RYMASZEWSKI
FAMILY in AUSTRALIA and WORLD-WIDE |
![]() G'Day mate! Dzieñ dobry! |
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INTRODUCTION BY FRANEK RYMASZEWSKI |
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Hello!
I live in Australia, in the city of Sydney. Australia is a sunny, free and democratic country of great cultural diversity. There are very many immigrants here, from all over the world. Most immigrants came soon after the war. In that period they were British, Italian, Greek, Polish, Yugoslav, Dutch and German. I came from Poland ... originally. This is my story : WHY I EMIGRATED TO AUSTRALA I was born on 25 October 1923 in Poland and lived in town Pinsk, then Poland. During the Second World War, in April 1942 at the age of 18, I joined the Polish Armed Forces in the West. It was an Allied army, attached to the British army in England. The volunteers were recruited by the Free Polish Government-in-Exile located in London. This Polish Army in the West was the fourth largest armed force during that War and participated on every front of the war. (Point at my photo).
After discharge from
the Army with status of an Alien, and therefore second-class citizen,
I worked at lowly paid manual jobs in London, studying hard in the
evenings to catch up with my education. Eventually I won a very
modest scholarship from the Polish Exiled Government in London for
a three year full time tertiary course in Building, being available
as a study in an area of post-war "national importance".
Although it was not my chosen profession, I completed the course
with distinction.
After four years of working in Australia, doing overtime, saving my wages and living frugally in the staff hostel next to my employer's smoky Steelworks, I felt increasingly very lonely. And in 1959, I went back to England. I undertook additional studies in London, living on my savings, and qualified as a Structural Engineer. Afterwards, I went to have a look at life in Canada. Over there, I worked for Du Pont of Canada Ltd in Montreal, Quebec, an industrial chemical company building their own factories for the new technology of plastics production. Eventually I went to Toronto in Ontario, where I got married in 1962.
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34 YEARS LATER
We are the only Rymaszewski family in the whole of Australia at this time, and I am the only member alive from my original Polish family. Before it is too late, I thought, I should leave some record about our origin — who we are, and where we came from — and save my children's heritage from being lost forever. As many descendants of immigrants know well, it is so easy to lose the family history and so hard to gain it back. So I devoted this website to my family background and to our genealogy.
For 50 years, I have been isolated from my homeland and my past. I have no family documents or records to help me with my genealogy except what my father told me before he was murdered by the Soviets and what I remember myself. And a few photos and notes. My children grew up without contact with their roots and without educational help in their mother language and heritage, which other migrant children in Australia have been receiving from their free mother countries
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| AND NOWADAYS, AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION And nowadays, after the collapse of the Evil Empire which in 1939 stabbed in the back and butchered Poland — my home town Pinsk, our house with large garden grounds, as well as my grandfather's country home and landed estate, all robbed by the Soviet-Russian Imperialists, were not returned to Poland. One of newly created post-Soviet states, Belarus, has taken over our land and our properties. In Belarus, still in the year 2009, there is no democracy. The "reforms" didn't go very far. Under the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko, things remain there like they were very much in the Soviet Union. |
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| Contacts with new bureaucracies of the former Soviet Union are not very easy. They have retained the communist old guard, soviet mentality and attitudes. Most of the post-Soviet republics are run by former communists. The old guard have never been punished for their crimes. There have been no trials, not even truth commissions or government inquiries and debates. | ||
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AUSTRALIA
- OUR NEW HOME |
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In
the meantime I am still completing my website and on my birthdays my
3 children and 7 grandchildren sing to me in Polish: STO LAT ! May you live a 100 years ! |
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YEAR
2007 |
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YEAR
2008 MY MOVE FROM SYDNEY TO MELBOURNE |
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Melbourne downtown in 2008 (Flinders Railway Station) |
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Postscript
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When the time comes for me to depart into Eternity, my son JULIAN will let you know. He will post the news on the NOTICE BOARD below. After my death Julian will take over this website. |
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This
website was LAST AMENDED on 3 July 2009 |
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Today's
date is : |
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This
website has been visited |
times since 1 October 2000 | |
I
hope you will find something of interest to you. |
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