IBorn in Krasna Słoboda
Antoni was born on 26 March 1898 in Krasna Słoboda, in the Novograd-Volyn area of Zhytomyr governorate, then part of the Russian Empire.
His birth date and place are confirmed by three separate records: the Arolsen Archives, his UK refugee certificate, and the Soviet special-settlement card. He is recorded as Polish by nationality, with “previous nationality Russian”, which fits the fact that Volhynia was Russian-ruled at his birth. He was one of the seven children of Jan and Teofila, and the eldest as far as the known birth dates go.
Antoni was caught up in the First World War. Writing to his cousin in 1972, he mentioned in passing that “Tsar Nicholas called me up to the army still”: the Tsarist conscription that reached young men across the western governorates. He would have been about nineteen. He adds that Bolesław did not serve, and calls him “a little younger than me”. The documents say otherwise. Bolesław was born in 1889 and Antoni in 1898, so Bolesław was nine years older. Both birth dates are well documented. Antoni was seventy-four when he wrote this, to a cousin he had not seen in forty years, so he may have misremembered the gap, or used the word loosely.
IIDeportation to the Soviet north
When the Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland in 1939, Polish nobles and landowners were marked as “class enemies”. Antoni was caught in the mass deportations. A Soviet special-settlement record places him in Arkhangelsk Oblast, Kotlas district, at a settlement called Nizhnyaya Striga, arriving 29 February 1940, the great deportation wave of that month. He was released on 4 September 1941, under the amnesty for Polish citizens that followed the Sikorski–Mayski agreement.
That wave was the first of four, and the largest. Across the occupied east, NKVD units worked from prepared lists, gave families about an hour to pack, and moved them in sealed goods wagons. Russian Memorial train records count 98 trains carrying 138,616 people north and east that February. Polish estimates run higher, because the train tallies never counted what was done outside them.
Nizhnyaya Striga was not a prison camp. It was a posiolek, a special settlement: no bars, no charge, no sentence, and no right to leave. The work was timber, in forest reachable only by rail or river. A commandant’s notebook survives from another settlement in the same district, and records what that meant. 618 people arrived there on 28 February 1940, the same week Antoni’s card records his own arrival. Rations were tied to trudodzień, the working days a person could log. Housing was mud huts and old stable blocks. Thirty-seven died that first year, and at least eighty of the 618 before the amnesty came eighteen months later.
That is the district and the system, not the man. Antoni was in a settlement of this kind, in this district, in these months, and the Soviet card proves it. What his own days held is not recorded. He never described them, not in thirty-seven pages of letters written thirty years later.
Three decades later, Antoni put the deportation into his own words. “Admittedly they deported me to Arkhangelsk; there I was a little safer, but in 1942 I had to return to work.” He names the same place the Soviet record does, Arkhangelsk Oblast. And 1942 is the year the amnesty and the forming of the Anders Army pulled him south, onto the route out.
Soviet interrogation protocols from 1931 name a “Черняхович Антон” in connection with an alleged underground group around Katiukha. These are coercive political-investigation records: they show only that someone was accused and questioned, not that the alleged events happened. Whether that “Anton” is my grandfather is genuinely uncertain. There were several men of the name in the region. I include it because it is part of the family story, but it should be read with care, not as established fact.
What Antoni says himself is more certain. Writing to Bolesław in 1973, he recalled that “with God’s help I managed to avoid their hands in 1931”, the same year his brothers Józef and Stanisław were arrested in Katiukha-Duby. “Admittedly I several times nearly paid with my life.” The 1931 case file and the family’s own records point to the same year and the same village. Antoni was the one who got away. He escaped arrest again in 1939, when the Soviets occupied the region, but the deportation of February 1940 caught up with him.
IIIThe long way out: Persia, India, Africa
Władysław Anders was a Polish general who spent the first two years of the war in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin needed Polish soldiers, and Anders was let out to raise an army from the people his gaolers had deported. Recruitment began at Buzuluk in August 1941.
The men who came were starving, and they did not come alone. Anders took in the civilians too, the women and children and the elderly who had walked to the assembly points with them, and then concluded that none of them would survive another Soviet winter. He negotiated an evacuation. In two waves in 1942, 115,742 people crossed the Caspian from Krasnovodsk to Persia. 37,272 of them were civilians, and 13,948 were children.
A Polish government evacuation list for August 1942 records “Czerniachowicz Antoni — 1898” among the families brought out that month. That he was evacuated is documented. That he came out this way is inference, though a safe one: the Anders evacuation was the only route by which a Polish civilian left the Soviet Union in 1942. No record I have seen places him in the army, so the decision to take civilians is the reason he got out at all.
Decades later, writing to his cousin Bolesław in Poland, Antoni set down what those years had cost him. His first wife died in 1942, in Uzbekistan, as he made the journey from the north of the Soviet Union to the south. A little daughter from that first marriage had already died back in Poland, before the war. He married again in 1944. So Helena, who appears throughout the later records, was his second wife: long held in family memory, and now confirmed in his own words.
Where that second marriage took place, the documents do not say; family memory places it in India. The India route is real enough. Polish refugee camps ran there from 1942 to 1948, at Balachadi and at Valivade near Kolhapur, the latter holding some five thousand Poles. I have searched the available camp lists for Antoni’s name without success. But those lists are known to be incomplete, so India remains an open question rather than a disproven one. The trail rejoins the records for certain in a refugee settlement in East Africa.
IVKoja, Uganda
By 1950 Antoni was head of a Polish refugee household at the Koja resettlement camp in Uganda, one of the “little Polands” of schools and chapels that displaced Poles rebuilt in exile. He is confirmed there by Antoni and Helena’s own UK refugee certificates and Arolsen Archives records, plus a 28 April 1950 nominal roll accessible as a derivative transcription.
That roll lists Antoni (about 51), his wife Helena (about 37), and twins Maria and Józef, both about 2. The twins were born at Koja on 12 October 1946; both the place and the date are confirmed by the Arolsen Archives. Józef was my father. The roll also names Antoni’s mother-in-law, Anna, aged about 69, living with the household.
Koja brought beginnings, but also loss.
One daughter’s death is documented: Bogumiła Czerniachowicz, born 28 May 1945 and died 24 August 1945, buried in the Koja cemetery. She is recorded in two independent sources, the cemetery list and the Baza Polonika memorial database. Antoni’s letter backs this up. He describes a daughter of his second marriage who died after three months, exactly Bogumiła’s span, which places her within that 1944 marriage. Family memory holds that a second daughter also died in childhood, of malaria or pneumonia, but I have not been able to confirm a second child, or any cause of death, in an accessible record. The graves lie a long way from Volhynia, a measure of how far the family had been driven. These memorials sit on the Polish cemeteries in Africa project.
VHelena
Antoni’s second wife Helena was born on 23 January 1912 in Nowy Wiśnicz, south-east of Kraków, confirmed by her UK refugee certificate and the Arolsen records. It is a significant detail: Helena was not Volhynian at all, but from Małopolska, in southern Poland near the mountains.
Her maiden name was Smęda (the ę is a nasal “e”; in non-Polish records it may appear as Smeda, Smenda or Smęta). My mother and the wider family remembered this first, and the refugee records have since confirmed it. Helena’s Arolsen DP registration card names her father as Maciej Smęda and her mother’s maiden name as Maria Enz. That corrects an earlier guess on this site: that her maiden name was Tchurzewska, inferred only because her mother Anna was recorded under that name in the Koja household. There are known Smęda relatives in Toronto and Newfoundland, in Piła, and in southern Poland below Kraków, the same region Helena came from.
VIEngland
Antoni and Helena were among those offered permanent resettlement in the United Kingdom. Their UK Alien / Refugee Registration certificates record the move precisely.
The camps were closing anyway. Britain had administered them and now wanted them shut, and Koja itself finally closed in 1952. But the family’s own reason for wanting out was simpler and closer to home: Józef, still a toddler, caught malaria again and again at Koja. Getting a small boy away from a malarial lakeside camp was reason enough. Whether that shaped when they actually went, or whether they simply left with everyone else, the records do not say.
UK registration certificates
Processed together, the same day, the same place.
| Antoni | Helena | |
|---|---|---|
| Certificate No. | A.330121 | A.330122 |
| Issued | Hessle, E. Yorks, 4 Sep 1950 | Hessle, E. Yorks, 4 Sep 1950 |
| Born | 26 Mar 1898, Wołyń | 23 Jan 1912, Nowy Wiśnicz, Kraków |
| Arrived UK | 2 Sep 1950 | 2 Sep 1950 |
| Last residence | Koja, Uganda | Koja, Uganda |
| First UK address | Priory Road Hostel, Cottingham, E. Yorks | (same) |
| Papers issued | Kampala, Uganda, 5 Aug 1950 | Kampala, 3 Aug 1950 |
The certificates do not name a ship, but they narrow it to one. The SS Dundalk Bay left Mombasa on 12 August 1950 and reached Hull on 1–2 September, carrying 1,014 Polish displaced persons, 173 of them children. Twenty-one days at sea, and two deaths on the passage. Its passengers were processed at the Priory Road hostel in Cottingham, the address on both certificates, and 97 of them were sent to Keevil: the camp where Antoni’s children turn up next. Port, date, hostel and camp all point one way. The only other sailing that summer left Beirut and docked in July, fitting neither. No passenger list for the Dundalk Bay survives, so this cannot be proved and will stay an inference. But it is a tight one.
Keevil was a requisitioned wartime airfield about four miles east of Trowbridge, run as a self-contained Polish community: a church, a school, a doctor, classes in English and dressmaking, and a camp priest, Fr Józef Czarniecki. The children “Józio and Marysia Czerniachowicz” appear among the schoolchildren there. Another family’s memoir of the camp remembers the Czerniachowiczes as neighbours at Hut 393, Site 9. The camps were not prisons. People left for work. But they gave housing, rations and a community to people who had spent a decade being moved about by other people’s decisions. As Keevil wound down, the families moved into Trowbridge proper, where the Polish community remains.
Antoni’s letter records one last grief from these years: a son born in 1951, by then in England, who died just after birth. He appears in no record I have found beyond Antoni’s own account of his family: a child who lived and was lost between the census lines.
After the war, going home was not an option. With Poland under Soviet control, Poles who had fought for the Allies or escaped Soviet captivity often found themselves stranded. Antoni’s family made their life in England instead. That is how the surname came to continue here, in a few lines, including my own.
One more detail survives only in family memory: that even in England, Soviet representatives sought Antoni out and urged him to return. He did not. For a man the Soviet state had already deported once, it is not hard to see why.
VIIThe letters
The official papers run out in 1950. What comes next is rarer: eighteen surviving letters in Antoni’s own hand to his cousin Bolesław in Poland, thirty-seven pages in all, written between November 1971 and March 1979. The Polish side of the family kept them, and Helena Czerniachowicz, a living cousin who got in touch, scanned and shared them. They cover eight years of his later life in his own voice.
The letters come from Trowbridge, addressed to “Kochany Bracie” (Dearest Brother) and signed “zawsze życzliwy Antek”, always well-wishing, Antek. Brat is the Polish word for a brother, but it is also how cousins address each other. Bolesław is Antoni’s stryjeczny brat, his paternal cousin: their fathers Franciszek and Jan were brothers. Most of the letters are Christmas and Easter greetings, with news of health and family threaded through. But they are also the only place where Antoni talks about what happened to him, without a clerk or an interpreter in between.
In one letter, written in August 1973, Antoni looks back over what he survived. He tells Bolesław about 1931, when he “managed to avoid their hands”, the year his brothers were taken. About 1939, when the Soviets occupied eastern Poland and he “escaped arrest by a miracle”. About Arkhangelsk, and the return to forced labour in 1942. And then, plainly: “I want nothing to do with them; I avoid them like fire.”
The letters also explain why Antoni never went back. In January 1972 he tells Bolesław he would love to accept an invitation to visit, but he cannot. If provoked by “lies” he would speak out, be branded a reakcjonista, a reactionary, and “it would end badly.” The fear is not abstract. He writes of being on a “leash” when he imagines Bolesław’s trips back to the USSR. Yet he kept writing, kept sending photographs, kept asking after everyone’s health. The warmth and the refusal sit side by side on the same page.
Most of what the letters carry is daily life. Both Antoni and Helena are on old-age pensions in Trowbridge. Arthritis sets in: his from 1972, hers from 1974, and by 1978 she has spent “four weeks in hospital” with no real improvement. In December 1977 he writes that it has “completely paralysed my hands”. The letters go on anyway, in the same careful script. Marysia has married David, and they live nearby with their son Simon, whom Antoni walks to school: “a kilometre and a half, but it takes a bit of time.” Józek is still a bachelor at home, working as an electronics inspector in a factory, until he marries Barbara in 1973. The family tour Poland as tourists in 1975, in their own car. Marysia and David holiday in Canada.
The last surviving letter does something no archive has managed: it shows one of Antoni’s sisters alive. In March 1979 he asks Bolesław, who is planning a trip to the Soviet Union: “perhaps you will be able to visit my sister Jadzia; she lives at the station of Rychalsk near Stara Huta, and the rest of the family — I do not know where they live.” Jadwiga’s birth in 1907 is in the parish index, but no later document had traced her. Here she is, alive at seventy-two, still in the old country, near the family’s home village.
The station name defeated me for a long time. The 1979 hand is poor, and no modern map I searched had a Rychalsk on it. The answer turned out to be sitting in another letter. Two years earlier, in March 1977, Antoni writes it plainly and legibly — call in on Jadzia w Rychalsku — and Rychalsk was a railway station, which is why he says she lived “at the station”. He meant it literally. The 1916 survey below shows no line there at all, so the railway arrived in the decade after it was drawn. And in 1963 the village of Stara Huta was renamed Rychalske, after that same station.
So Antoni was not naming two places. He was giving the name the village had when he left it, and the name it had by the time he was writing — the habit of a man whose home had been renamed behind his back. It is one place: the family’s home ground in the Barashi district, the same country the 1931 case file names. Today it is Рихальське, in the Zviahel district of Zhytomyr oblast.
There is one line the rest of the correspondence circles around. In December 1973, explaining again why he cannot come: “If Poland were free and independent, we would all return to the country. We long for our homeland like a small child for its mother.” Then, straight after: “But unfortunately I must finish, because regret wrings my heart.”
The letters end in March 1979. In one of the last, Antoni writes that Bolesław is planning to visit England in 1980: “if we live to see it, we’ll be glad.” Antoni died in 1983. Whether his cousin made the trip, the papers do not say.
That did not stop with him. My father Józef was born in the camp at Koja. He preferred to call himself stateless, and went on saying it until he died in 2023. I get called Polish by the English, and English by the Poles.
Three generations in, the question of where home is has not settled.
Antoni’s life, 1898–1983Deportation, forced labour, evacuation, exile. And at last a home, thousands of miles from where he was born.