Reflecting on her forced exile from Poland in 1940 as an 8-year-old girl, and the journey of thousands of miles by foot and rail that took her family from a Siberian labor settlement to a tropical refugee camp, Sister Jacynta is above all grateful.
“I have so much to be grateful to God for,” she said in a recent interview at the McGlinn Conference and Spirituality Center, part of the Bernardine Sisters motherhouse complex next to the Alvernia University campus in south Reading.
“You know,” she continued, “I am so grateful. Look, I could have perished like so many others and I have come through. I have been reunited with my whole family and have been here, of all places, in the United States, the wealthiest and probably most charitable country in the world.”
It was by the grace of God, she said, manifested by charity and compassion of individuals and institutions, that she as well as her mother, sister and three grandparents all made it safely out of the Soviet Union after it was invaded by the Nazis.
Her story parallels the odyssey of the Nowicki family that is chronicled in the 2020 novel “One Star Away,” by Imogene Salva.
In early 2000, Marilyn Wlazewski of Exeter Township read an article in the Polish Falcons of America member-magazine, Sokol Polski, about the newly released book. The story resonated with her as a Polish-American, especially because her husband’s mother and her family were exiled to Siberia from eastern Poland at the same time as Salva’s mother’s family.
The article mentioned that Salva, who resides in Colorado, is available for presentations.
Wlazewski brought the book to the attention of the members of the Polish-American Heritage Association, of which she is president, saying, “We’ve got to bring this lady here.”
This was before they even realized the connections that the factual narrative of the novel has to Reading.
Association member Christine Earl of Spring Township got a copy of the book, read it in a day and shared it with the members. The book quickly made the rounds with members.
The group supported the idea of inviting the author to speak in a public event. COVID-19 and other challenges, such as the difficulty of finding an appropriate venue for up to 200 people, put planning on hold until this year.
Earl is a member of the St. Ignatius Loyola Parish chapter of the Columbiettes, a Catholic women’s service organization. She suggested they help the Polish-American group with planning the event for October, which is Polish-American Heritage Month.
The two groups jointly presented the talk and book signing by Salva on Oct. 7 at the Reading Public Museum.
“The Polish-American Heritage Association has been around for 30 years,” Earl’s sister Gerry Wernicki said. “We’re hoping this is going to spur some interest in helping us with some members because every meeting we have a moment of silence for a couple of people who have passed.”
Beyond that, she said, “One Star Away” is a story people need to hear, regardless of their ethnicity.
“People think it’s a Polish story or a Catholic story,” she said, “but basically it’s a World War II story, it’s a Holocaust story.”
The narrative follows the sufferings and near-starvation of the Nowicki family through the eyes and ears of the author’s mother, Jozefa, who is referred to as Ziuta in the novel, from the moment Soviet soldiers entered their home around 3 a.m. on Feb. 10, 1940. The family and many others in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland were ousted from their homes and taken away with only the possessions they could carry, uncertain if they would ever return.
They were forced onto cattle cars with people from throughout eastern Poland, then transported over 1,000 miles to a settlement in Siberia, where they endured arctic temperatures, near starvation, forced labor and separation from the oldest male family members.
Local connection
While paging through the photo section of the book, Wlazewski was astonished to learn that Ziuta and her sister Jadzia attended high school in Reading after coming to the U.S. following the war.
The photo that struck her is of Ziuta posing in cap and gown with her sister, who is donning a white wimple, at Ziuta’s 1950 graduation from Mount Alvernia High School. After completing her education and nurse training at Alvernia, Ziuta settled in Queens, N.Y., and worked as a nurse.
Jadzia, who became Sister Reginata, entered the Bernardine Franciscan Sisters convent in Reading.
Wlazewski was so fascinated by the story that she visited Reginata’s headstone in the Bernardine Sisters’ cemetery in Reading.
She also learned that one of the girls who crossed the Pacific with the author’s mother and aunt resides in Reading with the Bernardine Sisters. Referred to in the novel as Ela, she learned this woman is now called Sister Jacynta.
A month shy of her 94th birthday and 73 years since entering the convent, Sister Jacynta, sat down for an interview. She was quick to point out that she has little connection to “One Star Away” and its author.
Though they were around the same age and were never very far from each other during their respective journeys covering three continents and one subcontinent — and were on the same ship that crossed the Pacific to America — they barely knew each other.
“We were in the same group (of refugees), but we didn’t know each other well because we were strangers gathered from different parts,” Sister Jacynta said.
Still, their families’ forced exile to and subsequent exodus from the Soviet Union — and struggle for survival — follows the same path.
Polish refugees, including many children who were orphaned or separated from their parents, were permitted to leave the Soviet Union following the German invasion of Russia in June 1941. The Soviet Union joined the Allied effort to defeat the Nazis, and the Polish government convinced the Soviets to allow those from Poland to leave the labor camps so the men could join the Polish army that was reforming.
Thousands of emaciated Polish children, including the author’s mother and aunt, journeyed south to refugee gathering points in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Those who were healthy enough were sent through Iran to settlements in India, with which Poland had close diplomatic ties.
The Polish Children’s Camp at Balachadi in southern India was the second home for Ziuta, Jadzia (Sister Reginata) and some of their siblings, as well as Ela (Sister Jacynta) and her sister.
India’s role in the rescue of Polish children is an unheralded story of compassion from the war, the author contends. In the Polish Falcons magazine article, Salva said that led her to make writing the book her life’s passion.
Her mother died in September 2018, just three days after returning from a reunion of Polish survivors in India. Salva accompanied her mother on that trip.
Drawing on that experience and her mother’s journals, Salva described an almost idyllic tropical settlement where Polish children were encouraged to engage in traditional Polish songs, dance and theater by Maharaja Jam Shahid Digvijay Sinji, ruler of the state of Nawanagar. The novel portrays the Polish children regarding ‘the good Maharaja” with reverence because he regarded them as his own adopted children.
To get to this safe harbor Sister Jacynta and her family traveled by foot and train, sleeping on the ground with little or no shelter, food or water.
They traveled with two other families with whom they shared a barracks back at the labor camp.
Her father and older brother were left behind in Poland. Neither were home when Soviet officers entered their home in the middle of the night. The Soviets had her father’s name on a list of Poles who fought during World War I and whom they were seeking to neutralize.
Unable to get home
During their nearly two years in Siberia, they never saw a newspaper and heard only bits of news on a radio, which was controlled by the communist government.
Still, by word of mouth they learned the Polish government was reorganizing and trying to reform an army and was gathering its children from several countries.
“We were trying to get on a track south,” Sister Jacynta said of their journey out of the Soviet Union. “We thought if we can get back to Poland, it’d be free. But when we reached the destination of Uzbekistan (then part of the Soviet Union) we realized the war was still in full gear and Hitler was having those gas chambers built.”
In Uzbekistan they traveled on foot by night due to the daytime heat. They made it to a place where they heard refugees were gathering, but there was no shelter available.
Officials took them to a palace that served as a government building where they slept in relative comfort.
The family was sent to Mashhad, Iran, where they remained for about two months. There and at Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, the Polish government was collecting its starving people.
“We were very ill,” Sister Jacynta said. “I was just getting over typhoid fever and I was very weak. When I got up my head was heavier than my body. My sister got pneumonia and dysentery so she was in dying condition when I was leaving.”
Sister Jacynta, who was born Eulalia Respondowska, was sent with the first group of Polish children to India, while her gravely ill younger sister was taken to a hospital in Iran. Her mother helped care for children there.
A reunion
After her sister miraculously recovered, her mother went to Tehran, where the Red Cross had set up a relief station, and sought information about her oldest daughter’s whereabouts.
Eulalia, or Ela, spent many weeks in an Indian hospital while separated from her mother, ravaged by malaria, a mosquito-borne disease against which her weakened immune system was no match.
“I was in the hospital and I heard that the third group was coming,” she said. “I was so excited because I expected my mother to be in that group. I left her countries away. I was allowed to be up and around, but I had to take more medicine before I could be discharged.”
She overheard a conversation about where the group would be arriving. She sat there for hours staring at the railroad tracks.
“Finally, the last car pulls up,” she said. “I saw mom’s coat. I recognized her and I rushed to her, but I didn’t get there. I fainted.”
After Ela came to and hugged her mother with all her strength, she felt someone tugging on her garment. She looked down and saw it was her younger sister.
Their reunion didn’t last long. About two months later, Ela contracted tuberculosis and was sent to a sanatorium. She was devastated, having sworn she would never again be separated from her mother.
Her mom tried to lift her spirits, advising it was better for her to continue her education and be around other children with the illness than being kept in isolation in the camp.
“I didn’t want to be separated from her,” Sister Jacynta recalled. “Mom said, ‘Go to school, be with friends.’ She convinced me. We had some correspondence and contact, and that was OK.”
As it turned out, she remained in the sanatorium for 2½ years.
U.S. bound
With Poland occupied by the Soviets, the fate of the hundreds of Polish children at the camp at Balachadio was uncertain.
“They had us a few years right after the war, but India was itself getting ready for independence,” Sister Jacynta said.
She said Mahatma Gandhi, the father of postcolonial India, apologetically asked the Polish refugees to leave the country because of the potential for religious violence as the country was divided into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan.
“I was probably by then 14 years old when we left Balachadi and transferred to a larger camp,” Sister Jacynta said. “The priest who was in charge of us did not know what to do with us. He did not want us to go to any place where our life and freedom and future was again terminated by some circumstances.
“So he came to the United States and he was looking for religious orders of priests and sisters to see if they would be interested in bringing a group of children from there.”
In Cleveland, Ohio, the father met Sister Zygmunta. This was a decade before she would become the first president of Alvernia College, which was founded by the Bernardine Sisters of the Third Order, originating in Poland, to train its religious students as teachers.
“She presented it (the proposal) to the community and they offered to sponsor 50 girls, hopefully girls with vocation to religious life,” Sister Jacynta said. “But many of us didn’t know what religious life was. Since she couldn’t get enough to try (the vocation) they added those who had no means of going anywhere else.”
The 50 girls steamed to San Francisco followed by a three-day cross-country trip by rail to Connecticut, where the Sisters had a place prepared for them.
“For those who didn’t want to try, the sisters had to find colleges to get them education because we came on a student visa,” Sister Jacynta said. “So this was a really difficult thing for the sisters because the sisters were really pretty poor at that time.”
All but a baker’s dozen agreed to give religious vocation a try, she said.
She and Jadzia (Ziuta’s sister) were among those sent to Francis Hall, then an orphanage that also served as an academy for girls aspiring to religious life.
“I started as a junior in high school,” she said, “reading second-grade books because I didn’t know any English.”
Frustrated by the language difficulties, she told a senior sister she wanted to discontinue academic pursuits. The sister counseled her that she would be choosing a life of domestic work if she gave up on her studies and encouraged her to keep at it.
She managed to complete high school and entered the convent in 1950 and became an elementary teacher, with assignments in Connecticut and New Jersey, while continuing her education at the graduate level.
Sister Jacynta went on to earn a doctorate in philosophy and to teach at Alvernia for 30 years.
A few years after she began teaching, Sister Jacynta was asked by Sister Zygmunta, the Alvernia College founder, about her mother and sister who had been in Australia for six years.
Sister Jacynta told her that her choice to become a sister likely meant she could never afford to have them brought to the United States. Sister Zygmunta would have none of that, saying she would sponsor Sister Jacynta’s mom and sister herself.
For many years while teaching at Alvernia, Sister Jacynta resided with her mother in a house downhill from the Alvernia campus. Her sister eventually settled in Bucks County.
Following their reunion, the family continued to inquire on the whereabouts of the girls’ brother. In the mid-1950s, they learned he was under an alias in Poland, then under Soviet influence. They arranged to have him brought to the U.S. under a sponsorship, and he resides today in Florida.
Their father, they learned, also survived the purge in Poland. He died before he could be brought to the U.S.
Sister Jacynta said she is grateful that every member of her family survived their time as refugees while so many others — in some cases entire families — perished.
“God’s miracles, I think, kept us alive,” she said. “We didn’t have any money, no ways to make a living.”
Sister Jacynta last saw Ziuta, the central figure of the novel, in 2014 when she was in Reading for her sister’s funeral. Her daughter Imogene, the future author of “One Star Away,” was with her.
“I met her and we talked about it and she told me about this dream of hers to write a book,” she said.
Sister Jacynta was already working on a book of her own. It was essentially completed about 10 years ago but not published. She’s working on additions to reflect her views on changes in U.S. society.
“My book is my journey of life, basically, on a spiritual level but in the context of this whole thing,” she said.
Source: Berkshire mont
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