anina Struk's Polish father never told her how close he came to being stranded in Nazi-occupied France. But after he died – thanks to a postcard – she traced his lucky steps
I am standing in the picturesque harbour of Saint-Jean-de-Luz on the Atlantic coast of south-west France. In my hand, I have a black-and-white picture postcard that belonged to my father. On the back he had written in Polish: "I was in this place on 23 June 1940 at two in the afternoon."
I found this and a few dozen other postcards of French towns and villages in 1999 after my father's death. A Polish airman, his name was Wladyslaw Struk. On the postcards, he sometimes wrote a date, a time or an impression – information that enabled me to trace his route through France in the early part of the second world war from Marseille to Septfonds, then to Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Bayonne, Biarritz and finally Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the end of my journey more than 70 years later.
While my father was alive, I knew nothing about these cards. Like many others, he kept his war experiences to himself. So I knew little about the four months my father had spent in France as the Nazis conquered mainland Europe and nothing about why he might have been in this tiny fishing port. But unexpectedly, on that holiday to the French Basque country, the story began to unfold.
I had taken a few of the postcards with me, more out of curiosity than anything else. I hadn't expected to find a harbour that so closely resembled the image on the cards. It had hardly changed in the seven decades since.
Then, near to where I stood, I found a clue to why he might have been there. On a wall by the harbour was a stone memorial installed in 1996. It commemorated the French evacuees who, in June 1940, following the French surrender to Nazi Germany, "responded to the call of General de Gaulle" and boarded ships to join the Free French in England. No mention was made of any Poles among them, but I wondered: could they have been part of the evacuation?
I couldn't find any books or documents about it at the town's library, but a librarian suggested the maritime office. Here, I was put in touch with a local historian, author and the deputy mayor, Guy Lalanne. He told me that between 21 and 25 June 1940, as the invading German army swept south, thousands of Polish troops had poured into Saint-Jean-de-Luz in a last-ditch attempt to leave France. It transpired that this small harbour was the scene of one of the most dramatic rescue operations of the second world war.
The Nazi occupation of Poland in September 1939 had driven more than 30,000 Polish troops from their homeland. My father was one of them, and he spent nearly five months in internment camps in the Danube delta in Romania. He contracted malaria, was hospitalised and left for dead, but recovered and somehow managed to escape alone. On 10 February 1940, he procured passage on board the Dacia, a Romanian ship that sailed from the port of Constanta to Marseille.
By mid-February he had found his way to a camp near Toulouse where 3,000 Polish troops – mostly airmen – were accommodated.
On 10 May, the German army invaded France. It met with little resistance – to the frustration of the Polish troops fighting alongside the French, who wanted to put up a tougher defence. On 14 June, Paris fell and Marshal Philippe Pétain's government began to negotiate an armistice with the invaders.
Britain had launched Operation Aerial to evacuate British and other troops and civilians from the western ports of France. General Wladyslaw Sikorski, who had established a Polish government in exile, appealed successfully to Churchill to include the Poles. From 15 June, British, Canadian and Polish ships, packed beyond capacity, sailed back and forth ferrying evacuees to Liverpool, Plymouth and Falmouth.
As the German army surged south, the number of ports open to the allied ships quickly diminished until Saint-Jean-de-Luz, just 13km (nine miles) from the frontier with fascist Spain, remained the only option.
By the time my father reached the harbour on 23 June, two Polish ships, the Sobieski and Batory, packed to capacity, had already sailed. Two British ships, the Ettrick and the cruise ship Arandora Star, were anchored outside the breakwater, unable to enter the harbour because of heavy seas.
The events of those few days have not been forgotten by the people of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Raymonde Sansebastian was 13 at the time. GuyLalanne took me to meet her and she described how she watched what seemed like an endless convoy of trucks rolling down the hill and along the quayside. At first, people thought they were Germans and were relieved to find they were Polish.
When I told Raymonde that my father was among them, she kissed my cheek and said: "To the memory of your father and the Polish airmen who passed through our town."
But it was the drama of their departure that is most vivid in the memory of the townsfolk – events in which the local fishermen played the crucial role. For three days and three nights, they braved the notorious swell of the Bay of Biscay to row the refugees in their fishing boats to the ships.
Pantxoa Goya, then a youth of 18, was one of those fishermen. I went to visit him in his apartment overlooking the harbour where he said the dense crowds had gathered. Panic and trepidation had spread as the Poles tried to weigh up whether to stay in France and face internment or possible death, or to be bombed, sunk or drowned at sea. Those who decided to scramble on to the small boats had to dump their luggage on the quayside or throw it into the water. "There were more than 30 of them in each boat. There wasn't enough room for luggage, so they had to leave it behind," he said.
The Ettrick sailed that afternoon. The Arandora Star started to load passengers, but the swell made the operation treacherous. By seven the next morning in calmer seas, the ship was ordered inside the breakwater so embarkation could continue. There is no official list, but according to reports there were perhaps 5,000 crammed on board. In mid-afternoon it set sail for Liverpool. A few hours later, at 12.30am, the armistice came into effect. It stated that no more ships were to leave.
My father was aboard the Arandora Star. I know this because among his postcards are five small, faded photographs taken on board. Four of them show dense crowds of uniformed Poles, while the fifth shows my father standing on deck. On the back, my father has written: "View of the Arandora Star during the transfer from France to England, 24.V1.1940."
The Arandora Star, the last ship destined for Britain from the last free port in France, berthed at Liverpool docks at 7.35am on 27 June – my father's 24th birthday. That afternoon, the German army rolled into St-Jean-de-Luz along the route that the Polish trucks had driven just a few days before. He had had a lucky escape.
Operation Ariel rescued 200,000 people – 25,000 Poles among them – in one of the biggest evacuations of the war, but it never captured the public's imagination in the way that Operation Dynamo at Dunkirk had done a month earlier.
For the rest of the war, my father and thousands of other Poles stayed in Britain and fought alongside the allies. He served in Polish air force squadron 307 as an aircraft mechanic.
The war ended in May 1945, but, for the Poles, conflict and strife continued. By 1945, the communist-led government in Poland considered those Poles who had fought Nazism alongside the western allies as enemies. This made it dangerous, if not impossible, for my father to return. Not only that, but the agreement between the victorious allies saw the eastern territories of Poland, where my father grew up, incorporated into the Soviet Union. He and thousands of his compatriots found themselves permanently exiled from the country they had fought so hard to free.
The new world order had sealed my father's fate. In 1944, his mother and two sisters were deported and resettled in the newly acquired Polish territories of Silesia. They would never see their home again.
In 1946, my father married an Englishwoman – my mother Joan – and found work as a bricklayer. He put his language and culture aside in an attempt to fit into a country to which he said he was grateful for giving him stability, but where he never really belonged – he didn't take UK citizenship.
As a girl, I knew nothing about Poland, its language or culture, but I was aware that my father was different. I had a foreign name, which at school I would have gladly exchanged for an English one to prevent unpleasant jibes. I often felt my father was separate from us. He spent entire evenings either in the cellar, making furniture and other things for our small terraced house or seated at the kitchen table writing letters "home", as he would say, wrapped in an intense concentration that made him oblivious to us all.
Every Christmas, he would make up parcels of food and clothing to send to his mother and write messages in Polish that we had to painstakingly copy on to cards, sending seasonal greetings we could not understand to people we had never known. I always had a feeling that my father belonged in Poland more than he did here, but he never went back and he never saw his family again.
Only in my late 20s did I begin to appreciate the complexity of my father's feelings and his history. I set out to learn Polish and visit Poland to meet his sisters – the recipients of his letters. I became a kind of ambassador between them and my ageing father. I travelled to his home town of Chodorow, now in Ukraine, and found the house in which the family grew up, virtually unchanged, and the graves of our ancestors in the cemetery across the road. I also discovered the heritage of the country with which I would form my own strong bond.
After my father's death when I found the postcards and began to research his story, I unearthed documents in the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London that filled out his movements in France. I also discovered a number of photographs taken during the evacuation from St-Jean-de-Luz. Remarkably, my father is in two of them: his face and black beret partially visible between the crowds on the deck of the Arandora Star.
Among my father's picture postcards is another that he wrote in Saint-Jean-de-Luz just before he embarked. It was addressed to his family in Chodorow, but never posted. He wrote: "I am leaving France because this is my fate … I can't describe to you how I feel … but I am surprised how I manage to bear it. I am writing these words to you, I know that they will not reach your hands, but I will keep this memorable thought that one day God will allow me to read these words to you myself as evidence that I remembered you."
Janina Struk's book Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence published by IB Tauris, £16.99 Reported by guardian.co.uk 12 hours ago.
I am standing in the picturesque harbour of Saint-Jean-de-Luz on the Atlantic coast of south-west France. In my hand, I have a black-and-white picture postcard that belonged to my father. On the back he had written in Polish: "I was in this place on 23 June 1940 at two in the afternoon."
I found this and a few dozen other postcards of French towns and villages in 1999 after my father's death. A Polish airman, his name was Wladyslaw Struk. On the postcards, he sometimes wrote a date, a time or an impression – information that enabled me to trace his route through France in the early part of the second world war from Marseille to Septfonds, then to Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Bayonne, Biarritz and finally Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the end of my journey more than 70 years later.
While my father was alive, I knew nothing about these cards. Like many others, he kept his war experiences to himself. So I knew little about the four months my father had spent in France as the Nazis conquered mainland Europe and nothing about why he might have been in this tiny fishing port. But unexpectedly, on that holiday to the French Basque country, the story began to unfold.
I had taken a few of the postcards with me, more out of curiosity than anything else. I hadn't expected to find a harbour that so closely resembled the image on the cards. It had hardly changed in the seven decades since.
Then, near to where I stood, I found a clue to why he might have been there. On a wall by the harbour was a stone memorial installed in 1996. It commemorated the French evacuees who, in June 1940, following the French surrender to Nazi Germany, "responded to the call of General de Gaulle" and boarded ships to join the Free French in England. No mention was made of any Poles among them, but I wondered: could they have been part of the evacuation?
I couldn't find any books or documents about it at the town's library, but a librarian suggested the maritime office. Here, I was put in touch with a local historian, author and the deputy mayor, Guy Lalanne. He told me that between 21 and 25 June 1940, as the invading German army swept south, thousands of Polish troops had poured into Saint-Jean-de-Luz in a last-ditch attempt to leave France. It transpired that this small harbour was the scene of one of the most dramatic rescue operations of the second world war.
The Nazi occupation of Poland in September 1939 had driven more than 30,000 Polish troops from their homeland. My father was one of them, and he spent nearly five months in internment camps in the Danube delta in Romania. He contracted malaria, was hospitalised and left for dead, but recovered and somehow managed to escape alone. On 10 February 1940, he procured passage on board the Dacia, a Romanian ship that sailed from the port of Constanta to Marseille.
By mid-February he had found his way to a camp near Toulouse where 3,000 Polish troops – mostly airmen – were accommodated.
On 10 May, the German army invaded France. It met with little resistance – to the frustration of the Polish troops fighting alongside the French, who wanted to put up a tougher defence. On 14 June, Paris fell and Marshal Philippe Pétain's government began to negotiate an armistice with the invaders.
Britain had launched Operation Aerial to evacuate British and other troops and civilians from the western ports of France. General Wladyslaw Sikorski, who had established a Polish government in exile, appealed successfully to Churchill to include the Poles. From 15 June, British, Canadian and Polish ships, packed beyond capacity, sailed back and forth ferrying evacuees to Liverpool, Plymouth and Falmouth.
As the German army surged south, the number of ports open to the allied ships quickly diminished until Saint-Jean-de-Luz, just 13km (nine miles) from the frontier with fascist Spain, remained the only option.
By the time my father reached the harbour on 23 June, two Polish ships, the Sobieski and Batory, packed to capacity, had already sailed. Two British ships, the Ettrick and the cruise ship Arandora Star, were anchored outside the breakwater, unable to enter the harbour because of heavy seas.
The events of those few days have not been forgotten by the people of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Raymonde Sansebastian was 13 at the time. GuyLalanne took me to meet her and she described how she watched what seemed like an endless convoy of trucks rolling down the hill and along the quayside. At first, people thought they were Germans and were relieved to find they were Polish.
When I told Raymonde that my father was among them, she kissed my cheek and said: "To the memory of your father and the Polish airmen who passed through our town."
But it was the drama of their departure that is most vivid in the memory of the townsfolk – events in which the local fishermen played the crucial role. For three days and three nights, they braved the notorious swell of the Bay of Biscay to row the refugees in their fishing boats to the ships.
Pantxoa Goya, then a youth of 18, was one of those fishermen. I went to visit him in his apartment overlooking the harbour where he said the dense crowds had gathered. Panic and trepidation had spread as the Poles tried to weigh up whether to stay in France and face internment or possible death, or to be bombed, sunk or drowned at sea. Those who decided to scramble on to the small boats had to dump their luggage on the quayside or throw it into the water. "There were more than 30 of them in each boat. There wasn't enough room for luggage, so they had to leave it behind," he said.
The Ettrick sailed that afternoon. The Arandora Star started to load passengers, but the swell made the operation treacherous. By seven the next morning in calmer seas, the ship was ordered inside the breakwater so embarkation could continue. There is no official list, but according to reports there were perhaps 5,000 crammed on board. In mid-afternoon it set sail for Liverpool. A few hours later, at 12.30am, the armistice came into effect. It stated that no more ships were to leave.
My father was aboard the Arandora Star. I know this because among his postcards are five small, faded photographs taken on board. Four of them show dense crowds of uniformed Poles, while the fifth shows my father standing on deck. On the back, my father has written: "View of the Arandora Star during the transfer from France to England, 24.V1.1940."
The Arandora Star, the last ship destined for Britain from the last free port in France, berthed at Liverpool docks at 7.35am on 27 June – my father's 24th birthday. That afternoon, the German army rolled into St-Jean-de-Luz along the route that the Polish trucks had driven just a few days before. He had had a lucky escape.
Operation Ariel rescued 200,000 people – 25,000 Poles among them – in one of the biggest evacuations of the war, but it never captured the public's imagination in the way that Operation Dynamo at Dunkirk had done a month earlier.
For the rest of the war, my father and thousands of other Poles stayed in Britain and fought alongside the allies. He served in Polish air force squadron 307 as an aircraft mechanic.
The war ended in May 1945, but, for the Poles, conflict and strife continued. By 1945, the communist-led government in Poland considered those Poles who had fought Nazism alongside the western allies as enemies. This made it dangerous, if not impossible, for my father to return. Not only that, but the agreement between the victorious allies saw the eastern territories of Poland, where my father grew up, incorporated into the Soviet Union. He and thousands of his compatriots found themselves permanently exiled from the country they had fought so hard to free.
The new world order had sealed my father's fate. In 1944, his mother and two sisters were deported and resettled in the newly acquired Polish territories of Silesia. They would never see their home again.
In 1946, my father married an Englishwoman – my mother Joan – and found work as a bricklayer. He put his language and culture aside in an attempt to fit into a country to which he said he was grateful for giving him stability, but where he never really belonged – he didn't take UK citizenship.
As a girl, I knew nothing about Poland, its language or culture, but I was aware that my father was different. I had a foreign name, which at school I would have gladly exchanged for an English one to prevent unpleasant jibes. I often felt my father was separate from us. He spent entire evenings either in the cellar, making furniture and other things for our small terraced house or seated at the kitchen table writing letters "home", as he would say, wrapped in an intense concentration that made him oblivious to us all.
Every Christmas, he would make up parcels of food and clothing to send to his mother and write messages in Polish that we had to painstakingly copy on to cards, sending seasonal greetings we could not understand to people we had never known. I always had a feeling that my father belonged in Poland more than he did here, but he never went back and he never saw his family again.
Only in my late 20s did I begin to appreciate the complexity of my father's feelings and his history. I set out to learn Polish and visit Poland to meet his sisters – the recipients of his letters. I became a kind of ambassador between them and my ageing father. I travelled to his home town of Chodorow, now in Ukraine, and found the house in which the family grew up, virtually unchanged, and the graves of our ancestors in the cemetery across the road. I also discovered the heritage of the country with which I would form my own strong bond.
After my father's death when I found the postcards and began to research his story, I unearthed documents in the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London that filled out his movements in France. I also discovered a number of photographs taken during the evacuation from St-Jean-de-Luz. Remarkably, my father is in two of them: his face and black beret partially visible between the crowds on the deck of the Arandora Star.
Among my father's picture postcards is another that he wrote in Saint-Jean-de-Luz just before he embarked. It was addressed to his family in Chodorow, but never posted. He wrote: "I am leaving France because this is my fate … I can't describe to you how I feel … but I am surprised how I manage to bear it. I am writing these words to you, I know that they will not reach your hands, but I will keep this memorable thought that one day God will allow me to read these words to you myself as evidence that I remembered you."
Janina Struk's book Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence published by IB Tauris, £16.99 Reported by guardian.co.uk 12 hours ago.