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The stone chair of Bolek Augustis

20/11/2023

Urszula Dąbrowska

It is commonly assumed that Bolesław Augustis, the author of the biggest collection of pre-war photos from Białystok, stopped practising photography after he emigrated. It took a trip to New Zealand to discover that this wasn’t the case. It took a lot of conversations with the Sybiraks living there to understand that the trauma of deportation, although dimmed, still hurts, radiates and needs clarification.

Four volunteers from Białystok travelled through 12 time zones (twice) and flew over 20 thousand kilometres. They visited New Zealand’s North and South Islands, travelling around 2,500 kilometres by car to meet over one hundred representatives of the local Polish diaspora in New Zealand’s three biggest cities: Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. These volunteers conducted 14 interviews with Sybiraks and members of their families; they digitized around 200 archive photographs, and the collected materials took over 2 TB of computer storage. The purpose of these actions was to find out why Bolesław Augustis went to the Antipodes and what is hidden in the private archives of Sybiraks living there. The crew left Warsaw on 22nd of October 2023, landed in Auckland two days later, and the next day one of the most incredible encounters happened.

Augustis vel Augustowicz

The discovery of Augustis’s collection is a movie-like story. It is mid-June, 2004, and three teenagers are rummaging through abandoned gardens on Bema Street in the centre of Białystok. They find a cupboard containing some green envelopes and rolls of film that had been uncovered because part of a wooden shed had collapsed while a fence was being repaired. What great stuff to play with! In the envelopes they find black-and-white photographic slides, on which they see oddly dressed people and buildings when they look through them against the sun. The teenagers are noticed by the musician Jurek Osiennik, who is rehearsing in the garage next door. He calls his friend, photographer Grzegorz Dąbrowski, who takes the slides home and prints these images of Białystok from the second half of the 1930s: shops, workshops, offices, citizens’ walks, family gatherings, funerals, and Labour Day parades. He discovers that the author of the photographs is Bolesław Augustis, who emigrated to New Zealand after the war. For the next 20 years, Dąbrowski will show the citizens of Białystok what their city looked like just before World War II. Some people recognize their relatives and friends when these pictures are published by the local newspaper. A wave of memories and nostalgia breaks and a sense of belonging to the city community arises – a community which has a beautiful photographical record.

Dąbrowski, with the support of the Widok Association, has digitized over 10 thousand photographs and published two books of Bolesław Augustis’s pictures so far. Exhibitions of these pictures have been held in Białystok, Warsaw, Berlin, Belgrad, Triest, Minsk, Vitebsk and other cities. Their author is acknowledged as the creator of the biggest collection of street photography in the country and has gone down in the history of Polish photography.

However, information about Augustis is scarce. After the discovery of the pictures in the shed, his sister, Eugenia Senderacka, got in touch with researchers and showed where her brother used to run a “Polonia Film” workshop near Kilińskiego Street. She also has a few of his portraits. She said that Bolek and their two sisters were born in Novosibirsk, to where their family escaped from the tsarist persecutions in Ryga. In 1932, they managed to get out of the Soviet Union and reached Białystok. When the Soviets entered the city in September 1939, they first arrested Bolesław Augustis’s father, Jan Augustis. To this day, the family does not know where his burial place is. On the last day of February 1940, NKVD soldiers took Bolesław and his two teenage sisters straight from the carnival ball for transport to the USSR. Their mother and the youngest sister Eugenia stayed in Białystok and hid the negatives. Bolesław went through a series of Soviet prisons and finally ended up in Krutaya labour camp in the Komi Republic, where he shared the fate of other Sybiraks, experiencing violence, hunger, and hard labour.

After the Sikorski–Mayski Agreement in September 1941, Augustis joined the so-called Anders’ Army. He fought as a bombardier in the 3rd Carpathian Rifle Division and in the battle of Monte Cassino. In 1946, like many of his brothers in arms, he was demobilised in Scotland and had no intention of returning to communist Poland. So, he travelled to New Zealand to meet a girl with whom he had been corresponding.

Dąbrowski looked for traces of Augustis in the Antipodes, but all the trails went cold until his granddaughter, Kerry, got in touch when he published more photos on Facebook. Then a letter arrives from one of Augustis’s sons, Zbigniew. The letter starts with the words “Bolesław Augustis is my father and all my life I’ve known him under the name of Bolesław Augustowicz”. This new information – just a few letters – changes the course of the search. It turns out that the photographer had decided to go back to his original surname in New Zealand. This surname is found in military documents, therefore it is possible to trace his military service, more or less. Only the period he spent in New Zealand remains a blank. Occasional online meetings with Augustis’s family in Auckland do not clear anything up, but this all changes on 26th of November 2023.

Bolesław Augustis in Polish uniform. Photo from the Augustowicz’s family archive.

Bolesław Augustis – a never-ending adventure

On this day, the crew from Widok is supposed to meet Bolesław Augustis/Augustynowicz’s sons in a rented house at around two o’clock. The atmosphere is quite tense. Stanisław arrives first on a motocross bike, followed by Zbigniew, the eldest of sons. They listen attentively to everything that Grzegorz Dąbrowski has discovered about their father. They have never heard some of these facts, such as their father’s youth in Novosybirsk. They are surprised, touched; they fiddle with an album of their father’s photos.

“I never thought that our dad was famous. He never wanted to be important, to stand out, he did not court fame”, Zbyszek says.

The sons tell the story of their peaceful childhood, spent among Polish immigrants (their mom, Maria nee Zazulak – the girl to which Bolek sailed from Great Britain – had seven siblings) in Tritirangi, a district in Auckland located on hills covered with bush. They reminisce about rabbit hunting, a Polish school, meetings in a Polish House (Bolesław contributed greatly to the creation of this building), masses in the Catholic church and holidays.v

“Dad used to say that Christmas Eve begins in Poland with the first star, but that is impossible here as the 24th of December is the middle of summer and we would have to wait until midnight for supper”, Staszek jokes.

They say that Bolesław, after arriving in New Zealand, tried to be a photographer, but he didn’t know the business; he had no contacts or reputation and was a newcomer from nowhere. Later, however, at the house of Bronia Brooks, a relative, we find a photo from 1968, marked with a stamp from New Zealand: “phot. Bolesław Augustynowicz”. The sons remember the darkroom in the house, into which their father often disappeared; they recollect that he was happy to teach them photography. The business was not profitable enough to support a family. Finally, Bolesław engaged in construction. He ran a construction company with Leonard Nowak, his friend from Poland. Today they are buried next to each other in the Polish lane in the multiconfessional cemetery in Auckland, where you can find tombs with inscriptions in English, Chinese, Maori, Croatian, and dozens of other languages. Bolesław Augustis died of a heart attack in 1995, 9 years before the discovery of the collection of his photographs.

However, the negatives from the shed are not the only things he left behind. During the meeting in Auckland, when the reserve had melted away, Zbigniew put a big white envelope on the table.

“This is what we managed to save from dad’s work”, he says. Zbigniew’s house suffered in the great flood which struck Auckland in 2022.

Pages from the album emerge from the envelope – eighteen in total, with four or five photographs on each page. These are carefully glued, small, square photos, a photographic record of Bolesław’s combat trail with Anders’ Army: landmarks of Italian cities, destroyed townhouses in Milan, a camp for German prisoners of war in Taranto, the flaming monastery of Monte Cassino, suburbs of Ascola, a field altar, a morning assembly of the 3rd Division, a military parade, a smashed plane, palm trees. There is also a self-portrait on a rock with the description “My armchair, which I cannot move”. The last pictures, dated 1947, were taken in Great Britain. Each one of them is, in Bolesław’s manner, carefully composed, well-lit, with a great sense of detail. Under each picture there are captions, calligraphed by his wife’s hand, such as “a proud Polish flag in a foreign land against the clouds”, “Italian women in a tree peeling mulberries”, “a memory from the Soviet paradise”.

“Take this to the Sybir Memorial Museum. Young people are not interested in this”, both brothers agree.

“At first we were speechless that the pictures had survived, that there are photographs by Augustis from the war period which we do not know”, says Rafał Siderski from the “Widok” (View) Association, who documented this moment.

Apparently, Zbyszek has been waiting for a reaction as he reaches into his bag once again and takes out two navy blue boxes from a Scottish company containing rolls of negatives. The films, wrapped in white packaging, fill the boxes. Some of them are dated.

“Augustis never stopped being a photographer and the best proof is in front of us”, Dąbrowski, who has already started digitizing the negatives, comments. These are his private photographs. They are mainly dated to the 1960s and 1970s, but they complement Augustis’s collection and the story of him as an artist. They are also the chronicle of a Polish family from Auckland and partially of Polish immigrants in New Zealand.

Witnesses, liaisons, researchers

The Polish researchers who arrived at the Polish Home in Auckland on 29th October 2023 are also surprised with Augustis’s work from Białystok. They carefully listen to a publicly read thanksgiving letter from the president of Białystok, in which he says that, thanks to these photographs, the citizens understand their past better. Poles from Auckland do not know Augustis’s pictures at all. He was seen at parties with his camera, but this was nothing extraordinary as many people had cameras. His wife Maria was more recognizable in the community as she was a member of the large Polish Zazulak family, which had settled in New Zealand. She was also a “child of Pahiatua”: a group of 733 orphans who were rescued from Sybir and travelled to New Zealand on the American transporter ship USS “General George Randall” on 31st October 1944 at Prime Minister Peter Fraser’s invitation.

The Children of Pahiatua is also a movie-like story, filled with great drama – travels through the Soviet Union, Persia, and India, with a happy ending. The orphans found true asylum in New Zealand, in Pahiatua, where they were cared for and given life opportunities. This is why the Poles celebrate 31st October. On the annual Pahiatua Picnic Day, the premiere of Augustis’s photographs from Białystok was held, followed by a presentation of the Sybir Memorial Museum’s collection of old photographs. A picnic is also a good opportunity for small talk. Hunter’s stew and pies appeared on the tables. Some Poles brought family photos. For the volunteers from Poland it was an opportunity to make new connections. Similar meetings were held in Christchurch and Wellington. Each one resulted in individual interviews with Sybiraks or members of their families.

“These conversations were extraordinary, filled with emotions that were very often sparked by completely innocent questions. We managed to record 14 interviews”, says Urszula Dąbrowska, the coordinator of the “Bolesław Augustis and the Sybiraks from New Zealand. A query and digitalization of chosen archives” project, within which the trip took place. “Depending on the speakers’ emotions and age, we divided them into three categories: witnesses, ‘liaisons’ and ‘researchers’”.

The first group consists of Sybiraks – mainly children from the Pahiatua camp, all now in their 90s – who want to share their experiences. Not everyone, however, decides to do so. Some of them have closed this chapter in their lives, claiming that there are no words to describe Sybir. They do not want to pass on their trauma, but it still festers and does not let them forget about it.

Some of them tell their stories many times, believing that they are not only a warning but also help understand how the past influences the present. Sybiraks with whom we managed to conduct interviews, Stanisław Manterys, Kazimierz Zając, Zbigniew Popławski and Alina Zioło, recount their experiences from eight decades ago – their stories of separation, death and pain – still not able to contain their emotion and tears. But they also have another truth to pass on: these experiences made them stronger, more resilient. Stanisław Manterys said they are also “tougher and hardier”, often lacking illusions, which may influence their relationships with close ones.

These close ones are most often their children. Some of them have become “liaisons”, cultivating Polish traditions and animating the diaspora in the Antipodes. Eugenia Smolnicka, mother of Irena Lowe from Wellington, co-author of the website https://kresy-siberia.org, has dealt with her trauma by talking about Siberia again and again, while walking, cooking or doing laundry. Irena soaked in these stories so much that they became part of her life as well. Nina Tomaszyk – granddaughter of Krystyna Skwarko, a guard of the children of Pahiatua, author of a book about Sybir – is a social activist (she is the president of the Association of Poles in Auckland). She does this to, for example, express her gratitude towards New Zealanders for their help. As she says: “Sybiraks, among them my grandmother, have never felt like refugees; they were treated like guests”. A huge amount of excellent work was done by Barbara Scrivens, who has collected and described dozens of testimonies. When asked why she does this, she says:

“I show that ordinary people become extraordinary in unusual circumstances – they suddenly grow”.

She also adds that the collected testimonies make it impossible to misrepresent history; she gets angry when she hears that Poles weren’t victims of World War II but accomplices.

The “Liaisons” describe themselves as half-Polish, half-Kiwi (New Zealanders); they feel good in their new homeland but they know their roots and usually speak Polish quite well. The “researchers” are different as they do not know their families’ histories and have just started to examine them. They are usually the first to reach out to the Polish volunteers, asking for a meeting. They are lost; they want to find out something about their grandparents’ homeland – about a European country far away. They do not know their language, history or geography. Antony Michalik, a respected producer of alcohol in New Zealand, learnt from Sybir Memorial Museum’s Tomasz Danilecki that one of his ancestors, sent to the depths of Russia after the January Uprising, also ran an alcohol business, but in tsarist Russia, in Siberia. He created a centre of Polish life in Tomsk with a library and art collection. To the meeting, Paul Lubas brought his grandfather Lech Lubas’s (originating from Tarnopol) school certificates, issued in Isfahan, and an old letter addressed to the family in Poland, asking for a translation. He does not know anything about his ancestors and he feels that this is a gap which he should fill. For years, Krystyna Wiek and her sisters have been coping with the same sense of great loss that their mother must have experienced when living in a quite modest conditions in New Zealand, even though she was an heiress of a big estate in Ukraine. They want to make a break from their past: to forget about the Polish sandwiches with pickled cucumber that were ridiculed by the children at their school – to forget about an embarrassing sense of disparity. Deciding to give an interview, they have taken the first step in coming to terms with their own and their mother’s history.

“Perhaps they are the ones who especially need conversations about their parents’ Siberian experiences and contact with Poland”, Tomasz Danilecki ponders. His story of Sybir Memorial Museum as a place of connection and contacts receives warm applause every time. “There is never a day when the Museum doesn’t get a phone call from someone in a distant country, wanting to find out something about their family who came from Poland and were deported to Siberia. Their grandparents did not want to talk about it or they were too young to listen to these stories. Now they need to know their roots. This is a place where they can deposit their story and others can listen to it to understand what their grandparents went through and why they were like that”.

To discover this, it is necessary to dive into difficult memories – to unlock painful images. Meetings and conversations about the past with researchers from the old homeland – far-away Poland – naturally trigger them. Usually, however, these conversations end with a warm hug, which brings relief.

***

The trip to New Zealand was taken by volunteers from the “Widok” Association: Urszula Dąbrowska, coordinator; Grzegorz Dąbrowski, archive specialist; Rafał Siderski, photographer and documentarian. They had strong support from a partner institution, Sybir Memorial Museum in Białystok, which was represented by Tomasz Danilecki, historian. The crew could also count on the help of volunteers and Polish organisations from New Zealand. The project lasted from 1st June to 16th November 2023.

The results of the project will be presented on the website: http://albom.pl/

The “Bolesław Augustis and the Sybiraks from New Zealand. A search and digitization of chosen archives” project was funded by POLONIKA (The National Institute of Polish Cultural Heritage Abroad) and from the budget of the City of Białystok.

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