TO JAM SAHEB WITH LOVE
World War II turned lakhs of Polish children into orphans. Between 1942 and 1946, a thousand of them were given shelter by the Nawanagar Maharaja. On the 100th year of Poland’s independence, many of them returned to relive their childhood years in Gujarat
It is mid-afternoon in Jamnagar and a bus is turning to take a round of one of its squares. The archway of a once magnificent fort is in sight. Roman Gutowski, 83, a retired Polish civil engineer, pulls back the grey curtain on one of the bus windows, and peers out. The Jamnagar he sees 71 years after he left it is not what he remembers of the place. His son, Tomek, a businessman, who has brought along the third-generation Gutowski, his son Maciej, is shooting with his camera to ensure that this time he does remember.
Photographs cannot stand on their own without memories. “I know about Jamnagar and Balachadi from my father’s stories,” says Tomek. “Maciej must see where his grandfather comes from. Had I just shown him pictures….”
Roman Gutowski grew up alongside almost a thousand Polish children in a camp at Balachadi, a village 25 km off Jamnagar city (the capital of the erstwhile princely state of Nawanagar in presentday Gujarat) in the British India of the ’40s. These were children of mainly Polish soldiers and they were trying to somehow survive the horrors of World War II.
The German occupation of Poland (September 1, 1939) led to the eventual extermination of six million people. Lists were drawn up of teachers, clergymen, the intelligentsia, army officers for public execution; millions of Jews died in concentration camps. The psychological impact of the Russian invasion (September 17) was only slightly less devastating. Polish soldiers were drafted into the Soviet army by force; families were compelled to join re-education camps; children were separated from their mothers.
Gutowski’s father was forced to soldier for Soviet Union; his mother and sisters were sent to Uzbekistan. He was sent to an orphanage there as well. But then he was selected without his mother’s knowledge and transported to India around the time when efforts were being made by the Polish government-in-exile to evacuate some of the families from the USSR.
GETTING INVOLVED
The first concrete offer to rehabilitate these children came from the Maharaja of Nawanagar, Jam Saheb Digvijaysinhji Ranjitsinhji Jadeja. Between 1942 and 1947, these children lived under the Jam Saheb’s protection and were maintained by his private purse in a camp close to his summer palace in Balachadi.
The children’s plight had moved the 46-year-old king because he was interested in Polish culture due to his friendship with Ignacy Padrewski, a Polish pianist and diplomat whom he had met in Switzerland.
Eight of the 1,000 Polish children – now mostly in their 80s – he housed were recently in Jamnagar en route to Balachadi to commemorate the 100th year of Poland’s independence in this corner of India where they once flew their flag (even as they had lost their nation), and practised their religion and their culture.
Other than when they were with their parents, Balachadi is the one place where these children from war-torn Poland were able to have a childhood. It was here that seven-year-old Roman Butowski first saw an elephant; where Wieslaw Stypula, 15, held up a trumpet; where six-year-old Josephine Salva learnt to sing in Gujarati; where Zbigniew Bartosz, aged 8, learnt how to be popular.
“The Maharaja visited our camp with his pockets full of toffees, which I was entrusted to distribute…. I have never had so many friends,” recalls Bartosz, now 74.
The Polish children met the Jam Saheb’s children during festival days. Says Hershad Kumari, the Jam Saheb’s eldest daughter: “We would meet them when we went to spend our summers in Balachadi from Jamnagar. They would also come over during my father’s and brother’s birthdays. When they arrived in Balachadi they were in bad shape due to malnutrition, disease, the arduous travel, but they slowly recovered.” The Jam Saheb told the children he was the father of the people of Nawanagar, so he was also their father. The children called him ‘Bapu’. On the days they were feeling cheeky, they called him ‘the Big Jam’ – but never, of course, to his face.
SAFE PASSAGE
Polish children such as Gutowski, Stypula and Salva made their way from the USSR to Balachadi as World War II raged in Europe. Polish leaders in London began to persuade the British government to convince the Soviets to release the families of Polish soldiers and evacuate them to safer areas. [After Nazi Germany’s attack on the USSR in 1941, it joined the Allies.]
India, then a British colony, was suggested as a possible destination. But it was easier said than done. The evacuation of children of Polish soldiers forced to serve the Soviet Union would mean for the Soviets, a PR failure. Their children, once free, would carry tales of suffering and hardship. For the British government, it would be a huge financial inconvenience.
The book, Poles in India 1942-1948, based on archival documents, quotes an extract of a letter from the British Minister of State in Cairo to his Foreign Office in London in 1942: “…. Action must be taken to stop these people from leaving the USSR before we are ready to receive them (and then only at the rate we are able to receive and ship them away from the head of the Persian Gulf) however many die in consequence.”
It was at around this time that the JamSaheb stepped in. With his friends in other princely states, he raised ~600,000 between 1942-45 to build the Balachadi camp. The camp had more than 60 buildings, including a chapel, laundry rooms, a stage to hold Polish cultural programmes, a community centre to hold Saturday evening dances for growing adults, plus sports grounds.
As the head of a princely state in British India, the Jam Saheb had a measure of autonomy and he was going to use it. “The Jam Saheb’s offer for the kids was good for everybody. Jamnagar was far from any political centre,” says Polish ambassador to India Adam Burakowski on the sidelines of the event ‘Generation to Generations’, co-organised by the Polish embassy in Jamnagar recently. The other organiser was Anu Radha, the executive producer of the 2013 film, ‘Little Poland in India’, based on the testimonies of many of the Balachadi ‘children’. “The British government wanted to avoid any political colouring to be given to this event and to be used for any propaganda,” adds Burakowski. It would embarrass the British no end if the Polish, in their quest for independence, should agit-prop with Indians in British India.
GIVING BACK
Wieslaw Stypula, 88, a former engineer, one of the most active of the Jamsaheb’s Polish ‘children’, went to town with the story of “the good Maharaja”. He was one of the main backers behind naming a high school in Warsaw in 1998 after the former royal – High School Bednarska Jam Saheb. Ambassador Burakowski was a student of this school.
More than 70 years later, the memory of the Jam Saheb is what has drawn people over 80 from across the world to interrupt their retired lives and catch a plane to Jamnagar. For the last evening in Balachadi, Jerzy Tomaszek, a former civil engineer, is dressed up in suit and tie to happily pose before the shutterbugs. He and his wife Jadwiga talk of meeting one another when they were children in Balachadi.
On that same night, Josephine Salva, an 86-year-old former nurse, is a vision in white. Jo was one of the children of the first batch who came to Balachadi from Soviet Union. Dressed in a white peasant blouse and skirt with a black scarf tied in a knot around her head, her lips move all evening, singing that one song, to no one in particular. Jai jai maharaja… is how it goes. It’s probably what Jo sang on special occasions when the Jam Saheb came visiting.
“It’s the song mom never stops singing at home ,” says her daughter, Imogene, a teacher in USA, who has accompanied her. “Mom’s mind wanders but I think she has actually never left Balachadi.”
A week after her visit, Jo died. Things one remembers: the sun dazzled her eyes but she wouldn’t stop looking out of the bus window. The windmills, the car parks, to the lone tree standing in the middle of a stubble field in and around Jamnagar and en route to Balachadi – for all, Jo had this to say in a low, thrilled voice: “Isn’t it just gorgeous?” Saying no was not an option. You had to see out of her window. You had to surrender to what she was seeing in Balachadi.
We would go swimming and from the Balachadi beach look up at the Maharaja’s palace on the hill. JOSEPHINE NOWICKA SALVA returned to Balachadi 72 years after leaving it in 1946. She died a week after her visit.
As I was growing up, father told me stories about jungles. Jamnagar seemed like Jungle Book... TOMEK GUTOWSKI (right) is the son of Roman Gutowski (centre). Roman Gutowski came to Balachadi when he was seven years old in 1942. His grandson, Maciej, is standing beside him.
We got gifts from international organisations. Sometimes we were sent instruments we didn’t know how to play. The Maharaja brought teachers from the military band to teach us. WIESLAW STYPULA was 15 years old when he came to Balachadi in 1942. He is playing a cornet (top right, standing) in the photo.