Girls from the Catholic Charity Action in Tengeru. In the middle fr Jan Śliwowski (on the right) and friar Łucjan Królikowski (?) 1947-1949. Photo: from the collection of the Sybir Memorial Museum.

When, in 1949, the International Refugees Organisation (IRO) decided to close down the Polish camps in Africa, the question arose as to what would happen to the 150 Polish orphans who had been evacuated there with General Władysław Anders’s Army from Sybir and who – after the war – were staying in a camp in Tengeru, Tanzania. They were claimed by the authorities in Poland, which was then sinking into the depths of Stalinism. Standing alone against the communist propaganda machine at the time was Franciscan Friar Zbigniew Lucjan Królikowski, who had previously cared for the children living in Tengeru. Instead of going to Canada (as had been previously agreed by the Polish guardians with the Canadian Episcopate), the children ended up in Italy, from where the communists planned to transport them to Poland. The Warsaw press called Królikowski an “international kidnapper”, and a “modern slave trader”. And the children, who had fresh memories of hunger and slave labour in the kolkhozes, were foretold of the fate of “white negroes” and “cheap slaves” at the mercy of Canadian entrepreneurs. Who would dared to oppose the communists?

Zbigniew Królikowski was born on 7 September 1919 in Nowy Kramsk, in the Lubuskie region. In 1934, he began his studies at the Minor Missionary Seminary in Niepokalanów, and in 1938 he entered the Franciscan order. He went on philosophical studies in 1939 in Lviv; a year later he was arrested by the NKVD and deported to the Arkhangelsk region, where he worked at logging taiga. He was freed by way of the Sikorski-Mayski agreement of 30 July 1941, which guaranteed an “amnesty” for Poles. With the Polish Army, Królikowski crossed Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, where he graduated from the Artillery Cadet School. He then made his way through Persia and Iraq to Lebanon, completing his theological studies at St Joseph’s University in Beirut and being ordained a priest there in 1946. He returned to the General Władysław Anders Corps, where he served as chaplain. After demobilisation, he looked after Polish children in Tengeru. Despite numerous perturbations, a whole group of children managed to happily arrive in Canada. They were placed in schools and boarding schools in the province of Quebec, and Fr Lucjan looked after them until they reached the age of majority. He described the story in a book entitled Stolen Childhood. A Saga of Polish War Children (Polish: Skradzione dzieciństwo. Polskie dzieci na tułaczym szlaku 1939-1950). Fr Lucjan stayed in Canada until 1966. Then, until 1998, he was the chief secretary at the world’s oldest Catholic radio programme broadcast in the Polish language, Father Justin Rosary Hour in Athol Springs, USA.

In 2007, the President of the Republic of Poland, Lech Kaczyński, awarded him the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta. In 2012, he was awarded the Order of the Smile. On 13 January 2013, to the accompaniment of the Sybiraks’ March, he was awarded the title of Friend of the School of Polish Culture and Language in Bridgeport. He died on the morning of 11 October 2019 at the Franciscan convent in Chicopee (USA) at the age of 100. The last farewell was held at the Basilica of St Stanislaus, where Fr Lucien exercised his pastoral ministry. He was posthumously awarded the highest Polish decoration, the Order of the White Eagle “in recognition of his outstanding contribution to social and charitable activities on behalf of Polish war orphans and victims of forced deportations from the Eastern Borderlands into the USSR.”