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What followed was a journey of unimaginable horror, the train trundling along at 10mph for the 3,000 miles into deepest Siberia. A solitary bucket was provided, wholly inadequate for toilet purposes. Soon the bucket overflowed and the prisoners had to stand, shoulder to shoulder, in a swelling river of human ordure. After a while few bothered to try and elbow their way to the bucket and simply relieved themselves where they stood. The smell of urine, vomit and excrement, soon followed by the stench of death, was overpowering. It was cold, bitterly cold, minus 18 degrees Centigrade. Babies cried, whimpered and fell silent. From time to time, the guards would make their way through the trucks, seizing the dead children from their mothers’ arms and together with the corpses of the adults, carelessly tossing them overboard, to be left as shapeless mounds in the snow. The young and the fit generally survived, the old and the infirm did not, carried away by a combination of hunger, exhaustion, hypothermia and disease. One survivor later gave an account of their ordeal:

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“The thirst, the hunger. The anguish of body and mind. The fatigue. The epidemics. The sores. The vomiting. The diarrhoea, dysentery, bleeding. For women, menstruation and childbirth.”

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Finally, at length, the wooden doors of the trucks were flung open and Bronislawa and her fellow survivors staggered out into the cold air to be confronted by a flat, featureless, snow-bound land that stretched out endlessly into the distance. Bronislawa had no knowledge of which Gulag she had ended up in, but in one sense, that did not matter; the Gulags were all more or less the same. In these camps, the prisoners were set to work, logging, digging, mining – hard labour of any description. The economic principle of the Gulags was simple: maximum output for minimum expenditure. All workers had to fulfil their daily quota of labour. Failure to meet these targets meant a cut in their rations. More and more hungry, they steadily became weaker, further unable to fulfil their quota…and the outcome was inevitable. There was always a steady influx of workers to replace those that had perished.

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The bald facts of Stalin’s murderous policies – it has been calculated that of the 1.7 million Poles deported to Russia, over half were dead within the year – speak for themselves, a genocide on a colossal scale, one of the greatest human rights violations of our times.

How on earth Bronislawa survived is almost beyond belief. Then, at the stroke of Stalin’s pen, the survivors were released. Germany had invaded Russia, thus forcing Stalin into an unholy alliance with the Western Allies, and one of the stipulations laid down by Allied governments was that the Poles would be let go. Free at last. But free to go where? With no alternative, the surviving Polish refugees gathered up their meagre belongings and embarked on a 3,000 mile footslog out of Russia. During what became known as the Great Trek, many already weakened by disease, malnutrition and exhaustion, never made it, their journey marked by the graves of those who had fallen by the wayside. Bronislawa’s stepmother, brother, and baby sister died of typhoid somewhere in Uzbekistan. She and her father scrabbled around in the rocks and stones with their bare hands to build a makeshift grave.

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The huddled masses eventually ended up in Palestine where they set up temporary camps as best they could while Allied governments argued the toss about what to do with them. His Excellency, Jam Sahib Sir Digvijaysinhji Jadeja, Maharaja of Nawanagar, an Indian prince, heard of their plight and offered to help. Now where had I heard that name? Then the penny dropped. A photograph of him, dressed in his ceremonial robes, is in the Rackets Courts at Malvern College. A former pupil (he had been in No.7, the house where I had been a housemaster), he was a keen Rackets player and the photo, with its inscription, gives due recognition to the generous donation he had made to the refurbishment of the courts. His generosity was now to be extended to Polish refugees. He offered to take in 500 orphans for the duration of the War, to house, clothe and feed them in his summer palace at Balachadi on the shores of the Indian Ocean. He promised to build a school for them, to have lessons taught by Polish teachers and to provide a safe and caring environment where their broken bodies and minds could be put together again. He was as good as his word.

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Thus it was that Bronislawa and 499 other Polish orphans found themselves lined up outside the newly built camp in Balachadi to be addressed by the Maharaja:

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“You are no longer orphans. From now on you are Nawanagarians, and I am Bapu, father of all Nawanagarians, so I am your father as well.”

Bronislawa and all the other children worshipped him. “I owe the Good Maharaja my life,” Bronislawa said simply.  In Balachadi, she and the other children found peace and security, far from the horror and privation they had suffered, able to move towards adulthood in a kind and secure environment. As the older children grew up and left the camp, other orphans replaced them. In total ‘The Good Samaritan’, as the world’s press denoted the Maharaja, saved over 1,000 Polish orphans. His humanitarian generosity has been likened to the work of Oskar Schindler and Sir Nicholas Winter in their saving of German Jews and Czechoslovakian refugees in the Second World War, but his name has largely flown under the radar. The intervention of an Indian ruler at a critical moment in these children’s lives deserves more than a passing afterthought in a war that saw so much wickedness and depravity.

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The War ended and it was now time for the young girl to leave India and to make her way to England, where she eventually gained British citizenship, found work, flourished, married and had children (one of whom was my friend, Eva Hobbs, who told me her mother’s story which has provided the inspiration for this book).

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To her dying day, Bronislawa bore no grudges – though she didn’t much like Russians – and refused to bemoan the cruel hand that fate had dealt her. This story, how she survived against all the odds, is an enduring testament to the indomitability of the human spirit.
 

The book is available for purchase via Eva Hobbs’s website:

www.polesapartbook.com