This little table was already old when I got it when I was a little girl. My mother used to take in the occasional lodger or paying guest, and I used to love them all as they were a very welcome break from my rather solitary not to say lonely existence. I was very shy […]Read Post ›
This is my grandfather as I never knew him. He was born in 1878 and died during the Second World War, a captive in Siberia. His story is a very interesting one, but one which I shall leave for another day. Today I was thinking about him as I was wrapping parcels to send […]Read Post ›
I don’t really know how I managed to forget to write about this place when I was writing about our four day trip to Kraków. We had gone to Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter of Kraków, not to do anything as exciting as sightseeing but to change my battery in my phone, which had been […]Read Post ›
This is one of my most treasured possessions. Made of olive wood I believe, it has been part of my consciousness all my life. When I was small my mother would not let me touch it – I was quite clumsy as a child – so it gained a mystery that never quite went away. […]Read Post ›
Every day is the beginning of a new year, or a new century or new millennium. The date is just an arbitrary convention. Yet we insist on trying to change our lives on January 1st each year. Why? I have already, as I started to type this, broken resolution no 1: do not procrastinate; do […]Read Post ›
My mother,Grażyna Łomnicka, never spoke about the war or Siberia at all until one day her doctor persuaded her to tell him why she wouldn’t let her throat be examined. She had had problems for years with swallowing and absolutely refused to have anything done about it. One Sunday, however, she came to lunch as […]Read Post ›
A chance photograph prompted this. I am sharing this post because I think it is so interesting: This past week Basia Korzeniowska posted a photo to the Kresy-Siberia Facebook Group, one which made me do a double-take. Why? Because I have the same photo in my collection. Basia mentioned her mo… Source: A serendipitous encounter…
My grandmother, Janina Wysoka, nee Kirschinger, in 1917 just before she got married. She was born in 1896 and died in 1978 just before I got married. Born in Bratislava; brought up in Vienna. Spent twenty years in Lwow, then Siberia and the long journey to freedom through Iran, Palestine and finally England in 1947. […]Read Post ›
This book was published very soon after the war. My father Jan Wysoki gave it to me to read when I was an adult because he said it gave the truest account in English of his own experiences. I am going to buy another copy now because I tore bits out of this one when […]Read Post ›
My father died on the 23rd November This is what I said at his funeral. It gives a tiny flavour of what he was like…. 96 years old and he was still my Tatus. My first memories of him are when he was in his late thirties and I was about three or four. […]Read Post ›
