Jerzy Gromadzki’s dugout in Yakutia, 1960. Sybir Memorial Museum collection

Yakutia is a land in eastern Siberia, a territory primarily covered by permafrost, where air temperatures can drop to -50 degrees Celsius. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it stood as a place of exile for, among others, the Decembrists, participants of the January uprising and labour movement activists. The Gromadzki family were also sent there, deported in June 1941 from the Szikszniai estate near Kibort in the Vilnius district of the Republic of Lithuania. The mother Helena Gromadzka (née Talko-Hryncewicz) and two children, Jerzy and Cecylia, were deported. The owner of the estate, Ludwik Gromadzki, remained at home. Jan Gromadzki, one of Ludwik’s three absent descendants, also managed to avoid deportation. The Gromadzki family ended up on the Lena River near the Laptev Sea, in the Arctic wilderness. In 1941, Jerzy Gromadzki’s mother and sister died. For most of his life, Jerzy worked as an electrician at the power plant in Kjusjur on the Lena River as well as being an electromechanic and radio operator at the kolkhoz ‘New Life’. He lived in the fishing village of Siktjach. In 1960 he formalised his relationship with Agrafena Ochotina, a local woman who hailed from the Ewenks people, and with whom he had a daughter, Janina. He died in 1994. His daughter received a certificate of rehabilitation from the Russian state and moved to Poland in 1997.