My grandfather, his role in the War and the respect he got for his involvement was everything to him, he got the Polish equivalent of the Victoria Cross, he received many accolades. Their house was a shrine to his war-time achievements although many of the memories from that time would have been very raw. My granddad had kept all his uniforms and when he was older, when he was very old, in the last five years of his life, he started to wear them. He was in the RAF before the War. My grandparents, they married in the late ‘30s. During the War he was captured by the Russians and he was put in a camp in Siberia and he was an officer at this point. We used to hear stories of him eating soap and rats and we used to hear these when we were small. When the Russians changed sides he was released to fight alongside the Russians against the Germans.
By this time my grandparents were in different parts of the world and my grandfather was posted to an RAF base in Edinburgh as part of the Polish Air Force and they found each other, somehow they must have found each other, then met and had children. They never said anything about going back to Poland; I know that Warsaw was razed to the ground. They established a new life in the UK very well, opening successful businesses, but I don’t think it was easy for my grandparents to integrate when they came to the UK and I’m not sure they actually ever really did integrate, because there was a big Polish community in Nottingham. When my dad and my aunt spoke to them in English, they would speak back in Polish. There was always this battle between my grandparents, I think, saying, ‘Be Polish,’ and my dad and my aunt, who’d grown up in England, wanting to be English.
My grandparents were very proud of their Polish connection and I think that having moved to England in the ‘40s and then they died in the ‘90s, so for fifty years, more than half their lives, they spent in Britain, but their heart was never in Britain, their heart was always in Poland, but they brought up British children, they lived British lives, they had British grandchildren, but they would have died as Poles and they’re buried in a Polish part of the cemetery.
