(1) Prologue

My father in law’s tale is fascinating and inspiring, but probably not unique.

Czes was born in Kalisz, Western Poland in the year that the Great War ended, the son of a former soldier in the Russian Tsar's army. Before 1939 he had the simple and straightforward life in a family of what we might call "gentleman farmers", but on the 1st of September 1939 when the Werhmacht roared Eastwards his life changed forever.

Many of his generation, born in that hopelessly strategic country once referred to as "God's Playground" went through similar tragic and sometimes humorous events that will be described here. Some didn't survive, some survived in body alone and some, like Czes, live to to a ripe old age to tell their tale with humour and humility.

This work bears witness to two extremes of the human condition; to those that have the spirit to survive against the odds and to the lost ones who allowed their government and system to evolve almost overnight in to the Monster that was National Socialism.

Czes was an ordinary man thrust in to extraordinary circumstances by this system. He would probably have become a doctor or a gentleman farmer if he had not chanced to be living in an area that was considered "Lebensraum" (living space) by the German Aryan peoples across the river from his home.

The story follows his exile to Germany, forced labour; escape to the Allies where he worked with the displaced homeless diaspora in Koln–Ossendorf camp, to final settlement in England.

His journey takes us from pre-war Poland to Germany, to rural post war Yorkshire, and finally to the Essex and Cambridgeshire countryside.

I ask the reader to take what Czes has told me as a genuine memoir. His mind even at 90 years of age is still razor sharp. Nevertheless I'm sure some of it will have been mis-remembered after more than 60 years, and some of it may even be downright embellished, but I hope reading it gives you as much pleasure as it has me hearing it first hand, and it gives you a first hand insight in to what it was like between 1939 and 1945 for those who were non-combatants, but still prisoners of war.

In this year of his 90^th Birthday, I'd like to thank Czes, for all the hours we sat and he talked and I listened.

John Worsnop: July 2008