BOOK OF THE DAY: Finding PolandBy Matthew Kelly, Jonathan Cape, 342pp, £20
WE’RE OBSESSED with family history – glued to TV shows that trace celebrities’ ancestors and using genealogical websites to trace our own.
The craze has also spread to the publishing world: family lit has taken over from misery lit. The trick is to use family archives to tell a wider tale. It doesn’t always work. Within the genre are families only a relative could be interested in, events blown out of proportion and inadequate research.
Matthew Kelly falls into none of these pitfalls. In Finding Poland, about his grandmother's deportation from Poland, he has a cracking story which he tells with compassion, verve, and the professional historian's restraint and accuracy.
Kelly’s starting point is an old woman in the woods – his great- grandmother, who lived for 30 years on a remote Dartmoor farm, making borscht and speaking only Polish. How did she get there? Circuitously – via Belarus, Kazakhstan, Iran and India – as the pendulum of history swung for and against her.
Poland emerged from the first World War an independent state with hegemony over disputed eastern territories (now part of Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine).
Adventurous Poles, including Kelly’s great-grandparents, Rafal and Hanna Ryzewscy, settled in these territories. But in 1939 Germany and the USSR partitioned Poland and they found themselves in Soviet territory and classified as undesirables.
In 1940 the Red Army arrived to deport the women east and execute the men, along with other military and political leaders.
This was the infamous Katyn massacre. The Polish president and other leaders were flying to Russia to commemorate the atrocity when their aircraft crashed tragically on Saturday.
The Ryzewscys were relatively lucky: Rafal went on the run, and Hanna and their two daughters were sent to Kazakhstan rather than Siberia. For two years they lived in a lice-ridden hut, surviving on scraps, while Hanna worked on the collective farm.
In 1941 the USSR joined the Allies, and Polish refugees were no longer undesirables. Rafal joined the Polish battalion in Russia and tracked down his family. He and the other men returned to war while the women and children were sent to Iran and, after a year, to Karachi (then part of India) and Kolhapur, living always in refugee camps.
Rafal fought on the winning side but the pendulum swung against him; Poland was handed to the USSR. The family couldn’t return. In 1947, seven years after their deportation, they were reunited, landing on that remote Dartmoor farm. England became home for the kids, but not the parents, who had used up their energy battling successfully for their family and unsuccessfully for their country.
Hanna lived to see the pendulum swing back in favour of Polish independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But Russian-Polish relations remained sour, partly because Poland deemed Russia insufficiently apologetic over Katyn. This year’s planned joint commemoration of the atrocity was the result of years of diplomacy and negotiation. The aircraft crash has not only cost Poland its leaders, but adds a further horrible twist to the tragic history between the two nations.
In Finding Poland– the title refers to the author's quest, for his relatives lost Poland – Kelly tells a story personal to him, specific to Poland and universal to refugees.
Bridget Hourican is a freelance historian and journalist