A Stepek Family Christmas Tale

Christmas in Eastern Poland 1938

As the year 1938 drew to a close much was not well in the Stepek household. Fear of war in Europe continued to grow. Worse for the family, in mid-December my grandfather Wladyslaw fell seriously ill with kidney problems. His doctor sent him to the local hospital for further checks. There the consultant told him they would have to operate but that there was no guarantee he would survive the operation. Wladyslaw was left in hospital to ponder this fateful decision; he might die if he rejected the operation, yet he might die if he went ahead with it.

His wife Janina sent a letter and some money to their son, my father, Jan, who was still boarding at agricultural college some four hundred miles away, in an era where few had cars and the railway system was fairly rudimentary. She explained his father's grave illness and suggested that Jan go to Warsaw to stay with one of his uncles, or remain at the college in Bojonowo through the Christmas and New Year period. She reasoned that young Jan could not help his father and would only feel helpless and upset over Christmas with his father in hospital, and with the possibility of his death hanging over the entire household.

As Christmas Eve arrived the family's younger daughter, Danka, was unwell in bed with a high temperature so the home was in an even more depressed frame of mind. As morning gave way to early afternoon Danka's fever worsened and she appeared to mutter senseless words as if imagining things in her head.

She then opened her eyes and said "Mother, Jan is at the station. Send the sledge to collect him."

Janina thought Danka must have been missing her big brother and dreaming of him in her feverish state. She cooled Danka's brow and sat beside her.

"No. No, he's probably in Warsaw. He's not coming home this Christmas."

Half an hour later the owner of the farm next to the Stepeks came to the door and said "Jan is at the station looking for a lift home. He asked me if I could tell you to send the sledge to come to collect him."

That night lots of children were coming around to sing carols. It was beautiful with lights to guide their paths, and they were singing and singing. Later on music bands came, playing traditional tunes. In the midst of this, someone opened the door of the house and as Danka put it to me more than half a century later "It was father, and that was the best Christmas ever. Your father had arrived, then my father arrived at night for Christmas from the hospital. And somehow for the following months he was ok and didn’t die of kidney failure."

She ended by saying "That was the last Christmas we spent together as a family." By the time the following Christmas came, 1939, war had erupted. Wladyslaw, even in his ill state, was deemed to be a potential resistance leader, and was singled our for immediate execution by the invading Red Army forces. So he went into hiding with the resistance. While he was away the rest of the family were deported by cattle train to a labour camp in Arctic Russia. In 1942 my grandmother Janina died of "starvation and exhaustion". She was 39. The following year her husband, my grandfather, died too, of cancer. He was 49. The three children were not to return to Poland for at least a quarter of a century, and none ever returned to the home they were born and raised in.

So why have I shared this story? Love your family. They are precious and we don't have them forever.

Think with kindness and compassion of the millions around the world, and here in our own countries, who have no peace, no rest, poor health, or are exiled from where they once called home.

And celebrate your life and your Christmas with energy and happiness.