Jaroslaw Stanislaw Dubik. A Memoir

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Jaroslaw Stanislaw Dubik A Memoir.Â

Transcribed and Illustrated by Isabelle Dubik


ENGLAND . 2016



For my family


Contents

Foreword

Beginnings

WWII

Deportation

Amnesty

Scotland

Sheffield

End

Memory Stills, 1942 - 1946

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Memory Stills, 1947 - 1969

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Memory Stills, POCKET JOURNAL

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8 14

20 25

30 38 42

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T

his book is a memoir of the life of my loving grandfather.

Jaroslaw Stanislaw Dubik endured an unimaginable journey from war torn Poland to England. My grandfather told the best stories, though he didn’t speak about them often, usually only brief snippets around the dining table at family get-togethers when the day had died down to sitting and drinking coffee. For years our family had said to him that he needed to write it all down but it never materialised. I was always a curious child and my grandfather was an avid collector and self-proclaimed hoarder, my grandparent’s house was like a treasure trove of stories waiting to be told. My grandfather kept his memories in the form of vials of dirt, an old worn bible, unstitched army uniform patches and buttons, a handful of old photographs, rosary beads, a stack of old letters and many other miscellaneous items, all placed in several boxes hidden away in the backs of wardrobes, safe from the prying hands of curious children. When I was older I asked him frequentl about writing his memoir; I told him he should write his story down so that he could share it with others, he laughed and said that ‘It is all written down, you just wouldn’t be able to read it’. He then showed me a small old pock-

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et notebook. Within its pages were lines and lines of indecipherable numbers and letters. Each sentence was written entirely in code. He explained that he had kept it since he was a boy and wrote down each date of significance that he wished to remember, not that he needed to, as he had the best memory of anyone I have ever known. In early 2011 I knew I would be moving away from England in the coming years to go to Australia for some time, and so, in fear of leaving it all too late, I asked if instead of getting a birthday or christmas present that year, if he would promise to sit down and tell me about his life as I typed the words out for him before I left. He agreed and later that year we started writing the memoir together at the dining table in my grandparents house over tea and cake. The time I spent at that dining table are some of my most treasured memories. His deep and powerful voice was so captivating, you could sit and listen to him for hours and hours. Before writing the memoir I had never seen my grandfather cry before. There were moments when his voice would crack telling the stories he hadn’t spoken aloud before and it would send shivers down my spine that would last for days. When he told me about not knowing anything about his biological mother you could see the pain in his eyes, he was truly desperate to know more about her though

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he understood his stepmother’s reasoning for not telling him, it was still something that played on his mind. The way he spoke about listening to the radio with the biggest smile was so lovely to witness. He had a love for music I had never realised before. I was always drawn to the gramophones he collected as a child and only learnt about his emotional connection to the gramophone when writing this book. One of my favourite memories he recalled was one of one of the times he took my grandmother to Scarborough. She slipped and rolled down the steep hill on the way to the beach. I had heard him laugh before but never like that; he absolute bellowed with laughter, you could see that he was replaying the memory as if he could see a film projection of it in the room. I adored hearing him laugh. During the time we wrote the memoir most of the stories were of his struggles, so hearing the stories he had of happier memories was heartwarming. We finished the memoir within a year, just before I moved to Australia. The last time I saw him in the flesh he was sitting at the dining table, it was the second and last time I saw him cry. He sadly passed away a few weeks before I planned to return to England. I will forever be thankful for the experience

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I got to have with him writing the memoir and even more so to have had him as my grandfather and friend. It took me several years to pick up the memoir again after he passed away. In late 2016 I was going through some of my grandfathers belongings as research to make this book, I came across the original little notebook that was written in polish code. I had looked at it a few years prior but not in any detail, as I knew I had no hope in being able to understand it. I studied the book carefully and flicked to the very back pages where I found several pages of quotes in my grandfathers english handwriting, one of which my family and I coincidentally chose to be engraved on his headstone 3 years previous.

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1928 Beginnings

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was born in a little cottage in a forest. My father Mikolaj Dubik, was the forestry warden where we lived. The forest was owned by Polish royalty, though that did not reflect on my fathers earnings. It was my fathers responsibility to tend to the wood; measuring each tree, ensuring they were ready for logging to then be sold. When the trees were axed down he would allow men from the local area to dig up the stumps and roots to be used as firewood as they were not permitted to simply take what they wanted from the forest. Where the trees once stood, seeds were planted to grow a crop called Proso, it was similar to rice but sweeter. Father looked after the wildlife, caring for the wild pigs and deer in forest, he adored all animals. Father owned a revolver that he could use against people trespassing in the forest. When I was about four years old we left the cottage, though the exact date is unknown. We went to live with my stepmothers parents in a little town around fifteen miles away and before this point I had never attended school. We stayed there for several years and my father got a job as a night watch in a large

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sawmill. There were thousands upon thousands of different types of woods for export, especially Fir. The sawmill was ¼ mile from where we lived so I used to go in the evening to take him food and would stand at the managers window and listen to the radio, which I enjoyed very much. I was around seven years old at this point. After a while father went back to working in the woodland but a different forest than before. He left me with my grandparents so I could finish my term at school. Once I’d finished my school term I rejoined my father. We lived in another little cottage in Horbkow Pow, Soak Woj, Lwowskie, Poland. It had sty’s and barns with hay and straw for the animals, so we kept many. We had two cows, a pig, chickens, ducks and a dog called Lord. There was a little pond for the ducks, the barns were kept for hay and straw but the cows lived in the barn in the winter months due to the bitter cold. The cottage was on the side of a steep hill and in the side of the hill there was a tunnel which went into a small room with a funnel for light with a small wooden door which we used as a food store for our winter vegetables. The garden was massive with a water pump in the middle. It was my job to collect and take fresh water everyday, it was around a hun-

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dred metre trip. I made this trip everyday and in the summer at three o’clock in the morning would take the two cows to the forest to graze, come rain or shine, but not in the winter due to them staying in the barn. During the trip I would light a fire and would take two potatoes with me to cook and eat for breakfast whilst the cows grazed. When I began taking the animals out at 3:00am each morning through the maze of forests I got lost about three times and cried my eyes out, the cows ended up leading me home. In the summer months I went to school bare foot because we couldn’t afford shoes. Walking bare foot in Poland was dangerous because infection was terrible due to the lack of medicine to treat it. In winter we had boots but no socks - a bit of cloth was used as socks. Short trousers were worn throughout the year, summer and winter. A farm 100 yards away was moved into by three sons and mother and father, they had a crystal set radio that was a novelty, I enjoyed listening to it very much. My father had a violin and played very well but decided to swap the violin for a gramophone. Still living in the forest cottage, my step mother had two daughters, Stefania and Genowefa. My step mother was the stereotypical kind like

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you find in fairytales, but she could also be a very nice and caring woman. She would beat by hand and if I ever tried to protect my half sisters from her wrath, I would often cop a beating.

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1939 WWII

T

he winter of 1940 was extremely hard. On the 21st of September at around 3:00am I was out with the cows in the forest and about one hundred Russian soldiers came and demanded to know if there were any soldiers or police nearby. I was terrified but fortunately they left me be. That was my first encounter with soldiers, but they began digging out trenches for the winter in the forest and became a permanent fixture in the scenery. Normally people would be classed as trespassers but the soldiers overruled, they were allowed to do as they pleased with no dispute. The surrounding area changed drastically with the anticipation of the impending war. The churches were locked and used for garaging tractors and farming implements. The farming land became a cooperative and so rather than each farm hand owning their own piece of land, everybody’s properties were interlinked. People now had to rely on the state for food rather than being self sufficient as all produce was now owned by the state. In 1930s there was a great famine in Poland due to the farmers giving up on the state because it didn’t provide them with enough

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survive on. Millions ended up dead. They were working for nothing. When I was around nine years old I overheard an argument between my father and my stepmother where she had described me as not of her true child. Prior to the argument I had not known she was my stepmother. I recall having found a traditional funeral ribbon given as custom when someone died with a boxed rose. I then presumed that this was from my birth mother’s passing. For years I did not dare to ask about my biological mother. It wasn’t until I was much older when I had a family of my own that I began to ask my stepmother questions. She was adamant that she wouldn’t utter a single word. I had begged and begged her but she refused, explaining that my real mother’s dying wish was for her to marry my father and raise me as her own. Fathers job was extremely convenient as everything was delivered to us. The forest belonged to the Polish countess and the surrounding fields were also owned by the Royals. People used to grow wheat, beat-vodka and sugarcane on the fields so the produce we wanted was given and delivered free of charge. At the end of September, Father, Genia and myself tried to move back across to my grandparents cottage which was situated on the German territory side.

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Step side When take

mother and Stef remained on the Russian in the forest cottage. we left we took two horse and carts to our belongings.

When we reached our Grandparents cottage, father and I left Genia as we planned to return to the cottage to retrieve my stepmother and Stef. We got back to them but on the return to the Russian territory we discovered that the Russians had locked down the boarder. We were stuck on one side and unable to get to the other where Genia was stuck with our grandparents on her own until we found a way to get to her.

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1940 Deportation

T

he winter of 1940 was extremely hard. On the 10th February in the then U.S.S.R our family was arrested and deported because my father was considered to have a position in society that was of importance due to his job and it’s link to the Polish royals. Any families thought to have any importance were arrested, resettled and dispersed all over Russia. They separated communities so that families that knew one another could no longer be in contact. It was the Russian policy to disperse different ethnic groups such as Georgians and Ukrainians. They sent many people into labour camps, mining for coal, copper and gold all across Russia. We were sent to the labour camp at Werchojanskoje Oziero Ustjanskij Rej Archangelskaja OBL. The journey took around two weeks and we travelled by cattle wagons on railway lines. The wagon doors were locked from the outside, we were completely trapped and unable to escape, the only opening was a hole in the floor to be able to go to the toilet. From the train station we went by horse and sledge to a camp forty miles away from the

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station. The journey was terrible. Every family in the labour camp had a single room. The toilets were outside and we had to collect water from a nearby river. The food was cooked in a communal cookhouse and bread in a separate bakery. Families had to queue to get food. There wasn’t any eggs, meat or sugar, just plain cabbage and potato soup. It was my responsibility to queue for food because at the camp I was too old to go to school and too young to work, my only duty was to queue. There were roughly one thousand people residing at the concentration camp and starvation became a deadly problem. I used to wait for the Russian officers to finish eating at their table and when they walked away myself and a group of others would practically jump on the table just in hopes of finding any leftovers. Even a small crumb of bread tasted amazing because we were always so painfully hungry. I lost my sight during the night once and my teeth had become loose due to starvation and malnutrition. Luckily my loss of eyesight wasn’t permanent and it came back eventually. During the summer I foraged in the woodland picking berries which helped take the edge off the hunger.

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The Russians treated us as though we had no rights. We were condemned to live and die in the camp. Officers would say “You will be free when hair grows on the palms of my hands”. The only news from the outside world came from newspapers as we weren’t allowed radios. The news was bias and corrupt as the paper was run by the communists, controlled by the NKVD secret police and so no truth was written as they decided what was printed.

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1941 Amnesty

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n the labour camp my step mother gave birth to my youngest half sister Teresa, she was born in May 1941.

Following an amnesty we gained our freedom on the 17th July 1941. My family was sent to a forested area in northern Russia called Archangel. We were kept in Archangel until September 1941 when Germany invaded Russia. On 24th December 1941 we departed the labour camp and headed for the south; Kizil Tepe Kagan Rej, Bukcharskaja OBL Uzbekistan U.S.S.R. It took us three months to get there, we spent much of the time travelling by railroad cattle cars and we couldn’t get permits to travel from one station to another due to the war effort and thousands of injured Russian soldiers filled the trains. The rail road consisted of one single rail line so we had no option but to wait until we were granted permission. We got as far as Tashkent, the capital and largest city of Uzbekistan by train jumping but in Tashkent we lost Teresa, she had fallen ill because of the journey. We were on the rail road and constantly travelling, like many other families we had to leave Teresa’s body by the rail side wrapped in blankets. There was nothing we could do,

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she was 9 months old. The railway station staff had to collect the bodies left by loved ones. I was thirteen years old and it was one of the harshest winters. Whilst waiting for our permits to move to another station, everyone on the train had to go to the toilet outside the wagon. There was nothing to wash yourself with so it was always unhygienic. A lot of people fell ill from illnesses like typhoid and when we finally got to leave Tashkent, around two hundred miles down my step mother fell ill with Typhus fever and was taken to hospital. She stayed in the Hospital alone and we travelled on. My father, Stef and myself traveled to Bukhara, which was part of the Russian empire at the time. We were there for only a few days. We got a small room near the station but didn’t stay long because there was no food and people were dying of starvation. I used to have to steal a thing called cow cake from the market which were made from sunflower-seeds so we didn’t starve. Another time in the market a man was carrying a sack of dried prunes, someone slashed the sack and the prunes fell to the floor, I tried to grab as many as I could from the floor with several others doing the same. I got kicked in the behind because of this but I got to keep the prunes I’d picked up.

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Youths would wait around for the opportunity to steal food. Hunger is what drove you and stealing then wasn’t like what it is now, because we were desperate. My father decided to send Stef and myself away so we would have a better chance of survival and getting out of Russia. To travel we had to train jump whilst the train was moving. I managed to get on the train but Stef wasn’t fast enough, I tried to pull her up but couldn’t and I wasn’t able to jump off because the train was moving too quickly. All I knew was that I was heading towards a little town where I knew some of the Polish army were based. On the journey other train jumpers and myself were robbed by Russian gangs so we had to travel outside of the train on the buffers to avoid them. The train jumpers and I decided to stick together as a group, we were all alone and there was safety in numbers. When we arrived at the little town I got a single room that ten of us shared, I payed 30 roubles for it. The next day we found the Polish army and they fed us. Two days after, we left the Polish Army Camp and they put us on a train to travel to the Russian port called Krasnoyarsk to head to a Polish Forces Camp in Pahlavi (Anzali), Persia by ferry. The ferry was chocker-block full and we had no means of sanitation. The smell was

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horrific so we decided to stay on the top of the ferry to avoid the smell, there was around sixty of us in total. On top of the ferry there were crates being transported full of salted herrings. The group of boys I was travelling with managed to steal one crate and we ate everything including the fish heads. We were so hungry but after a few hours we were all delirious with dehydration. I managed to fall asleep behind one of the ferry’s funnel chimneys, but when we ported in Pahlavi they disembarked everybody but me. I awoke with a shock and had no option but to jump overboard onto land before the ferry took off again. The thirst was worse than the hunger. I went for two days without eating or drinking before pinching the herrings. The salted herrings didn’t make the thirst any better but we were so hungry we didn’t stop to think that salt makes the thirst so much worse. The next day I swapped a little pocket knife that I had carried with me for some chapatis. Anyone who was lucky enough to have brought any personal possessions with them swapped them for food and drink. Travellers were separated into two halves, an infected area for people with disease and a clean area. Once we got to the clean area we were put through a disinfection (DDT) where they took our old clothes and

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burned them, shaved our body hair and gave us clean clothes. After the disinfection we were then put into wagons and transported to Tehran, Persia. In Tehran we were put in an air field complex, there we slept on the floor with just one blanket and they fed us very well. We had to be disinfected again due to louse, the louse were everywhere, all over our clothes and hair. We had to be disinfected three times in total as we were unable to get rid of them. We were then put on wagons and travelled to Iraq, one night we slept under the sun on the sand. We then arrived to a place called Habbaniya, we stopped there for two weeks to get transport from Palestine. We would bathe in the lake. I struck by sun stroke whilst bathing and was taken to hospital where they covered my body in ice to keep me cool. I didn’t like the sun again after that day. Travelling through the desert was a horrible experience as we didn’t have any cold water to drink, all we could see was Fata Morgana (mirage). I saw towns with trees and plenty water, to only find out it was my mind playing tricks on me. When we arrived in Palestine they sorted us into schools, some mechanical and some ordinary. I went to the mechanical school near Haifa and I stayed at that school for two and a half years.

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I belonged to a school choir, there were only about fifteen of us but we were very good so we got to take part in concerts. I also served as an alter server in a field church. A service could be held anywhere, be it in the desert, all that was needed was a priest, a table and your crucifix, a building was not needed. Because I served as an alter boy I didn’t have to march after mass like everyone else, which was extremely good because the marches were often in the scorching heat. The army school would take a dozen of us on holidays. I visited all of the Holy places in Palestine. The Dead Sea, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Lake Tiberias, Mount Carmel. Every place I went to I collected a vial of the earth and still have them to this day. During our time in Tiberia we stayed in a monastery where I stayed with the priests. They gave me a bible that I still have now. There I befriended an Italian boy. His father was a church mural painter. He was a very lonely boy, I was frightened of him at first because Italians and Germans were enemies to the Poles. We used to meet on the miranda and he taught me two Italian songs, ‘Torna a Surriento’ being on of them. We met four times. It is hard to to communicate with someone when neither of us could speak each others language. We had to talk in the little english we both knew.

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1945 Scotland

I

n 1945 the Polish army tried to make me enlist in the army but I failed the commission (medical). I was happy about failing the medical because I wanted to join the Navy and the only Naval school was in England. I travelled by army transporter liners and arrived in England on the 23rd May 1945. We ported in Greenock near Glasgow, there the Salvation Army greeted and welcomed us with tea and biscuits. From Greenock we travelled to Staffordshire, a little place called Cannock, the naval school was based there. A large Polish naval school in the middle of England‌ it seemed ridiculous to have a naval school in the middle of England but there was no room elsewhere. In Cannock we never got a penny because the Polish government was no longer recognised by English government, and so I decided to join the Polish army in Kinross, Scotland. In Scotland I started working at a communication office and began to learn morse code and then went onto mechanical and I was ultimately stationed in Thurso. They put me and my group on a course in Dunblane for experience before demobilisation so we could learn skills for when we left. I

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learnt about engineering as I didn’t want to go into the mines or work on agriculture. I lived in Scotland until 1947 when I moved to Sheffield, England.

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1947 Sheffield

T

he only jobs we could get were in coal mines, steel works or working on the land so I chose the steel works.

I came to Sheffield on 23rd September 1947 and had the shock of my life. The city was an industrial town. It was smoky due to all of the chimneys and could not have been more different from living in a forest with fresh air. My first job was at Brown Bayley Steel works as a labourer. After 6 months working there was a strike regarding wages. After the strike everyone got more pay except me because I was Polish despite being part of the union. I had to pay two pounds a week for my lodgings, this was out of two pounds, ten shillings and four pence wages for forty-eight hours work. If I didn’t get any over time I was in trouble because my usual pay was not enough to live off after paying my lodgings, and so, I left Brown Bayleys to work in a Rolling Mill. It was summer and the work was extremely hard and having to work on top of the heat of summer wasn’t pleasant. My job was to put plates back into the fur-

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ness, it would usually take three men to hold it due to how heavy they were. Once one of the men lifting the plate with me let me down by dropping his side and I ruptured my stomach. I went to the doctor and asked for a note to get lighter work that I’d be able to manage due to my injury. I went back to work with my doctors note and spoke to my manager who told me to “Fuck off back to Poland”. I left that firm and went to work at Alsing road in Wincobank. They were manufacturing steel castings and parts, it was extremely hard work but it was decent pay but I would work up to forty-eight hours a week. From there I went to work at a place that manufactured railway buffers, then got a little job on Lady’s Bridge with a private firm manufacturing tools. I was employed as a Turner. From Lady’s Bridge I went to Laycock Engineering in Millhouses as a driller. After a while a fellow worker and myself decided to find work with English Steel Corporation Ltd which later became known as British Steel after the nationalisation of the steel industry. As I entered the workshop I had the shock of my life, the size of the machinery was breathtaking. I was put on a drilling machine. After a week I was put on a small horizontal borer. After a month I was put on the biggest machine in England called the Engelhard which the British stole as a war reparation. The Engelhard was made in 1940, and Her-

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mann Goering the leading member of the Nazi Party stood on its platform to open the Leipzig fair in Germany. We started machining very heavy castings and the biggest one was one-hundred-and-eightyeight tons to make a new seven-thousand ton press. It took us three years to machine five castings. After that we did very large castings for generating power stations and a lot of presses for export which were much smaller presses in comparison to the others. After sixteen years at English steel the machine I worked on, the biggest machine in the world in those days was stripped to be reconditioned with new bearings and sprayed. In that time I went to tool room as a universal tool grinder. I spent fifteen years there, it was an extremely interesting job because of all the variety of work I got to do and I got to use my brain when making the tools. It was also well payed. There was no hassle from anyone as I became my own gaffer. In 1983 I got made redundant and for two years I was on the dole. It was very good payment. ninety percent of my wages every week for eighteen months and then eighty percent for six months. After that I found a job as a night watchmen in Eckington Motors Showroom. After two years in 1986 I got a job with my friend working for Auto Motive Diesel Electric Service Ltd. I worked there for four and a half years and was then made redundant again. That

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was my last job as I then went on state pension. I would have worked for longer but the firm had gone bust, I had no other choice but to go on state pension. Living in Sheffield I befriended a man called Emmel, he was very short and so nicknamed Shorty. We used to meet every Saturday and go dancing. He used to like a drink, a lot, whereas I didn’t. He would buy a bottle of wine and drink it all before he went dancing. Emmel bought a house so I used to go there a lot and he had many lodgers. I didn’t fancy staying there though, you had to do everything yourself despite the money you had to pay where as things were done for me in other lodgings. There was a lot of prejudice against foreigners. My ex Therma and I went out for several years but couldn’t get married because of lack of money and because her parents did not agree with me. Her parents did not treat her well and she wasn’t very happy. Shorty got married to a lady called Dorothy who worked in a pub. Later on they got divorced on account of his drinking and she ended up remarrying to an English man who owned a pub. One of the pubs they had was on Barnsley Road.

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In 1947 when I had been living in Sheffield for some time my immediate family found me after many many years of searching. We had no idea of knowing where we all ended up or even if we were alive. The Red Cross helped me track down the details of my father but I found out he had died. My father, Mikolaj Dubik was born on 6th July 1901 and died in Boston Hospital, Kagan Rej Bukcharskaja OBL, Uzbekistan, U.S.S.R on 8th April 1942. My step mother and sister Stefania had left Uzbekistan, U.S.S.R in April 1942 and travelled to East Africa to join a Polish Civilian Camp for women and old and young people at Arusha Tanganyika and remained there until 1947 when they returned to Poland. In 1956 I met the woman who would later become my wife, Brenda Woods. We were both at a dance in Cutlers Hall, Sheffield. I asked her to dance and after it closed I dropped her back off at home on my motorbike. Brenda went with her family to Blackpool and I decided to follow them on my motorbike, but only went for three days because of work. We were only allowed one full week off for the whole year. I even had to work Saturday nights. When I could I used to take Brenda on trips to Scarborough on the motorbike. Once Brenda slipped on the way to the beach on a hill and she rolled down that hill like a

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boulder and I laughed like there was no tomorrow. Brenda would visit me at work in the evenings for half an hour on my breaks. When she couldn’t make it, usually due to the bad weather she would write me letters that I still have now. We were courting for nine or ten months when she fell pregnant and I asked her to marry me. We married at St. Marie’s Church on Norfolk Street which is now known as the Cathedral in Sheffield on 30th November 1957. During my time at British Steel in 1958 I had my first son, Michael. In 1959 I bought a new house, I was called every name under the sun, people thought I was crazy for buying a brand new house as they were extremely expensive. When I bought the house in 1959 it cost me one-thousand-six-hundred-and-fifty pounds which was a lot of money in those days, especially considering my wages for one week was ten pounds and the building society wouldn’t grant me a mortgage because my wages were not high enough. So the solicitor for the new housing buildings had a long job trying to find a new building society who would grant me a mortgage.

In 1961 I had my second son, Richard.

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Every year we had the one week holiday, we either went with Butlins Holiday Resort in Skegness, Butlins in Pwllheli Wales or Pontins Family Holiday Resort. We much preferred Pontins. We had lovely times there. These places were wonderful for children. During our times on holiday we made friends who we still write to now. In those days it was only the extremely rich who could go on extravagant holidays. I didn’t care for this as we always enjoyed our week holiday away. There was only one year we couldn’t afford to go on holiday. My Polish family and I kept in contact often, we exchanged letters and before I had a family of my own I was going to return but there was nothing for me there anymore in terms of bettering my life. My family, including extended family some of which I had never actually met prior to exchanging letters would ask after me, and they would often ask for me to send them goods over like leathers, shoes, ladies stockings and scarves which were considered luxury items that they weren’t able to get in Poland. I still have the letters we have exchanged over the years, many of which have photographs of my family, including my sisters who had grown up so much. I wanted to take my new family over to Poland, including my two sons but didn’t in fear at the time of them potentially being

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forced to enlist in the Army. We visited quite often later on in life when it became safe to.

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End

J

aroslaw Stanislaw Dubik continued to live in the house he had bought in Sheffield in 1959. Both of his sons, Michael and Richard married and he became grandfather to Louie, Isabelle, Corey and Conor who he and his wife Brenda helped raise. Jaroslaw, known as Stan to his friends and family died peacefully in the Northern General Hospital in Sheffield, England on 30th April 2013, aged 84 years old.

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Memory Stills 1942 - 1946

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Memory Stills 1947 - 1969

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Memory Stills POCKET JOURNAL

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