With people in my past, Tomasz especially, I feel as I know him, that he’s actually quite a special person and to suddenly find out that he’s got this wonderful past, where he’s been such a hero was like opening a new world to me. The story of my ancestor I suppose starts with my grandmother who always said, ‘We’ve got Polish Jews in our family.’ I knew nothing about that until I started doing family history and started looking at the census records and found that her grandmother was Susan Czaykowski and I thought to myself, ‘Oh that must be the Polish ancestor?’ And then went to try and look further back and found that her father was Tomasz. When I put Tomasz Czaykowski in it came up with the Polish War Memorial in Portsmouth and I was puzzled and I thought, ‘What’s going on here?’ And I started looking into it and found out that he was in the infantry in the Polish Army, 1830 Uprising against the Russians, but because he didn’t want to serve under the Russians he and about 2,000 other people left and went into Germany. They were there for some time and every time the Russians tried to get them to go back into the Army they shot at them, killed them and quite a few died. Finally 212 people were put on a boat and exiled, The Marianne sailed to North America, but it was caught in a storm and it ended up in Portsmouth.
The people in Portsmouth rallied round and raised money and got them homes and schools and jobs. My Tomasz married a Portsmouth girl and they came to London and he became a sugar baker. I’ve come to appreciate now that not everybody that’s come to this country is here because they just want to grab what they can get and in actual fact they’re here for very legitimate reasons, because things have been so bad where they’ve lived.
If it hadn’t been for the Polish and the Russian Uprising, I would never have been born and I find that really exciting, but for all those events, I would not have been here.
