Description
Object description
Copy (42pp ts, with photographs) of the memoirs of Wacek Maj, recording his family background in the Rowno district of Poland, his childhood and schooling in the 1920s and early 1930s in a farming environment on one of the Radziwill family estates, the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 and his conscription into the Polish Army on local defence duties, preparations for flight from the German and Soviet occupiers and from attacks by Ukrainian nationalists, the family's arrest by the Soviet NKVD in February 1940 before these plans could be effected, transportation to a `resettlement camp' in the Gorky `oblast' (European USSR) where they were put to work clearing forest for a new railway track, conditions in the camp (including a typhus epidemic), their release in July 1941 following the German invasion of the USSR, staying in the camp until November when they embarked on the long journey to Bukhara, Uzbekistan, working in a `kolkhoz' collective farm until February 1942 when he and his brothers were enroled into the Polish Army in Persia, the author proceeding to Palestine (and later Iraq) for basic training and service in the Carpathian Lancers, 2nd Polish Armoured Brigade, in action in Italy during 1944 and until the end of the war in May 1945, leaving Italy in 1946 and proceeding to the UK where he was sent to a holding camp for demobilised Polish forces at Weelsby, Lincolnshire, emigrating to Canada in June 1947 where he settled.
Content description
Copy (42pp ts, with photographs) of the memoirs of Wacek Maj, recording his family background in the Rowno district of Poland, his childhood and schooling in the 1920s and early 1930s in a farming environment on one of the Radziwill family estates, the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 and his conscription into the Polish Army on local defence duties, preparations for flight from the German and Soviet occupiers and from attacks by Ukrainian nationalists, the family's arrest by the Soviet NKVD in February 1940 before these plans could be effected, transportation to a `resettlement camp' in the Gorky `oblast' (European USSR) where they were put to work clearing forest for a new railway track, conditions in the camp (including a typhus epidemic), their release in July 1941 following the German invasion of the USSR, staying in the camp until November when they embarked on the long journey to Bukhara, Uzbekistan, working in a `kolkhoz' collective farm until February 1942 when he and his brothers were enroled into the Polish Army in Persia, the author proceeding to Palestine (and later Iraq) for basic training and service in the Carpathian Lancers, 2nd Polish Armoured Brigade, in action in Italy during 1944 and until the end of the war in May 1945, leaving Italy in 1946 and proceeding to the UK where he was sent to a holding camp for demobilised Polish forces at Weelsby, Lincolnshire, emigrating to Canada in June 1947 where he settled.
History note
Cataloguer SWW