A North Albury resident who endured deportation, near starvation and the death of close family members as a Polish child in World War II has died aged 87.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Roman Wajda’s funeral will be held Tuesday morning after he died of cancer last Wednesday.
From time to time we had compulsory meetings with the commandant telling us to forget Poland as Russia was our mother country now
- Roman Wajda
He was one of more than a million Poles deported to remote Soviet Union regions during Stalin’s regime.
Mr Wajda told his story to then-Border Mail journalist Howard Jones 12 years ago, recounting the hardships that began as a nine-year-old in 1939 near Poland’s border with the Soviet Union.
“On a beautiful day in mid-September, our class was on a nature study when we saw Russian cavalry on horseback as they invaded Poland,” Mr Wajda said.
In February 1940, he, his family, and hundreds of other Polish villagers were loaded on to a train of cattle trucks and sent, eventually, to the Kirovskaya Oblast region, hundreds of kilometres north east of Moscow.
“We stayed at the station for about three days, with the only toilet a hole in the side of the truck,” Mr Wajda said.
“Bread was picked up at stops but I don’t remember any other food and one person per truck was allowed to get snow for water.”
They settled into a camp, where all the able-bodied adults were put to work.
“There wasn’t much food and women and old men queued for hours for bread,” he said. “Lice and mosquitoes were always with us. One of our treasures was a broken needle that we used to pull threads from clothes and to sew something else together.
“From time to time we had compulsory meetings with the commandant telling us to forget Poland as Russia was our mother country now.”
In August 1941 Stalin agreed to release Poles to join the fight against Germany, with Mr Wajda, his mother, grandfather and younger brother and sister, effectively left to fend for themselves.
They went from village to village heading south, begging for food and trying to keep out the frost and snow.
Mr Wajda’s grandfather and brother didn’t survive this period while his mother died the next year at a camp near the Caspian Sea.
The orphaned siblings were sent to Iran and then became separated, sister Jane ending up in the US and Mr Wajda in England.
He lived there nearly 20 years, marrying Maria and raising three children.
They migrated to Australia in 1967 and then settled in Albury. After Maria’s death, Mr Wajda married Rhoda in 1979.
A builder clever with his hands, Mr Wajda always enjoyed making things.
He is survived by his second wife, children, stepchildren, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
