A life of hardship, adventure and contentment
Polish-born WWII survivor was ‘one tough woman’ who thrived in nature, son recalls
Even into her mid-80s, Polish-born Helena Boraks spent six months alone every year in a cottage near Algonquin Provincial Park. She had no phone, no running water and no electricity. Her only modern conveniences were a refrigerator and stove, both powered by propane.
Boraks’ closest human neighbour was six kilometres away. Bears lived closer, but they didn’t intimidate her. Other than alternating weekly visits from her four children, Boraks had no interaction with people.
“She felt at peace,” said her son, Robert Boraks, and she loved the solitude and nature. His mother had started the annual pilgrimages to her cottage in her late 50s, shortly after the death of her husband, Jerzy. She continued her trips until she broke her hip in Toronto at about age 85.
“She was a survivor all her life,” said her eldest son, Victor Boraks. Her father died when she was only 5. She spent the first part of the Second World War in a Soviet gulag, where she lost a lung to typhus, and the rest of the war driving a truck in Italy for the Polish forces. She later raised her four children in Canada mostly on her own.
Boraks died on June 6 at age 93 in the Sunnybrook Veterans Centre, where she had spent her last three years. “She enjoyed being with people who understood the war,” said Robert. “She was very content there.”
“She was an innately happy person,” said her daughter, Barbara Boraks. She portrayed her life’s trau- matic experiences as adventures.
Helena Konstancja Figiel was born in 1921 on a farm near Lwow, in what was then southeastern Poland, the only girl among four siblings. Her father, an orphan, was raised by the Roman Catholic church.
On Sept. 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and one of Boraks’ brothers was killed in an air raid on his university that day. Her other two brothers hid, first from the Germans and then from the Soviets, who invaded the eastern part of Poland in mid-September.
Afew months later, the Soviets gave Boraks and her mother one hour to pack their bags and leave their home. Over one million Poles were to receive that deportation order. Boraks spent two and a half weeks in a cattle car with her mother and dozens of others on her way to their eventual destination — a slave labour farm in Kazakhstan.
It was a relief for Boraks to get on that train, to leave behind the bloodshed in Poland. “This adventure set her free,” said Barbara.
Once in Kazakhstan, the Poles lived in tents and unheated cattle sheds, in which many people died. Boraks had fortunately taken a blanket with her from home, and that helped her survive the cold.
With very little food and no medicine, Boraks and five other women in her unit fell ill with typhus. All died except Boraks.
The captors treated everyone with respect. They never humiliated their slave labourers, said Barbara, as everyone, including the locals and soldiers, were suffering hardship. No one had much food.
In 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Boraks and her contemporaries were given a choice: stay in Kazakhstan or join the war effort against the Germans. She chose option two because she wanted to see the world.
She travelled by truck across thousands of kilometres, ending up in Italy as part of the Polish forces there. She had learned to drive an army truck along the way and could change a truck’s oil and grease its engine.
Her job, and that of many other Polish women, was to deliver supplies to the war front. She also ferried troops: healthy, wounded, and dead. In Italy, she met her future husband, also a Pole, who was involved in Allied counter-intelligence.
The couple moved to the United Kingdom after the war, then to Canada in 1952 and settled in Toronto. Their accents gave them away as displaced people, and Toronto was not an easy place for DPs, said Robert. In the mid-1960s, Jerzy left Canada for Africa, where he lived and worked for six to eight months at a time, leaving his wife to run the household while he was away.
Before his death from cancer in 1978, Jerzy bought a 200-acre property on Bark Lake, near Barry’s Bay. With the help of her daughter and three sons, Boraks built the structure that became her home for half of each year. She also spent years painstakingly building a one-kilometre road leading from the cottage to the outside world. This task involved moving boulders and levelling terrain, work she did entirely using shovels, picks and other hand tools. “She was one tough woman who loved life,” said Robert.
Boraks leaves behind her four children, 10 grandchildren and two great grandchildren.