Ivonna Nowicka
The fate of Polish Sybiraks has inspired a remarkable range of cultural works in Iran: documentary films, a stage play, a feature film, and even a television series viewed by millions. From where did the profound level of interest in this subject originate?
In tribute to the Iranian nation, on whose hospitable soil 121,000 Poles – among them nearly 20,000 children – found refuge. In 1942, Iran took in and saved those Polish wanderers who had been deported in the years 1939–1941 by the NKVD from the Eastern Borderlands of the Second Polish Republic, transported deep into the Soviet Union.
FRAGMENT OF AN INSCRIPTION ENGRAVED ON A PLAQUE ON WŁADYSŁAW ANDERS STREET IN WARSAW
Rows of Identical Headstones
In 1970, the father of one of my friends, a Nestorian Christian, passed away. His funeral was to take place at the Christian Cemetery in Doulab. Out of friendship, I attended the burial. Following the ceremony, I took a moment to have a look around. What caught my attention were long rows of identical gravestones. I began reading the epitaphs – and encountered unfamiliar names. We are more accustomed to Western European names, whereas these sounded somehow foreign to me. I then noticed the ages: in one grave lay a one-year-old child, in another an eighty-year-old. I was intrigued by this, eager to learn more about the story which lay behind it all. The priest who had conducted the funeral service explained that these were Poles who had found shelter in Iran during the war and had lived there until 1945. The subject became a fascination for me.
That man who had been so intrigued, was no ordinary observer. He was a creative and sensitive soul: the Iranian film director, composer, and writer Chosrou Sinai (1941–2020). The result of his fascination was the feature-length documentary The Lost Requiem (known in Poland also as The Mislaid Requiem), devoted to Polish war refugees in Iran. The film opens with a title card in English and Persian that reads: “This film was made between 1971 and 1983 in memory of those refugees – children, women, and men – who came to Iran during the Second World War, and whose names, engraved on countless gravestones, represent the only remaining trace of a historical tragedy.”
Sinai gained access to archival newsreels documenting the arrival of Poles in Iran and sought out individuals who had found salvation there. He portrayed scenes from the life of the Sybirak Anna Borkowska and recorded a Polish-language Mass held in a Catholic church in Tehran in 1975. At a very early stage, he even travelled with his camera to New Zealand, where in 1944 a group of 733 Polish war orphans and half-orphans, together with their caregivers, had departed from Isfahan. There, he took part in the ceremony marking the thirtieth anniversary of their arrival in Wellington and recorded the stories of several of them, including that of Ada Fighiera-Sikorska (1929–1996), the daughter of General Franciszek Sikorski, who was murdered in Kharkiv as part of the Katyn Massacre. Sinai also visited Isfahan with his camera – a city that, from the spring of 1942 until October 1945, served as a base for orphanages, known as “institutions,” for approximately two and a half thousand Polish war orphans and half-orphans. He did not, however, attempt to travel to Poland, which would theoretically have allowed him to incorporate footage from there and to find witnesses to the events on Polish soil as well. This can be explained by the unfavourable climate in Iran toward affiliations with the Eastern Bloc, as well as by the reluctance of the authorities of the People’s Republic of Poland to support a production that cast a negative light on the “great friend of the Polish nation” – the Soviet Union. Instead, Sinai accented the presence of Poland in another way, by incorporating Polish songs and works by Fryderyk Chopin into the soundtrack. As the film’s leitmotif, he chose the song Zabłąkany kujawiaczek (“The Lost Kujawiak”). It is quite possible that the very title of his film was derived from this piece. In Persian, it is rendered as Marsiye-ye gomshode, where gomshode means both “lost” and “strayed” – words that are, after all, synonymous. From the director’s perspective, the same word resonates both in the film and in the song.
Sinai succeeded in creating a film firmly grounded in historical fact – no small achievement, given that the complexities of Poland’s wartime experience do not easily coalesce into a coherent whole for those less familiar with them. The footage he captured has, moreover, become unique with the passage of time: today it constitutes material of genuine historical value. Yet the year in which the film was completed, 1983, proved to be an unfortunate one. Only four years earlier, Iran had been shaken by a bloody revolution, and for three years the country had been engaged in a defensive war with Iraq. As a result, the film never received an official premiere. It was shelved, only to resurface more than two decades later as a cult work within interested circles and, in June 2008, to earn its creator the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.
Let us pause for a moment and consider those “rows of identical headstones” mentioned by Sinai. They had inspired him to make The Lost Requiem and thus, indirectly, contributed to the fact that years later a younger generation of Iranian filmmakers began to explore the subject of Polish refugees. What is referred to here is the Polish War Cemetery in Tehran – the burial place of 1,893 Poles who had managed to find a way out of the Soviet Union with Anders’ Army, but who did not survive the effects of their deportation to that inhuman land. The cemetery forms part of a Catholic burial ground covering just over one hectare, itself integrated into a larger complex of Christian cemeteries of various denominations. It consists of eight rectangular sections and, as Sinai aptly observed, contains the graves of both the very young and the elderly: specifically, 508 children under the age of five and four Poles aged between 81 and 84 (this tally does not include 56 graves which lack information about the age of the deceased). All of them died between 1942 and 1945.
With The Lost Requiem, Chosrou Sinai by no means drew a line under the Polish chapter of his artistic work. Four years after the completion of the documentary, he made another film – this time it was a feature film, though infused with factual elements. A Friend at Home is based on the early years that Anna Borkowska, the central figure of Requiem, spent in Tehran. Before the war, Anna had appeared on the stage of the Pohulanka Theatre in Vilnius in light musical comedies and had always dreamed of acting. Sinai therefore invited her to collaborate, presenting her with the opportunity to portray a fictionalised version of herself.
After A Friend at Home, Sinai had no intention of abandoning Polish themes. In the new millennium, he long dreamed of an Iranian–Polish co-production: a love story about Polish wanderers in Iran, with the doyen of Iranian acting, Ezzatollah Entezami (1924–2018), in the leading male role, paired with a Polish actress of equal stature. His character was to reunite, after many years, with his former love from Iran – a Polish Sybirak. Unfortunately, the project never came to fruition. As Sinai later explained, the Polish Film Institute was not prepared to accept the screenplay for conceptual reasons. Today, the director and the actor are no longer with us …
“The Soviets Took in the Orphans out of Compassion”
The first mention of Polish refugees in the pages of Persian literature appears in the short story Jereneczka by Bozorg Alavi (1904–1997), published in 1952. Jereneczka – or rather Little Iranian – is a Polish woman who confides in the narrator: “I am no longer the being I once was. I have become a ghost of myself and am searching for the ghost of my beloved. My humanity has been torn out of me. I was once a human being; the fascists killed me.”
Fascists? Ireneczka is staying in a camp for Polish refugees and is about to be sent to Africa. Elsewhere, the narrator remarks: “Whenever I see young Polish women, I think of Ireneczka. Whenever those trucks full of young Polish women pass me by, I crane my neck. But I know I will never see her again.” Everything fits: these are Poles who reached Iran during the war. But why the reference to suffering at the hands of “fascists,” by which Alavi clearly means the German Nazis? There is not a single word about Siberia, nor about the suffering inflicted by the Soviet authorities. The answer is obvious: this reference distorts the facts. It is not even a matter of Alavi’s reluctance to criticise the USSR. Rather, he may genuinely have perceived the reasons why Poles arrived in Iran during the war in this way. This distortion is telling. It is sharply illuminated by an observation made by Hanka Ordonówna in her collection Tułacze dzieci [Wandering Children]:
The Soviet representative, watching those first Polish refugees from the USSR from a distance but with great attentiveness, was angry – very angry. The compassion that the orphans aroused in everyone did not suit him. And so one day a note appeared in the Persian and Indian press stating that the parents of these poor children had been murdered by the Germans, while the Soviets, out of compassion, had taken in the orphans (…).
H. ORDONÓWNA, SIEROCE OGNISKO, IN: TUŁACZE DZIECI, ŁOMIANKI 2010, PP. 127–128.
And that is exactly how it played out. The Soviet campaign of falsifying the factual narrative, launched at that time, proved to be remarkably effective. I know from personal experience that it still lingered in Uzbekistan as late as 2000, and its echoes can also be encountered in Iran. Compounding this was the fact that Poles evacuated from the USSR with Anders’ Army, who were to later stay in Tehran, had been instructed by the Polish authorities not to speak too openly about the hunger, cold, forced labour, inhuman treatment, and omnipresent death they had endured in Siberia. By doing so, they might have endangered their compatriots still languishing there. Thus, the image presented in Jereneczka – that Poles who reached Iran had, implicitly, found shelter along the way in the USSR – reflects Soviet wartime and post-war propaganda.
Glass Negatives
In the decades that followed, references to Poles in Iran were few and far between. The subject gained real momentum only at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In 2003, Alireza Doulatszahi – a scholar of Polish history and literature, author of the book Lahestanian wa Iran. Polacy i Iran [Poles and Iran], translator of Polish poetry (together with the author of the present article, Ivonna Nowicka), and an author of the publication about Adam Mickiewicz – founded the Iranian Centre for Polish Studies. In 2011, the Iranian–Polish Friendship Association, established on his initiative, officially began its activities. Among its founders were close relatives of one of the Sybiraks who remained in Iran, Helena Stelmach (1931–2017). The Association organised lectures and book presentations on Polish-related topics, sometimes in cooperation with the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Tehran. Independently of this, the tireless journalist and essayist Ali Dehbaszi enriched Tehran’s cultural life with seven meetings devoted to Poles and Poland as part of his Bukhara Evenings series. At the Evening Devoted to Iran and Poland in April 2013, the guest of honour was Helena Stelmach herself, and it was then that Sinai announced his intention to make a feature film in co-production with Poland – an idea that, as we know, was never realised.
Interest among Iranians in the Polish wanderers – who had appeared on their soil in such incomprehensible circumstances and in such great numbers, seemingly from nowhere and for reasons long unclear – gradually grew, giving rise to new projects. Each successive event, each new work, further heightened this interest and contributed to a better understanding of the subject. The awarding of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland to Sinai in 2008 drew the attention of his compatriots to The Lost Requiem and, by extension, to the topic it addressed. A year later, the first biography in Iran of a representative of the wartime immigrants, Helena Stelmach, was published under the title From Warsaw to Tehran.
Yet it was something else that would prove to be especially powerful: prints made from glass negatives. In 2010, a photographic album featuring archival images of Polish children and their caregivers in Isfahan was published under the English title The Children of Esfahan: Polish Refugees in Iran 1942–1945. The book contains portraits and group photographs captured through the professional eye of photographer Abolgasem Jali (1915–1979). At the time, these images existed only fleetingly as photographic prints, finding their way into the hands of the people depicted in them; if they survived at all, it was in a damaged condition, scattered across the world in family collections. Now, thanks to this publication, a portion of these photographs were able to be viewed for the first time by the wider public. It was in fact only a small portion of the available photos, for the author of the album, Parisa Damandan, displayed a modest two hundred works from the archive she had discovered in Isfahan, where can be found in a total of about 1,100 glass negatives.
Unfortunately, the photographs in the album are not captioned. Without the help of living witnesses – “Isfahanians,” as they call themselves – it is impossible to put a name to those faces, often marked by a gravity far beyond their years, frequently sad even when smiling. While leafing through the album with deep emotion, Maria “Dzidka” Gordziejko, the daughter of a victim of the Katyn Massacre from the so-called Belarusian list, recognised herself in a photograph among a group of Polish scouts. But not only herself. Standing beside her are a classmate – the future Esperantist Ada Sikorska – and her sister Marysia, as well as Aleksandra “Oleńka” Jarmulska-Rymaszewska, who decades later, like Maria, would become a member of the Association of Alumni of Polish Schools in Isfahan and Lebanon. In other photographs, Maria Gordziejko identified Wanda Kociuba, whose Pamiętnik z Syberii, Iranu i Libanu [Diary from Siberia, Iran and Lebanon] was published posthumously in 2020, as well as another classmate from Isfahan, Elżbieta Kowalczyk. Elżbieta’s story is a moving one. During her stay in Isfahan, she corresponded with a soldier of Anders’ Army – a practice that the Polish children there were actively encouraged to undertake. The soldier survived the war, perhaps even the Battle of Monte Cassino, and this exchange of letters from those “years of wrath” ultimately led – to marriage.
Another revelation occurred at a reunion of the “Isfahanians” in Jurata in 2012. In one of the photographs, an emaciated little girl with a swollen eye and sores on her legs, yet standing defiantly with her hands on her hips, was recognised by an elegant lady from the United States: Teresa Mikosz-Hintzke, the author of the memoir Six Years ‘til Spring: A Polish Family’s Odyssey.
If we add to the aforementioned books published in Iran a volume of documents relating to Polish refugees issued in 2011, we begin to see an ever more densely filled Iranian calendar of works and events devoted to their history.
Anniversaries
The 70th anniversary of the evacuation of Poles from the USSR to Iran, commemorated in 2012, was reflected in Iranian media coverage. From around that time onward, Iranian politicians began to stress the positive role their country had played in saving Polish deportees, seeing in this episode – dating back to the rule of a different authority, later overthrown by the revolution – an opportunity to polish Iran’s seemingly tarnished image.
Anna and Stanisława, Helena and Maria
The first filmmaker after Sinai to take up Polish themes was Mehdi Naderi (b. 1973). Between 2003 and 2007, he made a short documentary about the Sybirak Stanisława Szakalska. Alluding to The Lost Requiem, he entitled his film Forgotten Dreams. As signposted in its subtitle – Four Seasons in the Life of Stanisława Szakalska (Ruhangiz Arabi) – the director focused his lens on the contemporary life of the widow: a wealthy elderly woman living in a large, traditional house in an Iranian village. In the film, the protagonist recounts how the Soviets had shot her father, Franciszek, and her brother Edek, deporting her and her mother Franciszka to Siberia, where the latter perished. Stanisława, the family’s only surviving member, reached the port of “Pahlewi” – in Persian, Pahlavi, today’s Anzali. Like many other Polish women, she married an Iranian officer, later a general, and remained on the hospitable Iranian soil for the rest of her life. The information provided about Szakalska’s past is somewhat sparse. One would like to know such details as the year and place of her birth, or to where exactly the Soviets had deported her. Perhaps the director had not thought to ask; perhaps she herself no longer remembered…
Iranian filmmakers were becoming increasingly aware that the relentless passage of time would soon snatch away any opportunity to preserve the histories of Polish women in Iran. In addition to the existing films about Anna Borkowska and Stanisława Szakalska, they managed to capture on film the memories of two more women. Maria Bajdan (1927–2021) became the subject of a 70-minute documentary entitled Madame, directed by Narges Charagani in 2014, while Helena Stelmach was portrayed in Mohammad Tagi Jazerlu’s film The Day I Was Not There (2015). Both productions may be classified as oral history projects. The film regarding Maria Bajdan, however, suffers from a serious factual flaw. The protagonist – an elderly woman who had lived in Iran since her teenage years – confuses certain facts. She has every right to do so. She says, for example, that she was deported in February 1939, meaning 1940, or that the Russians reached an agreement with Hitler on the partition of Poland only after the German attack on the country. This was precisely where the director should have intervened with editorial vigilance. A few explanatory title cards at the end of the film would have sufficed. Such vigilance was however, lacking, and the Iranian viewer – the film’s primary audience – will take away erroneous information. Charagani did, on the other hand, ensure that Maria Bajdan’s memories were preserved in yet another form: by publishing a book devoted to her.
New ideas and projects concerning Polish refugees continued to emerge. Due to sanctions, Hodżdżatollah Raisi was unable to realise his attempt at a co-produced feature film, Campoloni, the title of which referred to the Polish refugee camp – Camp Polonia – in Ahvaz in southern Iran. A documentary entitled Season of Life was made, but its Iranian director, whose name I deliberately omit here, was confronted with accusations of creative unreliability.
Once Upon a Time in Iran
A group of emaciated women and children, behind them the sea. Their only possessions – pitiful bundles – are carried only with huge effort. Someone collapses, unable to rise again, leaving a child behind. Astonished Iranian soldiers watch them; some try to help. Amid cries and moans, the song Kołysz mi się, kołysz, kolebeńko z lipki can be heard, performed by Maria Pomianowska. A representative of the Polish government-in-exile appears; someone introduces herself as Barbara Kowalska, another as Helena Stawińska née Nowak…
This is the only attempt I know of in any feature film, to recreate the scene of Polish refugees arriving in Iran. It has a moving effect on viewers in the fifth episode of the Iranian historical drama Khatoon. Although no official statistics exist, the series is estimated to have been watched by several million Iranians. They followed it – the first instalment of the trilogy Once Upon a Time in Iran – in 2021–2022, on one of Iran’s major video-on-demand platforms. The names Kowalska and Stawińska are fictional. However, in creating the character of Helena Stawińska – who before the war was an actress and opera Singer – the director and screenwriter Tina Pakravan drew partly on the life of Hanka Ordonówna and partly on the experiences of Helena Stelmach in Tehran. From the former she borrowed the heroine’s profession, from the latter her name and the storyline of an escape from a Polish camp in Tehran. She cast the Russian actress Maria Shelkunova in the role.
The scene of the refugees’ arrival in Iran, the entire context of Helena’s escape from the camp, and other fragments alluding to historical events were freely reshaped by Tina Pakravan’s imagination, adapted to the needs of the series and to censorship requirements. Even if the details diverge from historical truth, the main facts remain correct: refugees arrived by ship, mostly women and children (soldiers are not mentioned), and they were in a terrible condition.
They were taken to Tehran, where some Polish women began working at Café Polonia on Tulip Fields Street, Lalezar. We may also offer gratitude to the director for showing that Iran was at that time already in the midst of a typhus epidemic, whereas in popular belief its outbreak had long been associated with the arrival of Poles – as they had indeed been infested with lice when they reached the Iranian shore.
More than any other film, Khatoon brought the Polish thread of Iranian history into the present consciousness of Iranian audiences. It restored both memory and awareness of the wartime Poles – figures they had once heard about from parents, grandparents, shopkeepers…
Ideas
Anyone fascinated by the subject of Polish children in Isfahan eventually discovered and came to appreciate the study authored by the “Isfahan girls” themselves – Irena Stankiewicz, Danuta Waszczuk-Kamieniecka, and Jadwiga Lewicka-Howells – entitled Isfahan, the City of Polish Children, published in London in 1987 in Polish, with an English edition following two years later. The book received an award from the Association of Polish Writers Abroad and stands as a compendium of documents, facts, and memoirs of Polish orphans and half-orphans who, after the Siberian horror, regained their strength in the most beautiful of Persian cities. Thanks to the efforts of Polish diplomacy in Iran, a Persian translation of the book appeared three years ago. Admittedly, it is somewhat incomplete – it includes only those sections directly relating to Iran – but nevertheless, making it available to Iranian readers constitutes an important step forward, that will undoubtedly bear fruit in the future.
It so happens that yet another creator, travel writer Mansur Zabetian, is currently completing his own work, which includes material from his journey to Poland, when he visited Warsaw in the spring of 2025 to meet still living witnesses to this history. He listened to the accounts of Maria Gordziejko and Andrzej Chendyński, president of the Association of Poles from India (1942–1948), who, although he found refuge in the Indian state of Maharashtra, spent some time in Tehran and Mashhad following his escape from Siberia. The writer also met Bożenna Wójcik, who spoke about two witnesses to history – Girl Scouts – her mother Zdzisława Wójcik and Maria Gabiniewicz. As Zabetian confirms, the main subject of his forthcoming book will be precisely these wartime experiences of Poles. Someone else is thinking about a book, another about a computer game…
Thanks to the commitment and passion of Iranians, and with the support of our embassy in Tehran, so many events have taken place and so many works – in written word and on screen – have come into being, that it proves difficult to discuss them all in detail within the scope of a single article. Fortunately, much has changed since the mention made over seventy years ago of “German fascists” as the perpetrators of the suffering of Polish refugees who found shelter in Iran. The wanderers’ fate is now better understood and more widely recognised in Iranian society. It leads one therefore to wonder what new books, films, and other works—that not only enrich our knowledge, but are equally, if not more valuable to us – the Iranian artistic spirit has yet to bring into existence.
Ivonna Nowicka is an Iranian scholar and translator whose research focuses on the fate of Poles in Iran and the victims of the Katyn Massacre. Her work includes translations of poetry by Wisława Szymborska, Halina Poświatowska, and Adam Mickiewicz into Persian (published as stand-alone volumes), as well as translations of Persian literature into Polish.
Bibliography
Rows of identical headstones, Section 8 of the Polish War Cemetery in Tehran, where the largest number of small children are buried. June 2022; photo: Ivonna Nowicka.
From left: director Chosrou Sinai, actor Ezzatollah Entezami, and eyewitness to history Helena Stelmach, Evening Devoted to Iran and Poland, April 2013, Tehran; photo: Mojtaba Salek.
Maria Gordziejko and two photographs from her stay in Isfahan: from her private collection (first from the right) and from the album The Children of Esfahan, in which she rediscovered herself; November 2025, Warsaw; photo: Ivonna Nowicka.
Information board announcing the conference marking the 75th anniversary of the arrival of Polish refugees in Iran, in front of the Faculty of Literature at the University of Tehran, November 2017; photo: Ivonna Nowicka.
Concert by the group Perspol, with (from left): Mohammad Zolnuri, Dariusz Rasouli, Ivonna Nowicka, and Omid Samadi, University of Tehran, November 2017; photo: Renata Rusek.
In the background: a historical photograph of Polish scouting instructors in Iran—(men, from left) K. Sylwanowicz, E. Wiszniewski, Z. Peszkowski (a prisoner of Kozelsk, who escaped death in the Katyn massacre), Z. Szadkowski, and J. Brzeziński; and (women, order uncertain) J. Zaręba, W. Seweryn, A. Till, and K. Szpyt.
Poster for the stage production Isfahan, the City of Polish Children at the Municipal Theatre, Tehran, November 2017; photo: Ivonna Nowicka.
Chosrou Sinai during a conversation with Ivonna Nowicka about his Iranian–Polish co-production, December 2012, Warsaw; Ivonna Nowicka Archive.