Polish Consulate restores graves of their WWII victims
MUMBAI: The Polish Consulate in Mumbai has received several enquiries after the Consul General Damian Irzyk visited Panchgani earlier this week and tweeted about the Poles who were buried in the hill station.
After visiting St Joseph’s Convent in Panchgani on May 1, the diplomat tweeted: “This year the Consulate General of Poland in Mumbai renovated the graves of Maria Swiezawska, Jan Borek, Franciszek Bieleń and Stanisław Saybiński located in Panchgani Christian Cemetery.”
The four graves were restored by the consulate in April. These graves were not in the consulate’s files, and were only discovered after the diplomat found “Poles in India 1942-48” which was based on personal reminisces and archive documents.
“The book mentioned Maria Swiezawska and how she passed away in Panchgani. So, we visited local Jesuit priest Alfred Benjamin SJ, who showed us the parish records. We found four Polish names and the location of their graves. The graves were in a poor condition so we hired a local contractor who restored them,” Irzyk said.
“Social media has been very effective in terms of getting to know groups of Poles from India and their descendants scattered around the world,” he said.
In August 1943, during the World War II, the Polish Social Welfare Centre opened in Panchgani to help the several Polish citizens who were either refugees or visitors seeking medical treatment at the Bel-air sanatorium.
Following his post, the consulate in Mumbai has received several calls from relatives of Polish persons who were either war refugees in India or lived and worked here. The centre acquired villas in Panchgani to use as offices as well as food stores, classrooms and even dormitories. Polish nurses and teachers as well as those Poles, who had recovered but were not strong enough to leave India, also stayed in these villas. It closed down in 1947.
“We came to know the story of Maria Swiezawska nee Koscielecka, born to a noble Polish family living in Lykoszyn, who was being treated at Bel-air for tuberculosis. In the summer of 1939, she said goodbye to her husband and teenage son, who was supposed to start a new school year. Little did she know that she would never see them again. On September 1, World War II began. Maria tried to return home, but in 1940, she was arrested by Russians at her father’s apartment in Lviv and deported to Siberia. In 1941, after Sikorski-majski Agreement, with hundreds of thousands of other Poles, she was set free and once again started her journey. Finally in January 1943, fate threw her to TB sanatorium in Panchgani and like many Polish war refugees in India, Maria needed medical attention. She was sent to Bel-air sanatorium in Panchgani, where Maria passed away at the age of 42,” the diplomat said.
“I am extremely grateful to the Consul and his wife for restoring the grave that was in bad condition. I had visited her grave in Panchgani with Maria’s son Alexander in 1980, I was 28 then. We made this journey then for we, Poles, have a custom to visit close relative’s graves. It was an important journey for my uncle as he saw his mother the last time in 1939,” Agnieszka Karbowska, the granddaughter of Swiezawska’s sister, said.