Profiles Archives - THE WORLD OF SYBIR

Eugeniusz Cydzik – the Life of a Brave Man

The ninety years of Eugeniusz Cydzik’s life encompassed the defense of Grodno in September 1939, underground resistance in the ranks of the Home Army, daily struggle for survival in the Vorkuta labour camp, and in later years, tireless battles for the preservation of Polish monuments and cemeteries in Lviv and neighbouring area.

Edward Piekarski – A Monumental Life’s Work Against The Odds

Edward Piekarski was one of those Poles who had, similarly to Aleksander Czekanowski, Jan Czerski, Wacław Sieroszewski and many others, fashioned the environment of his exile into terrain where he could deepen his research work.

John Janek Roy-Wojciechowski – a great Pole

During his years in New Zealand, Jan Wojciechowski – John Roy was involved in rescuing failing companies, which earned him a fortune. But in reality, he probably never stopped being little Janek, who, together with his family, was torn from his safe home in the village of Ostrówki near Drohiczyn Poleski by the Soviets in February 1940 and deported to the village of Nuchw-Oziero in the Plesetsk district of the Arkhangelsk region.

Litwá – ródna ziamièlka! (O Lithuania, my native land…) – about Vincent „Vincuk” Dunin-Marcinkiewicz

Who was he really? A Pole? A Belarusian? An admirer of the simple Belarusian people and rural life or a khlopoman? Vincent “Vincuk” Dunin-Marcinkiewicz was probably a bit of each, which characterised many representatives of the borderland intelligentsia in the mid-19th century.

Varlam Shalamov – a perceptive observer of human suffering

He was first sent to a gulag near Visher in the northern Urals in 1929, where he spent three years. Then, in 1937, he was sent to Kolyma, to the ‘white crematorium’, where he spent the next five years of his life.

LEON BARSZCZEWSKI (1849–1910) – COLONEL OF THE IMPERIAL RUSSIAN ARMY, PHOTOGRAPHER, GEOLOGIST, ETHNOGRAPHER, AND EXPLORER OF CENTRAL ASIAN PEOPLES

Igor Strojecki: Leon Barszczewski was a pioneer of Polish reportage photography in 19th century.

Helping the Youngest – Maria and Kazimierz Wodzicki

Had it not been for the initiative of Maria Wodzicka, the help of her husband Kazimierz – Consul General of the Republic of Poland in Wellington – and the wife of New Zealand Prime Minister Janet Fraser, a group of more than 700 Polish orphans and half-orphans evacuated from Siberia would probably have wandered around the world for a long time yet. But thanks to these good people, the children have found their new home in the antipodes.