Teresa Somkowicz

Teresa Somkowicz was born into an aristocratic Polish family in 1927. Until she married her title was Princess, as her father Wladyslaw Swidrygiello-Swiderski was a Prince. She had a very happy upbringing along with her older sister Maryla on their estate in Eastern Poland, attended to by the family’s servants. Teresa didn’t have to dress herself until she started boarding school 2 weeks prior to the outbreak of WW2.

Her father was a landowner and many Jews were amongst his employees, including his estate manager and accountant. In 1939 Germany invaded Poland from the West and 3 days later, the Russians invaded from the East. The N.K.V.D soon came with a list looking for Wladyslaw, but his loyal employees hid him and his family, denying knowledge of his whereabouts.

A year later however, he was betrayed by a Ukrainian neighbor and was taken away. Teresa was 11 years old and never saw her father again. It wasn’t until the 1990’s that she discovered he had been murdered with thousands of other Polish Officers and Intelligentsia and had been buried in a mass grave at Charkow, similar to the massacre in Katyn Forest.

After he was captured, her mother had the opportunity to flee West and join her 2 brothers and their families behind the German lines, but she refused whilst her husband was in Russian occupied territory. The N.K.V.D allowed prisoners to send postcards to find out where their families were living.

Unfortunately, this decision led to her betrayal and Teresa found herself on a cattle truck with her mother and sister. This took them on a 3-week journey to a Labour camp/farm in Khazakstan. She was to be held there for nearly two years in -40°C temperatures. They would not have survived a 2nd winter.

In 1941 they were granted amnesty by Russia in return for the Allies help in fighting the Germans who had now invaded the Soviet Union. Together with thousands of former Polish soldiers and their families who had been deported to the East, they had to walk or take trains through Siberia and Khazakstan to join General Ander’s Free Polish Army and freedom.

They arrived at Krasnovodsk Polish transit camp in Soviet Turkmenistan on the Caspian Sea, where the refugees boarded vessels to take them to Persia. When Teresa, Maryla and their mother arrived at the sea port of Pahlevi, the main landing point for refugees coming into Iran, their mother insisted they stay.

The girls had huge open sores on their legs due to malnutrition. The Caspian Sea is a closed salty sea and they bathed and swam in it to clean and heal their wounds. From there they went to Tehran where Maryla worked for the Shah’s brother. From Tehran, they travelled to British Mandatory Palestine where the girls enrolled at a Catholic School in Nazareth. This school was run by nuns, for the education of Polish girls in the Army. Teresa was to remain there for the rest of the WW2 and was brought to Britain in 1947 after the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

Once in the U.K. Teresa found herself in a Displaced Persons Camp in Witley, processing the paperwork for demobbing Polish soldiers. It was here that she met her husband, the father of her only child, Krystyna (Kika).

Teresa has spent the rest of her life in Britain, working in travel and volunteering for the Polish Community. She now lives in Penrhos, a Polish village for elderly residents. The former airbase, R.A.F. Penrhos, served as a demobilization camp for Polish servicemen. The Polish community then purchased the site in 1949 as its facilities were ideal to accommodate exiled Polish war veterans and it is still in use today.

With thanks to Teresa Somkowicz and her daughter, Kika. 2018

I traced Teresa, a friend of my grandmothers, from a photograph I had been sent from Poland, taken around 1962 in London.