Swiatkiewicz, Walter
(Aug. 8, 1911 - )
Displaced personIf one were to look up the term displaced person in the dictionary, it wouldn't be a surprise to find no definition, no picture of a refugee, prisoner of war or a slave laborer, and a person without a country. After the Second World War, the United States took in 110,566 Poles in this group - sometimes abbreviated DP - between July 1, 1947, and December 31, 1951. Among them was Wladislaw (who changed it to Walter) Swiatkiewicz, his wife, Anna, both 39 years of age, and their son, Zbigniew (later John), four and a half, all listed as stateless on the manifest of the Queen Elizabeth that brought them to New York on February 13, 1951.
Not many families of the same name came from Poland. Walter Swiatkiewicz was born August 8, 1911, at Torun, Poland, where the famous astronomer, Nicholas Copernicus, was born in 1473. His parents were Waclaw and Wladyslawa (Gromadzka) Swiatkiewicz. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he left his job as an accountant and joined the Polish Army. Shortly after, because the underequiped Polish Army, only 20 years old, was no match for German tanks and motorized infantry, he was captured. During his imprisonment in Siberia he was tortured. He was released two years later when Germany invaded Russia, as was General Wladyslaw Anders, with the idea that he would form another Polish Army to fight alongside the Red Army. Anders, however, didn't get along with his Russian counterparts and escaped with his Polish troops to Iran. It was there that Swiatkiewicz joined Anders Army and met his future wife, Anna, a former prisoner of war and a member of the women's Polish military forces. At the same time, General Anders stopped taking orders from the Russians and joined the British military occupation forces in Iran. As the war continued, the British high command moved the 2nd Polish Corps first to Iraq and then Palestine, where most of the Jewish soldiers deserted the regiment. None of the military police pursued them. General Anders took the rest of his stout-hearted army to Italy in 1943. By May 18, 1944, when the 2nd Polish Corps captured Monte Casino after a three-month siege, it ended with a victory that Swiatkiewicz would never forget.
On Jan. 5, 1945, while the 2nd Polish Corps was still in Italy, Walter Swiatkiewicz and Anna were married on the island of San Giorgio, Italy, supposedly in a church designed by Andrea Palladio in the 1500s. After a honeymoon in the Italian resort, Swiatkiewicz returned to the security forces of General Anders to stand guard. Eventually Anna Swiatkiewicz gave birth to a boy at Trani, a fishing port on the east coast of Italy.
After the war, the family lived in France, Wales, and England. When it came to the United States, it lived for about a year in Bronxville and then in Lackawanna, New York, where Walter Swiatkiewicz worked for Bethlehem Steel Corporation until he retired in 1976. Anna Swiatkiewicz died August 30, 1992. No one knew it then, and least of all Walter Swiatkiewicz, but the Polish refugees of the 1940s were almost extinct. Each one carried a piece of Poland and spilled it here and there.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)