My Dad, Zbigniew 'George' Kurzweil was born in 1920 near the town of Stanislawow in Eastern Poland. He was one of eight children, and was the third youngest. He had four sisters and three brothers. It seems that eight children was about average in those days. He's the little blonde boy on the bottom right...

His father was a forest ranger, and as a result of that they lived in the highlands amongst hills, forests, rivers and streams. They owned horses, dogs and birds. I heard many stories of winter skiing mishaps, fishing trips, almost drowning in rivers, almost getting shot with rifle accidents, and an aborted attempt to walk to Africa when he was about 10 years old. 
Here are the three youngest boys, Hubert at the back (oldest), Waclaw in the middle (youngest) and my Dad at the front. This must have been about 1925.

When he was 14 his father died, and so the family moved into the town itself and started a different type of life , which for my Dad was taken up with going to the local high school.

In 1939 when my Dad had turned 19 the second world war broke out with the invasion of western Poland by the German army. Germany had become a massive war machine and the outdated, outmoded Polish army had little to prevent the invasion. My dads oldest brother Ryszard was an officer in the Polish army. After a couple of weeks as the Polish army tried to regroup the Soviets invaded from the East with nothing to oppose them.  The German and Russian armies met at a prearranged line on the map which basically sliced the country into two occupied halves. They Soviets arrested any members of the Polish army especially officers. My Dads brother was arrested, but he managed to escape, only to be caught again. The Russians beat him so badly that within a few days he died of his wounds. Ryszard......

The families in that side of Poland had to put up Russian soldiers in their homes. Then one morning at approximately 1am there was a knock at the door, It was a Russian officer with soldiers, they told the family that they had ten minutes to pack their belongings, they were being deported to Siberia. So they packed what they could, and had to leave their home. My Dad had a canary and he released it out of its cage and out of the window. His last memory of his home was the canary repeatedly crashing against the window trying to get itself back in the house.

They were put into cramped cattle trucks, no windows, no lights, just straw on the floor. The journey took two weeks, with stops for water. At one stop a woman got separated from her child and as the train set off without her child her mind completely snapped and she never recovered.

In Siberia they lived in small cottages dug into the ground, they had an oven that they filled with wood and slept around for warmth. My Dad had to work slave labour, as a quarry worker, cattle herder and tree cutter in freezing conditions. They all suffered from night blindness as result of vitamin deficiencies. sometimes they stayed out all night looking after cattle or chopping wood. He told me how they made camp fires and a very watery stew. There were lots of mosquitoes which were attracted by the stew and they tried to get them to drown in the stew to add some extra meat. Sometimes the ground was totally frozen and they could barely manage anything. On one occasion he got lost in a blizzard and it was only by bumping into a cow and holding onto its horns that he managed to follow it back to camp.

This went on for two years.

In the meantime things had changed drastically in the war. Germany had gone against its agreements with Russia and invaded the Russian held territories and continued to push the Russian army back across Europe through Russia towards Moscow. Stalin was desperate for the western allies to form a second front in the west. The Polish General Anders visited Stalin and negotiated to have the Polish men in captivity in Siberia released to join the western allied armies with a view to enhancing the armies of the future second front.

My Dad was given the choice of joining up or staying where he was. Unfortunately the choice meant the men only, his mother and sisters would stay where they were. His mother told him and his younger brother Waclaw that if they didn't join the Polish army in the west they would eventually be dragged into the Russian army which would be a lot worse. So eventually they decided to join up. That was the last time they saw their mother.

The Polish men were taken south to Kazakhstan where they were signed up to the Polish army and uniforms were issued and training began. Then they had long overland trips through the deserts of Iran and Iraq where they suffered from dehydration and dysentery.

Eventually they arrived at the gulf of Arabia and onto ships to be taken around Africa. Transport directly over Europe was not possible. The ships took them down to South Africa where they stopped in Durban for more training, and then more ships up through the Atlantic, hoping that they would not be attacked by German U-boats (submarines).

Their journey ended in Scotland where they joined the army camps in InverGarry. They were given choices of what sort of units to join. They were told that the fastest way to get back to Poland would be by joining the paratroops as they would be trained and then dropped on Warsaw in conjunction with a Polish resistance uprising. So, my Dad and his brother joined the paras.

Parachutes were still quite experimental in those days. Training involved jumping from balloons, these had large baskets with a square hole in the base. You sat with your feet dangling into the hole, watching the ground get further and further away, and when it was your turn you jumped.   

Landing was difficult as you landed with quite a bit of force and had to keep your legs together to try and prevent a broken leg, which quite a few of them didn't manage.

They progressed onto jumps from planes, from Dakotas which would be the planes they used in action. My Dad told me how they had squad records which they tried to beat for the fastest squad out of the plane. The guy in front of my Dad was known to be hesitant, so my Dad leaned forward and told him that he would be jumping straight on top of him, so no hesitation. Unfortunately my Dad jumped a bit prematurely and got caught in the parachute lines of the guy in front, basically leaving my Dad dangling and caught underneath the plane. The squad instructor had to carefully lean out of the door and cut him free. They didn't break any records that day.

Night jumps were apparently amazing as you jumped into black nothingness, but landing was very difficult as you were never sure exactly when the ground would slam into you. On one occasion just as my Dad was about to land there was a gust of wind that blew the parachute one way and he swung the other, eventually crashing into the ground on his back. He blamed this for all his back problems that plagued him the rest of his life.

In 1944 they were ready for action, and hoping to be dropped on Poland, but General.Montgomery had a great idea to end the war early by capturing a number of strategic bridges in Holland. This operation was called 'Market-Garden', if you've heard of Arnhem or the film and book 'A Bridge too Far' this was basically it. All the paratroops were called in for this, and the Poles accepted that they had to follow strategic decisions. What should have been a straightforward and high impact blow was everything but. Bad intelligence, bad weather, bad everything and lots went wrong. Bad weather meant that the drops were spread out and having to wait for days waiting for the weather to lift drove some of them crazy. They all knew they could get killed and the wait was intolerable. 

My Dad's the one at the back without a helmet....

By the time the Poles were airlifted for their jumps, the whole operation had become a rescue mission to help the earlier drops. They were dropped in wrong areas, areas that should have been enemy free (but weren't ). My Dad remembered dropping through the skies with tracer bullets cutting the skies as you hung there unable to do anything. He remembers a Messerschmit fighter plane strafing the landing zone and seeing the ground in front of him bursting with machine gun fire literally inches from him.

There was a lot of confusion and he found a bicycle which he climbed on to go faster down a road to find the rest of his squad. A friend of his shouted from a field telling him to take cover where he was, but my Dad decided to take his chances on the bicycle. There was an explosion behind him and when he looked round there was a huge crater where his friend had stood.

When he found his squad he also found the remains of another squad which he was informed was his brothers squad. He realised he'd just lost his brother until he walked around a corner and found his brother sitting munching an apple.   

Eventually he made it back to Britain. He was a bit of a maniac on a motorbike and during some motorbike stunt he crashed and smashed his face, cheekbones and eye socket which had to be pieced together, and probably meant he missed anymore action.


When the war in Europe was over, the Poles were very bemused. The Eastern half of Poland that the Soviets had invaded at the start of the war, was now retained by the Soviets. The Polish government that had escaped to exile in London was ignored by Stalin and he installed his own puppet government into Poland. So while the western allies celebrated victory the Poles and other East Europeans found themselves still occupied by the enemy. They couldn't understand how the war had officially started with the invasion of Poland and ended with Poland still occupied.  The soldiers that returned to eastern Poland were immediately arrested and carted off to Siberia again. The Poles that went to Western Poland were kept under close scrutiny and had to report to the Police at first on a daily basis, and many of those also got deported again.

My Dad, his brother and many of their comrades decided that returning to Poland would not be an option, and they would  have to stay in Britain until the West liberated Eastern Europe as they could not imagine the western powers tolerating the Soviet occupation, but as we know that didn't resolve itself until 1989 (44 years later!)

My Dad and his brother stayed on with the Polish army in Britain until 1946, after which they became civilians and had to look for jobs. They had no qualifications, they had very little English language, they had no family for support. Literally they had to start new lives in what they were stood up in. So they headed for the industrial mill towns of Northern England. They ended up working in factories in Halifax in West Yorkshire, and because of their numbers they formed a Polish community that met socially and for Polish church services.

Halifax had a Polish priest Father Gaik. A survivor of concentration camps and being a guinea pig for Nazi experiments. He took it upon himself to bring the community together as he knew they had to start lives and families here. That's how my Dad met my Mum.

My Mum, Waleria, was born in1926 in Western Poland near the small town of Kepno. Again one of eight children. During the war she was carted off to Germany for slave labour, she had to wear a 'P' armband to distinguish her from Jews and Gypsy's who wore different armbands.  My Mum told us very little of what happened to her, but with her Mum they ended up at Dachau concentration camp. If you've seen Shindlers list, the scene where they all have to strip off in the showers and start screaming thinking they are all about to die, but turns out to be a real shower, happened to her. She had a photo of herself and her Mum when they were liberated at the end of the war but she never let us see it and destroyed it.

She came to England at the end of the war with her twin brother Stanley and headed for the factory towns of the North, and through the events organised by the Polish priest she met my Dad.  

They dated and eventually got married in Sowerby Bridge in 1950, and bought a tiny one up one down house. They both continued to work and hope that one day they would be able to return to a free Poland. Things got worse in Poland and the Eastern bloc in general, and the possibility of seeing family that they had left behind seemed very remote. Letters were heavily censored at both sides as the cold war went into full swing.

In 1955 they moved into Halifax itself into a bigger house and had their first child. My sister Eva. In July 1958 a great day for the human race, I was born.

His brother Waclaw, had also married earlier and had three children. Here we all are with Ryszard at the back, Christine on the left, and Halina on the right......

My parents worked hard and they sent money and various items to their families in Poland. In the early 60's my Mums Father died, he and my Grandmother had continued to live in Ludwigsburg in Germany where they had ended up after the war. When he died my Grandmother came to England to live with us. My Dad always had her on his arm when they went to church, and treated her as an integral part of our family, maybe he felt that was the least he could do as he couldn't get to see his own mother who with his sisters had spent the rest of the war in Siberia, eventually coming to western Poland after the war. His mother died around the time that I was born. His older brother Hubert who lived in Krakow came to visit in 1959 or '60, it took alot of organising, and getting through customs was a harrowing experience. This was the only occasion that they were together since before the war. Thats Hubert on the left, Waclaw in the middle, and my Dad on the right. Guess who is photobombing at the back!

My parents didn't smoke or drink, or go out or go on holidays, and with my grandmothers arrival, they could both work fulltime, so they saved and saved and by 1969 they moved into a newly built bungalow with a huge garden. Something that was unheard of amongst the Polish refugees at the time.

My Dad had a very good grasp of English, much better than anyone else I'd ever met that had come over from Poland. He loved English crosswords, and even when Polish satellite TV became available in this country he insisted on continuing with the regular British TV.

He loved to draw and paint. I used to study a little notebook he had of his sketches that he'd made in Siberia, and all through our childhood he drew more and more and started to paint. His paintings got more and more ambitious and our living room ended up looking like an art gallery. 

Despite the physical work in factories, my parents would come home and work on the garden. What started off as a weed covered derelict wasteland ended up looking like a small park with weeping willows, conifers, and fruit trees. The neighbours thought  they were crazy as they worked on the garden and eventually had to have three huge lorries take away all the stones they had dug up by hand.

In the early 70's my Dad got British citizenship and thus a British passport, so in 1974 I went with him on a trip to Poland, he felt safe enough to travel there as a British citizen. I met his remaining brother and two of his sisters and all their families. His youngest sister had stayed in Russia and ended up marrying a Russian and starting a new life there. He'd lost another sister in the war, but they never got to the bottom of what had happened. Rumour had it she'd been locked up by the Germans who had shot all prisoners as they retreated towards the end of the war. That was the first and only time he saw his sisters since before the war.  

My Dad retired in the mid 80's and continued to paint, work on the garden, take his dogs for walks and loved to see his children and new grandchildren. My sister had a girl Michelle born in 1983 and a boy Christopher born in 1985. I had a boy Alexander born in 1992 and a girl Lorian in 1994.

In 1997 my Mum died of a series of strokes. (a pic from their dating days)....

My Dad continued as he had before but gradually became more and more reclusive, and as he lost his dogs and his canary he didnt replace them. It was obvious when we visited that he was glad to see us but it also interfered with his daily routine and eventually the whole family descending on him at Xmas or Easter was getting too much.

In 2003 I took my family for a holiday in Holland and we visited the world war 2 sites, including the cemeteries. I took pictures of every gravestone that was of a Polish serviceman just in case he recognised any names. When I showed him the photos he remembered many of them... this one was a great singer, this one was such a comedian, this one was a great chess player, but he also remembered how many of them died.

In the last few years he lost his brother Waclaw who he had grown up with, gone through Siberia and the army with, and lived not far from each other for the rest of their lives watching each others familes grow. He took that quite badly.

He also gained two great grandchildren. Ellie and Luke, daughter and son of his grandson Chris.

Even in his 90's he was still trying to climb trees in the garden to lop branches and even up a ladder and onto the roof to cement a loose tile. On one occasion I sent my son Alex up a ladder armed with a saw to lop branches whilst my Dad and me held the bottom... 'Nooo hes doing it wrong! I can't watch! Get him down I'll go up and do it!

His 90th birthday, with children and granchildren....

Over the last year his health deteriorated rapidly and before Xmas he went into hospital. Even when I visited him in hospital a day before he died, with him looking very frail and skeletal, and his speech barely understandable he was still making little jokes to the nurses. As the doctor arrived he raised his hand 'I'm still alive!'

He died on 18th February 2014 aged 93.