Date: 1 October 2000

Hello!
My name is Franek Rymaszewski.

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).

When Germany was defeated and the war ended in 1945, I could not go back home, because — to my great disappointment and concern for my future — Poland was still occupied. But instead of Germans, the Soviet Red Army and the KGB, their notorious Secret Police (then called NKVD), were the occupiers. Moreover, the eastern part of Poland generally called Kresy, where I come from and where my family home in town Pinsk and my grandfather's landed estate were, has been totally annexed as part of the USSR. The Soviet Union, which in 1939 assisted Hitler to start the war, later became, accidentally, our "ally" in the war with Germany. From the beginning, the Soviets proved to be uncooperative, unreliable and difficult, and in the end, they turned out to be the invaders and ruthless occupiers themselves. Many Polish soldiers who returned home from the West after the war, were arrested by the KGB and deported to Soviet gulags. Having already experienced what life under communism was about, I had no choice but to remain in the West.

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. With diploma in my hand, I applied for an advertised position in Australia. The vacancy was for a design draftsman with the Australian Iron and Steel Pty Ltd in Port Kembla, south of Sydney, and included an assisted passage. They selected me and, in 1955, I emigrated aboard the ship s.s. New Australia. I was then 32 years old, and single.

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.

As time went on, the world political situation was becoming grim. The Free Western world was facing the Communist Soviet world committed to a systematic attempt to take over any country it could. This continuous provocation was described as the "cold war". In this situation I became convinced that Poland would not become free in my lifetime, unless there was a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Such a war was unthinkable, therefore it meant that there was no hope for me and my family of ever going back home to my own country.

Canada was attractive. The countryside looked much like I saw in Kresy in Poland. It reminded me of my happy childhood and the forests —  I liked the smell of fir and pine resin. However, Australia, although a dry and "a sunburnt country", offered better prospects and protection for my three infant children — as far away as possible from Communism and their nuclear threat. So I decided to return to Australia ... And, in 1966, I made my home in this country.

34  YEARS  LATER ...

I am now, in the year 2000, 77 years old. 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.

Unfortunately, my knowledge of family history is very limited, because in September 1939, with the outbreak of the Second World War, my part of Poland was invaded by the Soviet Union. And on 13 April 1940, at the age of 16, I was uprooted from my home in Pinsk, Polesie province, by the Soviet Secret Police, and deported to Siberian hard labour, frost and famine. At the same time I have lost my father, executed by firing by the Soviets, also I've lost my brothers and my country.

After two years of suffering in Siberia, I was very fortunate, thanks to Hitler attacking the Soviet Union, to get out of the USSR still alive in April 1942, with the General Anders Polish Army. Then, after the war service, the fate finally brought me to Australia.

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.

THE  FORGOTTEN  HOLOCAUST ...

We are, my children and I, the survivors of the forgotten holocaust. The one perpetrated by the Soviet Union. Soviet persecutions were much more extensive than the German. Yet, they were ignored by the West and its media. Why ?... Because the perpetrators happened to be on the winning side of the war and were able to cover up their wartime murders and terror. In contrast to captured German records, there were no films or photos or any records of Soviet atrocities made under Stalin's dictatorship where life, education, work, accommodation, property and behaviour of each human was totally controlled by the KGB and their masters in the Kremlin (possession of a private camera would land you in jail accused as a spy). In addition, the Soviets pursued against us, the so called "cold war". It was diverting attention from the exposure of their wartime and postwar atrocities in occupied countries. They blackmailed the Western world with atomic weapons, obtained thanks to easily stolen secrets in our free, open world by communist agents. The West, always politically pragmatic, did its best not to antagonize the Soviets and ignored their crimes against humanity. And indeed also not to antagonize the communist sympathizers in the West, the labour and socialist parties, left-wing organizations, etc. The media publicized German inhumanity instead. At the present time, the known past criminal history of Communism is being played down. To appease Russia now also for economic reasons, their evil history is misrepresented, revised and modified. The truth is falsified or simply erased. On the other hand, cinema screens, TV, radio, newspapers, and all media are full of evocations of the Jewish holocaust, but other victims and victims of a different tyrant, whose perpetrators and heirs are alive and are proud of their past, are denied the same memorial. Non-Jewish victims are tragically forgotten from Holocaust remembrances.

Poland's tragic fate during Second World War is recorded by history, and the fact that 6 and a half million Polish citizens perished : over half a million fighting men and women and 6 million civilians. Of these, 2 and a half million were Polish Jews and 4 million were Polish Christians and Catholics. The infamous Auschwitz concentration camp was built by the Germans in occupied Poland, and for the first two years from 1939 it was used for exterminating ethnic Poles only. From 1942, the camp begun to be also used for exterminating Jews, Gypsies and Russian war prisoners. Poland's suffering in the concurrent holocaust under the Communist occupant, was particularly ignored and now forgotten. Professor Norman Davis, a renowned English Oxford historian writes "we now know that during the war, Stalin actually imprisoned and killed by means of mass murder and concentration camps at least twice as many people as Hitler killed during the Holocaust".

SOVIET  TERROR: 1939-1941 ... Just before the war, in August 1939, the Soviet Union rejected an invitation from the Allies (Great Britain, France and Poland) to join their alliance against Hitler's continuing aggression in Europe. Instead, the Soviet Union signed a Friendship Treaty with Germany, which included a secret agreement to divide Poland and Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union. This Russian back-up gave Hitler free hand to start the Second World War. Soon after, in September 1939, the Red Army, in support of Hitler's invasion of Poland from the west, which triggered the war with England, France, Australia and India, attacked Poland from the east. Two months later, the Russians also attacked Finland, and invaded Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Bessarabia (Rumania).

Friendly meeting of communist and fascist aggressors. A crew of the Soviet tank is being welcomed by Nazi officers in the Polish town Brest where both occupying armies met in September 1939.

Brest, on the river Bug, became a border town on the new Soviet-German border that divided occupied Poland.

Above: A Red Army high ranking officer and the German officers discussing arrangements of occupation.

Below: A commander of the Soviet tank is being welcomed in Brest by Nazi officers after invasion of Poland in September 1939.

In 1939, Stalin and Hitler divided Poland between themselves, subjecting Poles to a double reign of terror. Under the initial Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, in a short period from September 1939 to June 1941 (before German attack on the USSR) over 150,000 Poles were arrested and deliberately killed in prisons, including 27,500 Polish officers retreating eastwards with their troops from the German onslaught. The officers were taken prisoner by the Russians, and six months later were all individually executed by a bestial shot in the head with hands tied at the back and buried in KATYN forests. The Soviets were ignoring the international law with regard to prisoners of war which was observed even by the Nazis. In addition, at the same time, nearly 2 million Poles, men, women and children  —  I was one of them  —  were deported to slave labour concentration camps and gulags in Siberia and other remote areas of the USSR.  Half of the prisoners and deportees have died within the first two years due to excessive hard work, harsh treatment, primitive living conditions, cold, continuous malnutrition, hunger and starvation, exposure to severe climates, lack for clothing, lice and disease. This was Communist Russia's cheap way of exterminating people. It was primitive and cruel but it was just as effective as the Nazi gas chambers. Continuously practiced from the times of the Lenin's October Revolution, it was just a natural part of the Communist - Socialist system. This treatment of Poles by the Soviet Union is still an unfamiliar story to foreigners. News of what was going on came only scantily to the West between 1939 and 1941. Later in the war, when Britain and the United States became the allies of the USSR, discussion of this episode was discouraged and ignored by the media. During the post-war years the true story emerged only in fragments , and was overshadowed by the more spectacular, documented and better-publicised Nazi behaviour. Yet in its brutality and the sheer scale of its cold-blooded attempt to obliterate the Polish nation physically and culturally, this Communist Soviet occupation far outdid, without comparison, the crimes committed by the Germans.

For the first two years of the war the Soviets cooperated and supported the Nazis against the Allies : politically, militarily and economically. While British, Polish and Australian airmen, sailors and soldiers were loosing their lives in the West due to German war activities, the Russians supplied Hitler with food, agricultural products, wheat, petrol, oil, timber, and other war materials, as well as disseminated anti-western propaganda. This lasted until June 1941, when ever-victorious Hitler decided not to share Europe with Stalin. He betrayed his partner in crime and invaded the Soviet Union itself, advancing with lightning speed right up to Moscow and Stalingrad.

SOVIET  OPPRESSION RETURNS ... After German attack, the Soviets unexpectedly found themselves on the same side as the Allies. But they did not share our cause for fighting : the defence of freedom and democracy. Using their usual methods of deceit, the Soviets proclaimed the war as "the Great Patriotic War for the Fatherland", implying an illusion of fight for the former Russian Fatherland. But they really had in mind the survival of their own dictatorial power devoted to communist domination and imperialism. From 1944, with the Red Army advance on the eastern war front, and after the end of war, the oppression continued. 750 thousands more Poles were deported to the USSR gulags from Poland "liberated" by the Soviet "ally". Most of the victims were former members and their families of the Polish Homeland Army, the largest and most effective underground resistance anywhere in German-occupied Europe. They were branded by the Soviets as the "bourgeois organisation" taking orders from the "fascist" Polish Government in London. In addition, some 20 thousands former Polish underground leaders were tracked down, imprisoned and executed by the Soviet judges and communist puppet regime installed in Warsaw by the KGB.

Similar atrocities were happening in other Soviet occupied countries: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, part of Finland, Moldova, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania.

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 2008, 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.

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.

Our Family Tree, a solid Polish oak, had suffered a raging Communist storm and was uprooted.
One of its offshoots, still weak, is now growing in Australia.

12th September 2007 : THE YOUNGEST DESCENDANT >>>

One-day-old Henry Kasper Rymaszewski, my second grandson, is held by myself, his 84-years-old grandfather (dziadek).

In June 2001, at the age of 78, I had a heart attack due to vascular blockages — a result of lifelong accumulation of cholesterol which could have been prevented.
In September 2002 I underwent an open heart bypass surgery for heart failure. With a new start I hope to live long. Rymaszewskis are known for longevity.