Helena Żmurkiewicz, nee Rodzeń, was born on 17th June 1926 near Stanisławów, now Ukraine. At the beginning of the Second World War she was deported deep into Russia with her entire family, to the territory of today’s Kazakhstan. In 1941, the family was evacuated from the USSR with the Anders Army. During the journey Helena’s parents died of malaria. Helena Żmurkiewicz’s sisters, Irena and Janina, joined the army and Helena was transported to Palestine via Iraq and Persia (now Iran). In Nazareth Helena graduated from the School of Junior Volunteers, the Pedagogical High School. She worked as an English teacher in the Youth Mechanical School in Bayt Nabala.
In 1947, Helena Żmurkiewicz left Palestine and went to the UK where she married Włodzimierz Żmurkiewicz, whom she had met back in Kazakhstan. In 1951, the couple left for Hamtramck, to join Włodzimierz Żmurkiewicz’s family. Here Helena Żmurkiewicz raised her children. She also ran a Polish language school for the Polonia.
Interviewed by Anna Muller on 27th July and 10th September 2015 in Hamtramck.
Let’s be honest, every story is a bit different. I know a lot of people who travelled across Russia, Africa, who were in India, New Zealand, Mexico. My journey was different. I was carried out of Kałusz. It’s a poviat town south from Stanisławów. The first transport was organized on 10th February. That transport was heading north. They took us on 13th April. And we were taken to Kazakhstan. They transported us in cattle wagons, I suppose there must have been more than forty people and there was no toilet. Luckily, the bugs [inaudible]. From time to time they opened the door and the men went to get some hot water or soup. After 18 days they told us to leave the train at the Trock station. Some trucks came and they took us to the dwelling place, as they called it. And they took us to Michałówka village. They took all the luggage and put in on the square and then they distributed it among people. We were separated and had to go to a family [inaudible] with four children. He was much older than she was and I think that maybe she was a communist but not an idealist, really. Anyway, I suppose she had to be. He was complaining all the time, he was always complaining about this soviet system. He remembered the Tsar’s Russia and he said that the Tsar’s Russia was better than the communist state. Anyway, we had to live with that family. The four of us. Plus a friend, Mrs Durczyńska with two children. When they threw out our things at the square my mother was reasonable enough, she was always thinking straight. She’d put all our documents into one small suitcase so that they wouldn’t get lost. When they threw everything out somebody stole it. We stayed without any papers, we didn’t have any documents with us.
While being in Pachlewi, we had this professor, Mrs Agnieszka Pochowska. She taught us Latin. And general Tokarzewski made a suggestion that he will take 80 girls but there was some age limit. And Pochowska told us to go there. I have no idea what was his intention, what did he want to do with those girls. Anyway, I joined that group of girl volunteers. Back then I was 16. Of course, they gave us uniforms but it was all too big for us because they had no uniforms for such small children. And we went to [inaudible] in Persia. There were 80 of us. And they wanted to make troops out of us, of course. We were supposed to undergo army training. We were in a tent, in small tents. There were six of us. A sandstorm came. We didn’t know what that was, we saw a black cloud approaching, this dark brown cloud. It blew off the tent, all our backpacks and our things were all over the desert. Sand was everywhere and nobody had told us what to do. Only when a second storm came the army command told us that if such a storm comes we have to preserve the tent by holding the pegs. The command was Polish but the British gave orders. There were three women, there were no civilians in the army. But there were also men. I can’t recall his name. He was more of a military man than he was supposed to. He was in charge of the first drill. The second drill, we really didn’t feel like doing that. He really put us through a mill. Forward, march left, turn right, run. And it was all in the desert. There are a lot of stones there, too. So we all hurt our feet. He was laid off eventually, they let him go. Besides, in Iraq you had to sit in a tent from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. We weren’t allowed to get out of the tent because of the heat. I remember that when this sandstorm came everything was a mess. Our lingerie was lying about the place and everything else as well. And we were living… there were men’s camps all around us. Then the troops came, brought us a bra and asked who it was. Wanted us to say who owned it. So it was all strange. The second time we knew what to do with that. It seems that Tokarzewski didn’t know what to do with us. He sent us back to school. And then we set off for Gedera, Palestine.
There I finished my fourth class of junior high school and from Pachlevi, from Rohovod, they transferred us to [0:00:08.4 nz]. Later they transported us to Nazareth and finally in Nazareth we were staying in a cloister facilities and the conditions were much better there. Back then we got some books that had been printed by the Ministry of Education, they printed them in the West so that we could have books. But we used to write a lot by hand, the entire lecture was written by hand. After completing 4th class of junior high school I decided to go to… they opened a business high school and a pedagogical high school. So I decided to attend the pedagogical high school. I thought that when I came back to Poland at least I will be a professional teacher. I took up an English course, a very intense course and then I started teaching at a public men’s school. I spent 5 years in Palestine, until 1947. And there were a lot of Polish schools back there. Such schools were also in Iran, in Africa, in Rhodesia, Tanganyika. In only one institution there were over 3 thousand of Polish children. And they also taught the children. Afterwards some children stayed in Iran, some in India. Later, some of them were transported to New Zealand. But most of those lands were English colonies. I have no idea what was the arrangement made between the British and the Polish governments. We used to wear English uniforms and the Polish army also had English uniforms. They were teaching us English. Every child at a public school had to have English lessons. I knew English because my boyfriend was English, he was a soldier because they had their units here. He was living in Nazareth and the English troops were in vicinity of Nazareth. I must admit that I’ve learnt a lot thanks to him. I wrote compositions for school. Then I took my composition to him and he corrected my mistakes and explained why it should be like that and not the other way around. We were always speaking English. And thanks to him I spoke English well. This is why I completed the pedagogical high school and took up an intensive English course taught by an Englishman. It was all thanks to my boyfriend. There were 20 people in our group at first but only 8 managed to complete it. It was such an intensive course. And I got a teacher’s position at a public mechanical school for boys [inaudible]. It’s near Tel-Aviv. There was an English camp, there were lots of workshops organized and English people worked there. And there was a public school. Those boys, they were 12 or younger. I suppose they might even have been younger than 12.
I taught Poles, I taught those boys English. Only at a public school level. After that I was transferred to a junior high school. Mechanical junior high school for boys. I had older boys under my care. To be honest, I was a bit afraid of that. At the time, it was 1945, they were the boys from the AK (Home Army). And I was just a bit afraid because they were older. I was just 19, 20 and the age difference wasn’t that big. I was wondering whether I can make it. And I did, somehow. Then the war ended, that was in 1945. We were so isolated from the rest of the world. We were living in our own group. Somebody knew something but they knew about [inaudible]. He couldn’t deal with that on the emotional level. Maybe because he was young. But later we felt the changes happening around us. They started to close down the schools. Everyone did their best to survive. The army was gone, we had to hand over the uniforms, they just left us coats and that was it. After a while we had to give back the coats as well and everyone was on their own. It’s never easy to become a civilian again. But back in Russia I had met my husband who was from Stanisławów. Later, he joined the army and we met in the UK. I left Palestine for the UK. There was no other way out. In Palestine there were riots. Jews started coming to their country. There was a moment when… it was known that the English were pro-Arabic and the Americans pro-Jewish. They brought entire transports with Jews, there were ships mooring in Haifa and they couldn’t allocate the people. They had no idea what to do about it. The English. Afterwards they started to emptying all the camps that were there. They started to establish those [inaudible] and it became too crowded. We had to leave, it was really dangerous back then. I saw a car blown up in the middle of the road, a lot of people left for Canada. A lot of troops left for Argentina because they didn’t want them in the UK and the reason was they were married to Italian women. A lot went to Brazil, to Argentina. So people were leaving, a lot were contracted in Canada. I got married and in 1948 we started working at a bed & breakfast. We were in the UK, we were married. My husband’s mother was American. She had left Palestine, she had gone to the US. Here, there was her extended family, her aunt. So she made it. She wanted her son to come to her, to [inaudible]. We came, we took advantage of the fact that the American government passed the law that 18 thousand former Polish troops… It was all covered, the trip, he got a few dollars as a pocket money. They decided to come here, aunt and uncle, I mean. They were simple people but many Poles that had come here earlier were very kind.
My first impression after my arrival to Hamtramck. We came in December and the snow was melting. And the filth. I came from the UK and the UK is really clean. I just frightened me at first. The city itself was clean but when you leave the railway station, anywhere you go, after the snow melts people start throwing papers on the street, cigarettes, etc. We came to my mother-in-law’s aunt who lived in [inaudible]. It was a nice, quiet city, at least to my knowledge. And I still go to [inaudible]. I don’t mind when it comes to [inaudible]. We used to live in [inaudible], afterwards we bought a house in [inaudible]. My husband attended night classes and I stayed at home because we had two children. And suddenly I can hear all the glasses shaking, all the trays in the oven shaking. What was happening? It was something in the street, an earthquake or something. I went out in the street but nobody cared. They all were just living their lives. Later, I found out that they have those pneumatic hammers across the street. And when I came there was this change of model or a strike so they weren’t working at the time. That evening they started work, it was in the evening when the hammers started pounding and it happened every day. We all got used to it in time. Later, when they stopped and I can’t recall why they stopped, it all got so quiet. Now I have no idea what are they doing there. They probably do the same but it’s more automated now.
At first, when I was a teacher, we used to earn one dollar per hour. After that the situation improved but the effort a teacher has to make… It’s really hard work. We taught children to read, write and speak. A child hears Polish at home so it has to speak Polish. Children were always forced to speak Polish because when a child went to school or to play with other children outside then English immediately became its first language. If a child doesn’t speak Polish at home, it won’t speak Polish at all. Reading, writing and speaking as the last element. And I remember this situation. I was in the Congress and there were a lot of consuls. A mother, father and a boy came. He was 8 maybe. They came to renew their passports. And I speak to the boy but he replies in English. “So, you don’t go to a Polish school?” And his mother says: “Why should he?” “But you’re going to Poland. He would have to speak Polish there.” And she says: “Why? Those are rare situations. It’s extra work for parents to take those children to school, wait 2 hours, take them to scouts meetings and that’s at a different time.” At the scouts they sang, learnt, danced and did many other things. And we taught at some level, to read and write. We used Falski because the book wrote by Falski is the best when it comes to methods, only the topics are not suitable for American children.
I don’t have Polish citizenship. The communist government took it away from us. He took it away from us because we joined the Anders Army. “Finally, you came to [inaudible], why you don’t accept Polish citizenship?” I reply: “I don’t want to. Because they took it from me. Now they want me to ask for it. No. You took it away from me so now you should give it back to me.” “It was another government back then. Now you can get your Polish citizenship for free.” I say: “You know, I don’t really need it now. Whenever I want to go somewhere I can go there as an American citizen.” And it’s an interesting story. I have American citizenship, what would happen… It doesn’t concern me, I’m too old. But young people accepted it, they have dual citizenship. I don’t acknowledge that. In my opinion when I get American citizenship I renounce the other one. When I want to go to Poland, then I’ll go to Poland. What the Poles did? They went to Poland when they had to pay to stay in Poland. It was 8 dollars a day. So they went there using their Polish passports so that they wouldn’t have to pay. When you used your Polish passport then you didn’t have to pay that. But they came back using their American passport. And sometimes there were problems on the border: “How come you want to get to the US if you don’t have the stamp that you left the country? Where are you coming from?” Back then it was easier because all people were waiting in long queues, all Europe and Poland waited and Americans were passing through immediately. I understand that but, on the other hand, I sometimes say that people have dual citizenship. It’s a fact. So if there was a war between Poland and America, where would their loyalty be then? I wonder… I have no idea. It’s good that it doesn’t concern me anymore.
I don’t have Polish citizenship. The communist government took it away from us. He took it away from us because we joined the Anders Army. “Finally, you came to [inaudible], why you don’t accept Polish citizenship?” I reply: “I don’t want to. Because they took it from me. Now they want me to ask for it. No. You took it away from me so now you should give it back to me.” “It was another government back then. Now you can get your Polish citizenship for free.” I say: “You know, I don’t really need it now. Whenever I want to go somewhere I can go there as an American citizen.” And it’s an interesting story. I have American citizenship, what would happen… It doesn’t concern me, I’m too old. But young people accepted it, they have dual citizenship. I don’t acknowledge that. In my opinion when I get American citizenship I renounce the other one. When I want to go to Poland, then I’ll go to Poland. What the Poles did? They went to Poland when they had to pay to stay in Poland. It was 8 dollars a day. So they went there using their Polish passports so that they wouldn’t have to pay. When you used your Polish passport then you didn’t have to pay that. But they came back using their American passport. And sometimes there were problems on the border: “How come you want to get to the US if you don’t have the stamp that you left the country? Where are you coming from?” Back then it was easier because all people were waiting in long queues, all Europe and Poland waited and Americans were passing through immediately. I understand that but, on the other hand, I sometimes say that people have dual citizenship. It’s a fact. So if there was a war between Poland and America, where would their loyalty be then? I wonder… I have no idea. It’s good that it doesn’t concern me anymore.
