Czeslawa Julia Wisniewska

Czeslawa Julia Wisniewska

My mother, Czeslawa Julia Wisniewska, could be described as a survivor. She was born in Poland in 1922, during the inter-war period when the country was independent after 120 years of partition and occupation, in a little wooden house in a village with no electricity. As a small child she was taken by her parents, Maria and Karol Korzeniowski, to the extreme east of Poland – now in Ukraine – to a small village, Zaremba, 150 miles south-east of Lviv. Her childhood was very simple. Her parents grew their own food, rarely eating meat. Her younger brother and sister, Alexander and Emilia, were born during this time and the children had to walk daily to school in the next village, three miles away; in the winter they went on skis. This austere but natural, healthy life undoubtedly contributed to my mother’s inner strength and her capacity for endurance.

On 10 February 1940, when my mother was 18, the Soviet army entered their village. They were given half an hour to pack up and were told: “You will never see your home again.” It was winter, and the two dogs of the family lay on their feet to keep them warm as they waited at the railway station before deportation. Inevitably, these dogs had to be left behind, along with all the family’s treasured household possessions.

They spent three weeks on the train, travelling in cattle wagons, until they reached Skaczok, western Siberia, on the European side of the Urals. Despite the upheaval in their lives, they were lucky: this first deportation, unlike later ones, was not to eastern Siberia or Kazakhstan where conditions were much more severe. They were taken to a labour camp where huts had already been erected.

After two years of work in forestry and timber, the political landscape of the war changed; Germany had attacked Russia in June 1941 and Russia had therefore joined the Allies. Thus, the release of the hundreds of thousands of Poles who had been exiled to Russia was negotiated and my mother’s family began their next arduous journey. The only exit route from the Soviet Union at that time was to Iran, Persia. To get there, experiencing much hardship and lack of food, they travelled through Uzbekistan, spending three months in Tashkent.

Here my mother buried her father, who had died of typhoid. When I asked her many years later what she had felt at his death, she simply said, “We had no time to mourn. People were dying all around us. You had to carry on.” As I have indicated at the start of this memoir, my mother had learned to survive.

Finally, in 1942, through the good offices of her brother, she was able to cross the Caspian Sea to Persia on one of the last available ships. She spent the next 18 months in Tehran studying with the Red Cross to become a nurse for the Polish army in exile and had many happy memories of this time. In 1944 she was posted to the Polish military hospital in Egypt, at El-Qantara by the Suez Canal. There they all lived in tents. Of this period, she commented to me, not so long ago, “It was fine. When you are young and strong you take everything in your stride.” Youthful and carefree, on her days off she would go with other nurses to Port Said or Ismailia, or even to Cairo, to climb the Pyramids.

When the war ended in 1945, my mother was sent to Rehovot, between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in Palestine, then under the British Mandate. The Polish Government in Exile had established a school there for those who had not been able to finish their matriculation in Poland because of the outbreak of war. It was here that she met her husband, my father, Tadeusz Wisniewski, and they were married on 23 November 1946 in Jerusalem, in the church of Our Lady of France (it is still there, but now renamed “Our Lady of Jerusalem”.) Afterwards they had to return to their posts, my mother to the hospital at El- Qantara and my father to Cairo, where he served in the intelligence service.

Then my mother, travelling by hospital ship through the Straits of Gibraltar, arrived in Liverpool in February 1948; from the sunshine of Egypt into English fog and rain. Still an army nurse, she went straight to work at the Polish hospital for the war wounded in Wrexham. She and my father were finally demobbed in 1950 and came to live in London. This presented another challenge in an already eventful life: a new country, a new language. My mother, characteristically, was undaunted; she was never afraid of hard work. This she found initially at the Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital in Golden Square, and then at the Princess Beatrice Maternity Hospital in Earl’s Court, where I was born in 1955.

My mother then stopped work to look after me as well as her mother, my grandmother, who lived with us for the next 28 years. Later on, when I went to secondary school, she went back to work, part-time, at Sainsbury’s. After my father’s death in 1986 she chose to work as a dinner lady at a local school. She couldn’t abide being idle. For the last 30-odd years, before her fall which then confined her to the house, she chose to work every Sunday in the cafeteria of our Polish church in Shepherd’s Bush. My mother loved meeting the people there after Mass and organising the ladies’ rota; she got up at 7 am every Sunday morning without fail, to catch a bus to open up the cafeteria. She also took great pleasure in her garden and her flowers; later in life she remarked from time to time that she wouldn’t mind dying among her flowers on a warm summer evening.

I hope these brief reminiscences will illuminate what I wrote at the beginning: that my mother was indeed a survivor. But she was much more than this: she was resolute, determined and stoical, with a strong sense of duty and without any trace of self-pity. Clearly, her life and its harsh early circumstances had combined to form her like this.

My mother’s final four years, after her fall in 2017, were naturally difficult for someone so fiercely independent, as she had to rely on my help and that of carers who lived full-time in the house. On reflection, I see that this was necessary. God wanted to refine her; to give her the opportunity to mellow. Indeed, during these last years she often used to remark how sorry she was for people who had no-one to care for them, and to show her gratitude to me in other ways. Every night when I was at home, we would pray together the prayers she had learnt as a child: the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the prayer to one’s Guardian Angel and concluding with Eternal rest give unto them, O Lord.

After my mother’s death, among the many messages and condolences I received, one in particular stands out poignantly and it remains with me: a friend had written, “Of course, our mothers should never leave us. They should be immortal.” I responded: “Yes, they are immortal – but in heaven, not on earth.”

I want to conclude by saying how profoundly grateful to God I am for my mother. Throughout my whole life, even when we experienced occasional disagreements and arguments, I never once felt estranged or separated from her. I knew that I always had a home with her, and that I would always be loved, accepted and welcomed back by her – even after I had been told off. Deo Gratias.