As Europe balks at the influx of refugees from the Middle East, one woman recalls fleeing from the horrors of Stalin.
'Głodna [hungry]." Przemysława Hernacka-Azzi repeated this single word when asked to describe her childhood.
She had to be prompted gently before she would go on.
“I remember sleeping on floors, cold, dirty and damp,” she says. “I remember the adults around me sobbing, many praying, while their babies kept crying. I had holes in my shoes and my feet hurt but I had to keep walking, my mother said. She would tell me ‘a little bit more’, but we kept walking and walking. I was so tired. So hungry.”
Unsure of her age, she believes she is now somewhere in her late 70s. Yet memories of a painful childhood as a Polish refugee during the Second World War are as clear as if they occurred yesterday.
“A child does not forget,” she says. “Children remember the sad times. It leaves a permanent scar on their hearts, so my heart aches for the new refugee children I see almost daily appearing on the streets.”
Mrs Hernacka-Azzi lives in Ghazir, Lebanon. She arrived in the country on foot in the early 1940s along with an estimated 6,000 Polish refugees, mostly women and children. Mrs Hernacka-Azzi, who speaks fluent Arabic, English, French and Russian as well as Polish, is believed to be the last living refugee from that time.
“We were welcomed in Lebanon but we had to depend on ourselves and worked very hard to survive. We had to rebuild our lives from nothing,” she says.
The world marks World Humanitarian Day on Friday, calling for solidarity with 130 million people around the globe who need humanitarian assistance to survive.
By the end of the Second World War, there were more than 40 million refugees in Europe. Last year, the United Nations announced the number of those displaced and refugees in the world exceeded 60 million, most of whom like Mrs Hernacka-Azzi, will never go home.
“These are the same repeated stories of suffering and loss,” she says.
In Lebanon, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency, (UNHCR), there are more than one million registered Syrian refugees, half of them children.
The mass influx of Arab refugees to Europe, more than one million, has garnered a lot of attention. What is not so often recalled are all the European refugees who fled to the Middle East more than 70 years ago. They went to Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon and Iran, before moving on to the United States, Latin America and other parts of the world.
“I was lucky I had a mother who watched over me as we walked, and walked, and went on trains, buses and carriages,” says Mrs Hernacka-Azzi.
“I don’t know where we were going, we were just going. She fed me whatever crumbs she found along the way and most of the time she didn’t eat herself. We ate grass, whatever we could find on our way.”
During the Second World War, more than two million Poles were held captive in the Soviet territories. Mrs Hernacka-Azzi, along with her mother, was held in a Siberian labour camp known for its terrible living conditions.
That came after she had already undergone a horrific and terrifying experience.
“They came into our house and dragged my father outside. My mother held my mouth so I wouldn’t scream,” she says. “That is the story of many families in war zones, and they never find out why a loved one was taken or killed.”
An amnesty signed in 1941 between the Russians and the Allies led to more than 100,000 Poles being moved in 1942 from Siberia to Iran, including Mrs Hernacka-Azzi and her mother. A rare YouTube video shows what appears to be a US news reel capturing their agonising journey and arrival.
“We ended up in Isfahan,” Mrs Hernacka-Azzi says. “There were many Polish orphans who arrived there with us. I don’t know how long we stayed, as everyone was always moving. Some died, some disappeared, some got lost, some left.
“It was a horrible time of chaos and confusion but I have a beautiful memory of an Iranian -woman who gave me a fresh loaf of bread. It was warm and it was the most delicious bread I ever had. God bless her.”
Figures and facts from that -period have not been properly documented, with some reports that at least 40,000 refugees from -Europe and the Balkans came to this part of the world to camps.
The few black-and-white photos preserved by the United Nations Archives and Records Management Section provide a snapshot of what life might have been like in some of these camps.
Photos of the tents set up back in 1945 at the Nuseirat camp, in Gaza of Palestine, are similar to those housing Syrian and Iraqi refugees today.
An image of refugee children at the Tolumbat camp in Egypt using the sands as their blackboards and notebooks, and fingers as pencils because of a lack of school supplies, is an echo of what child refugees struggled with then, and today.
“The camps across the Middle East were run by the Red Cross, the Middle East Relief and Refugee Administration (MERRA), the refugee relief organisations of the UN that preceded the UNHCR,” says professor Dawn Chatty, emeritus professor of anthropology and forced migration at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford.
“These displaced people, who weren’t always called refugees, were mainly put up in French and British army barracks that were emptied after the Second World War,” she says.
These camps were set up to be “temporary” for the continuous influx and outflux of refugees, yet at the same time the camp officials did try to create opportunities for refugees to use their skills, such as in carpentry, painting, shoe making, wool spinning and even toy making for the children, so that they could earn a little income.
“Their purpose was as holding centres until repatriation or resettlement in a third country could take place.
“Most of the camps functioned until the early 1950s as active -repatriation or third country resettlement, which was well organised and quick,” says Prof Chatty. But some stayed on, like the Poles in Lebanon, as well as the Greeks, Yugoslavs and Bulgarians, some of whom had relatives in the Middle East from earlier forced migrations in the 1800s.
“Most people returned to countries of origin but Yugoslavians and the Poles were not often happy to return to their countries as they had become under the Soviet orbit,” she says.
“They were resettled in Europe, the US and some Latin American countries.”
One of the marked differences between the wave of refugees in the 1940s and today is the opposition in Europe over taking in refugees.
“Europeans are worried there are going to be too many migrants and perhaps local people will not be able to find jobs,” says Prof Chatty.
“But after the Second World War, most countries had lost significant numbers of their men and rebuilding countries needed manpower so it was not hard to resettle those displaced by the war.”
In the case of Mrs Hernacka--Azzi, after Isfahan, the family of two went onto Lebanon.
“I think my mother and other Poles decided to come here cause it was a Christian country and they heard of how Jesus visited parts of Lebanon and it had churches where they could worship,” says Mrs Hernacka-Azzi.
From building their own homes, setting up their own schools, spending time together at picnics and at church, the Polish refugees soon mixed with the Lebanese population, many of them marrying into Arab families.
“My mother was a hero, she kept me alive, she became a teacher,” says Mrs Hernacka--Azzi. “She taught me and other Polish children, she had a rough life but she never complained. She died young because of this rough life.”
At the age of 19, Mrs -Hernacka -Azzi’s life took another major change of direction.
“A handsome government employee, Fouad Azzi, came in a suit and a fedora to church one day. We fell in love right then, and he proposed,” she says.
Together, the couple had four children, two girls and two boys.
These days, Mrs Hernacka-Azzi regularly feeds refugees children who cross her path.
“I have seen many tragedies, and sadly, we never seem to learn,” she says. “Refugees may have different names and nationalities, but they share and experience the same pain. So be kind to them.
“I was a child refugee myself. I know what it is like when people try to ignore you while you beg for food.”
rghazal@thenational.ae
