armoured Corps of the 1st Polish Armoured Division. But he was mentally unfit and was assigned to various support brigades (and including both working and treatment? at the Edinburgh Polish Military Hospital, before being invalided out of the Army (also after an arrest for theft) in December 1944. He returned to Szczecin at the end of 1945, working for the Communist Government in re-assigning German farms to Polish family displaced from Eastern Poland. He lived with my mother, his second wife (although he wasn’t divorced, and his first wife had also escaped the USSR and arrived in the UK with my sister Krystyna in 1950, after years at Tengeru) in a British Liaison Mission monitoring the displacement of Germans from Western Poland, in Szczecin. We are still investigating what Walerian did in London in 1945. His marriage certificate to my Mum in October 1945 declared that he worked at the Polish Embassy, which would have been the Soviet one at the time, but, along with the lie about being divorced and ten years younger than reality, maybe this was also a lie.

?

Is this a help to your studies? Anything else you discover about my father would be wonderful.

?

Best regards

?

Julia Stopnicka-Lawrence

?

?