Twelve adult volunteers from Lower Silesia arrived in Kazakhstan to carry out maintenance and documentation work in the north of the country—in Jasna Polana, Czkałowo, Oziornoje and Głubokoje.
Poles and their descendants rest there—people deported in 1936 from the territories of what are now Ukraine’s Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskyi and Vinnytsia regions. B. Smoleńska:
We flew to Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, on 17 July and then headed north to Akmola Region, where the villages founded by Polish deportees are located. The first Poles were deported to Kazakhstan in 1936 from areas of Ukraine which, after the Polish–Bolshevik War, did not become part of the reborn Second Polish Republic. The Soviet totalitarian system tried with the greatest determination to destroy the Polish population living east of the Zbruch River, Poland’s pre-war south-eastern border. This is evidenced by the fact that thousands of Poles were deported to the steppes of Kazakhstan even before the official beginning of the NKVD’s anti-Polish operation in 1937.
The first stop on our work route was the cemetery in Czkałowo. There we spoke for the first time with people of Polish origin—living witnesses to history. That same night, the team of volunteers reached our accommodation in Jasna Polana.
We began the following day by inspecting the cemetery located near the village’s border buildings. We found the enclosed necropolis in fairly good condition, considering the conditions in the borderlands. There were no looted or dug-up graves or rubbish to be found. The graves were mainly overgrown with grasses, small bushes and a few trees, whose removal was very easy. We were surprised by the large proportion of tombstone inscriptions in Polish, that is, written in the Latin alphabet, as well as by the number of German burials, which may have accounted for as much as one-third of the old part of the cemetery. A sad fact we encountered both in Jasna Polana and in other Polish cemeteries in Kazakhstan was the large number of children’s graves. Because of the harsh climate and shortages of food and medicine, children had the highest mortality rate among the deportees. In Jasna Polana we also visited the Catholic church, where we witnessed the baptism of a child whose father was descended from Poles deported to Kazakhstan.
The volunteer from Bolesławiec continues:
The next stop on our Kazakh route was to be the cemetery in Czkałowo, which still needed maintenance work, but communication difficulties caused by a faulty minibus made it impossible for us to reach Czkałowo.
Time was running out, so we headed to the village of Oziernoje, where the parish priest and the nuns welcomed us warmly and cordially. We stayed on the grounds of the church, the National Shrine of the Queen of Peace. The village was established in 1936, after Poles living in the Ukrainian SSR were deported there. “The people spent their first summer in tents. Before winter arrived, they managed to build dugouts. From the very first days they placed great trust in God, expressed through prayer, especially the Rosary,” said Leontyna Korczyńska.
In March 1941, the snow began to melt after a hungry, freezing winter. According to witnesses, water flowing in three beautiful streams filled a great lake and stopped just before the garden fences, without flooding a single farmstead! Then fish appeared, no one knew from where—huge numbers of large fish, a true gift from Heaven for the starving people!
In May 1990, the residents of Oziernoje began building the church. On 25 October 1994, Bishop Jan Paweł Lenga proclaimed Our Lady Queen of Peace the principal patroness of Kazakhstan and Central Asia.
In Oziernoje we continued the work at the local cemetery that had begun three years earlier. We worked with local Poles who, because of their age, are unable to maintain the entire cemetery themselves. In addition to the maintenance and documentation work, we hung a red-and-white sash on the cemetery gate. At the request of local Poles, we also decorated some of the graves with red-and-white ribbons.
And she adds:
About 12 kilometres east of Oziernoje, on a hill called Sopka Wołyńska, there is a thanksgiving cross dedicated to the Kazakh people for the help they gave the deportees during the first years of their stay in Kazakhstan. The Kazakhs supported the Polish deportees as best they could and shared food with them, even though they themselves suffered hunger under Soviet rule. The cross bears an inscription in four languages—Kazakh, German, Polish and Russian: “Glory to God, Peace to People, the Kingdom of Heaven to the Martyrs, Gratitude to the People of Kazakhstan, Prosperity to Kazakhstan.”
A plaque of gratitude to the Kazakh people is also located on the railway station building in Tajynszi, the last station to which the deportees arrived by train. “In memory of the Poles deported in 1936, grateful to Kazakhstan and the Kazakh people for their compassion, kindness and help provided in difficult times.” From this station, our compatriots were led on foot or taken by oxen to so-called tochkas, settlement points where they were supposed to begin a “new life”. In reality, however, Stalinist Russia expected them to die of hunger, disease and exhaustion. The descendants’ memories of life in dugouts and mud huts crammed with families deeply shook us.
Barbara Smoleńska:
The next cemetery where we worked was in the nearly depopulated village of Głubokoje, located near Oziernoje. Father Mariusz from Oziernoje and Sister Beata, who runs a home in Głubokoje for people struggling with addictions and difficult life circumstances, asked us to help at the cemetery. A ten-person group made up of Sister Beata’s residents and people from Oziernoje helped us clean it up. The residents came to the cemetery with their own equipment—a mower, an excavator and the famous “gruzowik”, which transported the cut vegetation to a steppe dump. With their help, we brought almost the entire cemetery into proper order in a single day.
Although many deportees and their descendants now live in Poland, many of our compatriots still live in Kazakhstan. Meetings with volunteers arriving from their former homeland, about 4,000 km away, were filled with emotion and profound feeling. Each of us felt that carrying out these activities in Kazakhstan was very much needed. The Poles who remained there greatly need contact with their homeland. They thanked us for being there. They invited us to return. And they blessed us. It should be clearly emphasised that traces of Polish identity in Kazakhstan are not only the cemeteries, but also the Poles living there, who have preserved their own culture, the memory of their parents and grandparents, and a sense of their own unity and distinctness from their surroundings.
In our free time we visited our compatriots, giving them small gifts. Each volunteer carried several kilograms of gifts in their luggage, including sweets, gadgets and items in Poland’s national colours, as well as other regional products.
We also visited the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Astana. During a meeting with the Ambassador’s plenipotentiary, the Consul of the Republic of Poland and his wife, we discussed matters related to repatriation and activities as part of the “Save the Grave of Your Great-Grandfather from Oblivion” campaign, and presented ourselves and the cities we came from. Speaking about Bolesławiec and its ceramic traditions, I gave the Ambassador’s plenipotentiary a ceramic cup. Similar cups were received by Father Mariusz, the parish priest in Oziernoje, and the Polish Korczyński family from Oziernoje.
We also visited two cities: Kazakhstan’s capital, Nur-Sultan (Astana), and Kokszetau. They are beautiful, modern cities. The capital, with its tall buildings, reminded some of us of Dubai, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, while Kokszetau, with its beautiful large lake in the city centre and a hill bearing the city’s name, brought Hollywood to mind.
And she adds:
Outside the cities, we admired the flat-as-a-table steppes covered with sparse grasses and stretching for dozens of kilometres. In Oziernoje, there was a wonderful lake that looked like the sea at sunset. Spending the night in the steppe, on the slope of Sopka Wołyńska, was a time for reflection and helped us empathise with the situation of Poles deported to the steppes of Kazakhstan. The large number of inscriptions in Polish at the cemetery in Jasna Polana, and the people who for the most part acknowledged their Polish roots and often also spoke Polish, meant that we were moved and filled with emotion at every turn. It was these kind, warm and helpful people—both Poles and Kazakhs—who inscribed memories in our hearts to which we will always return with longing.
The fate of Polish deportees to Kazakhstan and their descendants is still far too little known in Polish society. The deportees to Kazakhstan belong to Siberian exile associations, such as the Association of Siberians, and are therefore often associated with deportations to Siberia. In the interests of historical truth, accounts by eyewitnesses to historical events, including those deported to Kazakhstan, should be collected and published.
Several years ago, the Bolesławiec branch of the Association of Siberians and the Bolesławiec branch of the Society of Lovers of Lviv and the South-Eastern Borderlands, with the support of teachers and students from Bolesławiec schools, compiled biographies of Bolesławiec residents who returned from Kazakhstan. The biographies of Kazimiera Bagińska from Stara Oleszna, Wacław Berdzik, Jadwiga Brandt, Jan Cołokidzi, Wanda Drabczyk, Halina Gawrysiak, Aleksander Grybuś, Helena Hewak, Irena Maria Kłos-Leszczyńska, Helena Kowal, Eugenia Kuraszyk, Alwina Mikulska, Mieczysław Petters, Roman Potępa and Jadwiga Ross from Bolesławiec can be found in the publication “We Had No Childhood—Memoirs of Siberian Exiles from Bolesławiec” and in “The Jubilee of Bolesławiec Borderland Residents 1989–2019”. The publications were issued with the assistance of the Museum of Ceramics in Bolesławiec.
The head of the Bolesławiec branch of the Society of Lovers of Lviv and the South-Eastern Borderlands, B. Smoleńska: – The volunteers of the “Save the Grave of Your Great-Grandfather from Oblivion” campaign were a genuine and living connection with the homeland for Poles in the distant steppes. Therefore, we hope that the National Institute of Polish Cultural Heritage Abroad “Polonika” will also help us carry out a project in Kazakhstan next year.
The volunteers: – We invite you to watch footage collected during the “Save the Grave of Your Great-Grandfather from Oblivion 2022” campaign in Kazakhstan:
Project co-financed by:
