Publications
The director and staff of the UKEN Centre for Documentation of Deportations, Expulsions and Resettlements are working on and editing academic publications on the fate of Polish citizens subjected to forced migration, which are presented in various forms – from personal memoirs, as in the book “Seen and written. Diary of a deaf Siberian woman” to post-conference publications, such as “From the frost of Siberia under the sun of Africa”. On the 70th anniversary of the arrival of Polish Siberians in Eastern and Southern Africa’. Often, these are also source publications, such as the series entitled “The Siberian. “Generations are leaving. Source accounts of Polish Siberians…’, and a publication summarising 10 years of CDZWiP’s work to document and renovate Polish necropolises in Africa, entitled ‘Polish Siberians in Africa. “Deceased Poles on their way to their homeland. Polish cemeteries in Eastern and Southern Africa (1942-1952)”. The publisher of the CDZWiP publications is Publishing House of the University of the Commission of National Education, where they are on sale.
For more information see: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego (wydawnictwoup.pl)
“Pastoral activities among the population evacuated from the USSR (1942-1952)”, Kraków 2023
Mariusz Solarz
The book presents the history of Polish settlements in Africa, India, Mexico and New Zealand through the prism of pastoral activity. The author has enriched the knowledge on the period of World War II, the first years after its end and the history of the refugees. He has dealt not only with the predominant Catholic pastoral activity in the settlements, but has also devoted much space to other faiths and interfaith relations. The work makes use of materials from the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare, the Polish missions in Tehran and Mexico, and accounts held in the Archives of the Centre for Documentation of Deportations, Expulsions and Resettlements.
“From the memory of a child. Aktion Saybusch – source accounts of Poles displaced from the Żywiec region during World War II”, Kraków 2022
Hubert Chudzio, Alicja Śmigielska
The Saybusch Aktion is the name of a special operation to forcibly displace Polish citizens from the Zywiec region during World War II. As part of the project of the Centre for Documentation of Deportations, Expulsions and Resettlements, the village of Gilowice was studied. In 1940, 179 families, or a total of 843 people, were displaced from Gilowice. All this was done in order to settle German settlers in their place, in their homes and farms. Some of the survivors of the German deportations are still alive today in the place of their birth. It was to them that the Centre’s staff went with filming and documentation equipment. In Gilowice alone, they managed to record the accounts of twelve witnesses to history.
“Deceased Poles on the Road to the Homeland. The Polish Cemeteries in Eastern and Southern Africa (1942-1952)”, Kraków 2020
Hubert Chudzio, Mariusz Solarz
The publication describes 14 Polish necropolises (including separate cemeteries and quarters at British resting places) located in what is now Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. It is the result of 10 years of fieldwork and several years of searches in numerous archives in Poland and around the world. During this work, starting with the first necropolis in 2009 in Tengeru (Tanzania) and ending with the last renovated necropolis in 2019 in Rusape (Zimbabwe), staff and students of the University of the National Education Commission in Cracow conducted photographic and film inventories, took measurements of the cemeteries/cemeteries and the objects in them, created plans of the necropolises, inventories of the buried, and reached out for information about the people buried there. The tasks performed directly during the scientific missions never stopped. Record cards of deceased Poles were created, and archival searches were carried out to supplement information about them (place of deportation, place of exile, work done in the pre-war period, cause of death, etc.). The best results came from the Archives of the Polish Institute and General Sikorski Museum in London, the Archives of the Polish Catholic Mission in London, the Archives of New Records in Warsaw and our CDZWiP Archives.
“I saw and wrote… Diary of a deaf Siberian”, Kraków 2016
Krystyna Chyży-Ostrowska; compilation of source text and introduction by Hubert Chudzio
I saw and wrote… is a special record of memories of a deaf Siberian woman. Its author lost her hearing at the age of 10, following an illness. Krystyna Chyza-Ostrowska, as a teenage girl, was deported with her family deep into the Soviet Union in 1940. After amnesty was declared, she was sent via Iran to one of the refugee settlements in Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia). After the end of the war, the author settled permanently in Great Britain. The publication is a valuable source for researchers of the fate of the forced migration of Poles, especially the so-called Siberian-Africans.
“Modern teaching of native traditions – Siberians and youth”, Kraków 2017
Hubert Chudzio, Zygmunt Kolenda, Joanna Kulpińska
Modern teaching of native traditions – Siberians and youth – was the main topic of the 4th Congress of Polish Scientific Societies Abroad, which took place at the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Krakow. The Congress was divided into two panels, the first was a continuation of the Third Congress in the sphere of research on the education of Polish youth abroad. The second – a new topic – was the fate of Poles exiled to Siberia in the 19th and 20th centuries and research on this problem, conducted by Polish researchers and scientific centres of Siberia and the Caucasus. The activities of the Centre for Documentation of Deportations, Expulsions and Resettlements were also discussed. Panel discussions covered such topics as: Siberia in the consciousness of Poles in the 19th and 20th centuries; the Diaspora of Polish Siberians in the world.
“Generations Gone. Source Accounts of Polish Siberians in Great Britain. Coventry”, Kraków 2016
Hubert Chudzio, Anna Hejczyk, Adrian Szopa
The fifth volume contains 28 accounts of witnesses to history from Coventry. The vast majority of them are Borderlanders who were forcibly deported deep into the USSR by the NKVD in 1940-1941. The memoirs of Polish Siberians included in this publication show their journey from life in the Second Polish Republic, through the aftermath of the events of World War II, to their residence in Great Britain. The book is accompanied by a CD with recordings of excerpts from interviews with the volume’s protagonists.
“Generations Gone. Source accounts of Polish Siberians in Great Britain. Birmingham,” Kraków 2016
Hubert Chudzio, Alicja Śmigielska, Mariusz Solarz
The fourth volume contains 27 testimonies of Polish Siberians – mainly from the Borderlands of Poland deported to the East after the outbreak of World War II – whose fates are part of the complicated history of the 20th century. The book is accompanied by a CD with a recording of excerpts from interviews with the heroes of the biographies collected in the volume.
“Generations Gone. Source Accounts of Polish Siberians in Great Britain. Leeds”, Kraków 2015
Hubert Chudzio, Agnieszka Chłosta-Sikorska, Marek Buś
Memoirs of the Leeds Siberians is the third volume in a series entitled “Generations are leaving. Source accounts of Polish Siberians from Great Britain.” The Leeds-based publication features 21 memoir accounts by Polish Siberians.
“Generations Gone. Source accounts of Polish Siberians in Great Britain. Bradford”, Kraków 2015
Hubert Chudzio, Anna Hejczyk, Adrian Szopa
The second volume of source accounts of Polish Siberians living in Great Britain is now in the hands of the Reader. These are the recollections of 23 Poles from Bradford. The British Isles after World War II received the largest number of refugees from the Vistula River. They were mostly people who, after the Siberian trauma, came out of Soviet Russia with the Polish army commanded by General Władysław Anders. Men (but also many women) found their way into the army, ended up on the front and followed the trail of the Second Corps. Children, women, men unfit for military service were deployed in Polish settlements in India, Africa, Mexico, the Middle East or faraway New Zealand. It was mainly people who went through such turns of fate who were interviewed by the staff and volunteers of the Centre for Documentation of Deportations, Expulsions and Resettlements at the University of the National Education Commission.
“Generations are leaving : source accounts of Polish Siberians in Great Britain. Nottingham”, Kraków 2014
Hubert Chudzio, Anna Hejczyk
The first volume of the book “Generations are leaving…” is the result of a mission to Nottingham to record the biographies of 33 people who ended up in the British Isles after more or less traumatic events related to the consequences of World War II. The work carried out in Britain by the UP mission should be considered “rescue” research and, in a sense, even pioneering. More than 70 years have passed since the mass deportations of Poles deep into Soviet Russia in 1940-1941. However, many witnesses of those tragic moments are still alive today. This is because not only adults, but in large part also children, were subjected to deportation. Whole families from the eastern areas of the Second Polish Republic were deported to Siberia, Kazakhstan or the Arkhangelsk region. […] Witnesses to history who can still tell today about these traumatic events and the consequences of the deportations are almost exclusively people who were children during the war years. […] this is the last moment to record and archive the accounts of these people. Accounts that, in their bulk, reveal the tragic fate of hundreds of thousands of Poles caught up in the Soviet system of human degradation. There are still several thousand Siberians living in Poland today. Their accounts are being recorded by the staff of the Centre for the Documentation of Deportations, Expulsions and Resettlements at the University of the Commission of National Education in Cracow. […] In addition to the recordings in Poland, similar work has been carried out in Great Britain, France, Australia, Canada and Uganda. The former country in particular is home to a large group of survivors of the deportation to Siberia. In the British Isles, these people form whole clusters in many large cities. As a result, a project was conceived to visit several British cities and record accounts of witnesses to history. [However, it is necessary to hurry, because “generations are passing away.”
[excerpted from a review by UP Prof. Hubert Chudzio, PhD].
“Siberians under Kilimanjaro. Tengeru. Polish settlement in East Africa in the memories of its inhabitants”, Rzeszów-Kraków 2013
Anna Hejczyk
“Siberians under Kilimanjaro. Tengeru. Polish settlement in East Africa in the memories of its inhabitants” is a book about the extraordinary fate of Poles who from the hell of Siberia and Kazakhstan ended up in an African paradise. Deported to the Soviet Union in 1940-1941, they reached Africa via Iran and also India after the Sikorski-Mayski agreement in July 1941. The hospitable African land became a haven for them, where they found shelter during the turmoil of war. Tengeru was the largest Polish settlement in Africa, located in what was then Tanganyika (now Tanzania). By the late 1940s and early 1950s it was inhabited by more than 4,000 people. The book details the daily life of the settlement’s residents, social issues, issues such as labor, schooling, scouting, religious life, health care, mortality, as well as Polish-British relations and the relationship between Poles and the indigenous population. The book, enriched with accounts of participants in the events described and previously unpublished photographs, brings to light a little-known page of Polish history – the fate of Siberian-Africans.
,,From the Frost of Siberia to the Sun of Africa”, Krakow 2012
Hubert Chudzio
On 25 March 2010, the 70th anniversary of the first mass deportations, a scholarly session entitled “From the Frost of Siberia to the Sun of Africa” was held in Kraków. It was attended by academics and people interested in the fate of Polish Siberians in Africa. The joint efforts of the staff of the University of the Commission for National Education affiliated to the Centre for the Documentation of Deportations, Expulsions and Resettlements and the Siberians’ Association succeeded in collecting material for a book. The publication includes not only the topics discussed at the conference, but also articles talking about the aftermath of UP missions in Tanzania and Uganda. Among other things, the work contains articles showing the fate of Polish Siberians, from the time of the deportation itself, through their stay in Siberia, to their departure from the places of exile and life in African settlements. In addition, the present publication contains articles describing Polish settlements in Siberia after World War II, an account of an expedition to Polish cemeteries in Tanzania and Uganda, and a record of the aftermath of this research mission.
