Irma Ways de Orda was born on the 23rd of September, 1920, the same day as the Pope John Paul II in the city of Piotrkow Trybunalski, Central Poland, a very old and historical city, home of the Sejm or Polish Senate.
She lived here until she was about two or three years old.
Then her family moved to Tomaszow Mazowieckim, where they bought a house from a Russian painter. The far end of the garden gave onto a forest where they played as children. An alley of chestnut trees ran along the front of the house. The fruit of these trees is a round, small, soft ball with a twig at the end, so it could be cut and put together in the same manner as the “legos” we know today.
When her father, Kazimierz Ways became sick they moved to Stanislalowa (Malopolska) near the forest as her mother, Bronislawa Rybak, was originally form that area and she wanted to be near her family. Irma was nine years old at that time. She went to a Catholic religious school.
The name Ways was originally longer, but somewhere along history it was shorted and nobody seems to know why. It originated from England or Scotland, and, during the religious wars, the family migrated east and settled in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Vienna. There Irma’s grandfather worked for the Duma in the Austro-Hungarian government as well as her father Kazimierz after him. After he met Bronislawa Rybak, they moved to Malopolska.
Irma did not know any of her grandparents.
Kazimierz had a brother and a sister in Wlwowje, whom Irma met once during the war but then lost touch with.
Malopolska, Galicia, Lwow, Stanislalow, Tarnopol: it now belongs to the Ukraine, but between 1920 and 1945 was Poland, and before that was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The eldest daughter Danka, the second daughter Ema and Irma went to the Urszulanki Convent School.
Her father had a growth on his stomach but never wanted to operate it. He suffered from terrible pains. One winter he got a very bad cold and the doctors recommended he go to Jarempcze Wodospad, a holiday place in the Carpathian Mountains, on the border with Romania (now it belongs to the Ukraine) to convalescence. One night a telegram arrived with the news that her father had died. Irma was twelve years old. Till this day she hates telegrams and bells. It was a very heavy winter and my grandmother and the four children took the train to fetch the body, but due to the snow the train would no longer continue, so they finished the journey on sledges and finally on foot. He was buried in Jarempcze Wodospad.
My father’s father died in Russia in Harkow of an attack.
Both my parents came from the Kresy, one from one side, the other one from the other side. People from the Kresy were different from other Polish peoples, they were more open, more friendly, different from Central Poland.
So the family stayed in Stanislawowie. When Irma went from primary to secondary school she was made to skip a year as she was an outstanding student and at the age of 14 was giving mathematic lessons to her new classmates. She read a tremendous amount, every free moment she had. Both her brother Stephan and her sister Danka were extremely musical and could play any instrument.
In 1939 when she had just finished high school the second World War broke out. She had wanted to study journalism in Warsaw, Poland. At the age of nine she had won a writing competition of the PKO (Polish Savings Bank) (Polska Kasa Oszczennoscowa).
Hitler invades Austria, Chekoslowakia and the Sudetenland. So France and Britain sign a non-aggression pact with Poland that if Hitler invades any one of them the others would defend the other two. Hitler attacks Poland, so France and England declare war on Germany. But the Marginot line falls together with France. Before attacking Poland, Hitler makes a pact with Stalin to attack Poland simultaneously: Germany from the west and Russia from the east.
Irma saw the first bomb that Germany dropped on Poland, on the railwayline in Stanislawowie, from her house.
The Russians invade Poland from the east, they were the first Asiatic Regiments and their smell was awful as they used a special gunk to insulate their boots from the cold and the wet. Their overcoats were long and just cut at the bottom with no hem.
In Stanislawowie where Irma lived the population was 90% Ukranian and only 10% Polish. The Poles were land owners, forming part of what was known as the “Yntelligencja”, trade was in the hands of the Jews (as under Polish laws Jews could not own land) and the rest were practically if not effectively serfs as Poland was still a feudal country. The Ukranians hated both the Poles and the Russians. On Sundays Irma would go to an Orthodox church as there was no Catholic church near by. Irma can speak Ukranian.
Today the Ukraine is an independent state and Kiev, Odessa, the Krym and part of Poland belong to it.
Irma was born in Central Poland but her family came from and she lived all her life in the Ukraine.
Stas, my father, went to university in Vilno, now capital of Litwia.
In 1939, when Russia and Germany invade Poland, the Polish resistance movement was formed. It was voluntary. Danka did not want to join, and Stephan was too young. Only Irma and Ema joined. The KGB (NKVD) was everywhere, arrests took place constantly, meetings of the resistance were carried out in private homes.
The Polish army, defeated after a short fight, crossed over the border to Rumania where it concentrated to continue the fight from abroad, and this is the beginning of the Polish army which fought alongside France and Britain.
Stas, a Reserve Officer in the Polish Army, who had studied Agronomy at the University of Vilno, as a hobby used to fly in sports clubs in Poland before the war. At the time, military service in Poland was compulsory. In 1939 all reserve officers were called in to join the army and Stas flew as a pilot for the Polish air force until Poland fell.
The Polish resistance tried to save as many soldiers and officers as possible from being sent out to camps in Russia, supplying them with civilian clothes and helping them cross the border to Romania, where they would join the Polish Army. Irma worked for the Resistance in Tarnopol and in Lwow.
One day the Polish resistance found out that a large convoy train carrying 14,000 Polish officers taken prisoners by the Russians would stop in Tarnopol, as the Russian tracks were wider than the Polish tracks. Irma helped many of these officers change into civilian clothes and cross the frontier into Rumania. One of the officers decided last minute that he would go back to the train to fetch his box with money. At that moment the Russians surrounded the train with guns and dogs and he never got out. These officers, contrary and against international laws protecting the rights of prisoners of war, were taken to a forest in Katyn and every single one was shot dead. Danka’s boyfriend was among the 14,000 Polish officers murdered by the Russians in Katyn. (“See the Film “KATYN”).
Bratek Kuznicki, a friend of Irma’s in Argentina spent nearly all the war in a German concentration camp for political prisoners and he got a fair treatment and food and could receive Red Cross packages, unlike the Russian prisoners of war who were treated like common criminals with no rights whatsoever.
The train to Russia with Polish officers first stopped in Wlwow, then Stanislawowie and finally in Tarnopol - (here the train had to change tracks) - before going on into Russia. Irma’s work at the Resistance was to save as many officers as possible from crossing the Russian border by getting them off the trains at night, providing them with new documents and civilian clothes and finally crossing them over the border to Romania.
In the resistance movement she ran weapons from Stanislawowie to Lwow, she had contact with other European Powers to obtain money, helped prepare new papers and documentation, plus all type of espionage work.
Ema was the first one to be arrested when she was 21 years old.
Then, one night, Stephan (14) who was still in his school uniform and Irma (19) were arrested. They were taken through the town streets with guards and machine guns guarding them to the jail in Stanislawowie where they were fingerprinted and all their jewelry taken away. As they could not take off – or could not be bothered to take off - Irma’s earings, they just ripped them out and till this day she has a scar.
The Russians arrested all the rich, the Intelligencia, the people who worked in the resistance movement: they were all catalogued as anti Soviet agitator element.
All prisoners were given a letter and a number, no more names or surnames.
All questioning was carried out in Russian, never in Polish.
All questioning was done in the middle of the night.
The cells were tiny, there were no beds, so all the prisoners slept on the cold floor. That first night a Jewish woman covered Irma with her lambskin coat as when they arrested her she did not take anything with her except an overcoat. She thought she would return. The prisoners were not allowed any exercise (she was never allowed out of the cell, except for questioning, during the four to six months that she spent here) nor were they allowed to go to the bathroom whenever they wanted. Twice a day a guard came to fetch the prisoners to take them to the bathroom. These were just holes in the floor with rats crawling out of them, so the prisoners had to stamp on the ground to shy away the rats before even trying "to relieve themselves". Irma’s aversion to rats dates from this period and till this day her flesh crawls when she sees one. In one corner of the cell there was a pail which everybody used. The newest arrivals were thrown into the cell and slept beside the pail. Only the old arrivals had the privilege to sleep far from the pail.
When a prisoner was led away for questioning during the night, along long dark passages, and by chance met another prisoner coming the other way (returning from questioning) both prisoners were forced to turn their faces towards the wall so there would be no eye contact and the prisoner going towards questioning would not see the other beaten up prisoner.
One day the guards brought in a new prisoner, a very nice and decent looking woman, evidently quite cultured, but very quickly she went insane and spent her days howling like a hyena and picking lice out of her hair and then eating them.
When the Russians invaded Poland, from one day to the next the type of people on the streets changed. You could no longer see “decent” people, only “unwelcome specimens”, revolutionaries, as well as many Jewish people. All others went into hiding, afraid of the events.
The maid who for years had worked in Irma’s house one day went past the family home and pointing at the house said: “It seems that there are still people who have managed to stay out of prison”.
Danka’s boyfriend was murdered in Katyn. Her first husband, Lagotski, died in the Powstanie Warszawskie (“Warsaw Uprising) in 1942 . Here the Polish People (Armja Krajowa) rose nearly at the end of the war. The Germans had already lost the war and the Russians (now allies) were 20 Km from Warsaw and did nothing to help the Polish people. Warsaw was destroyed. They did not allow any food or medicines to be delivered to Warsaw either.
The Allies, after the end of the war, did not allow the Polish people to march in the Victory Parade in London – hence the Polish hatred towards Britain and the USA - although the British and French air forces had Polish contingents fighting alongside them, and it was thanks to Polish pilots that the Battle of Britain was won. (“Read Squadron 303”).
When Irma joined the Resistance movement, she was infiltrated into the Radziecki (Communist) University of Eastern Ukraine where she got the post of senior secretary. But on the 1st of May, 1939, as it was worker’s day, all the university had to march along the main street of the town to celebrate, and she, together with all the professors, was first in line holding red flowers and waving red Communist flags. She says that her face burnt with shame, as she was really working against the Communists.
When the Communists invaded Poland, the first thing they did was hold elections. Everybody had to vote, and soldiers with machine guns and police dogs went from house to house, dragging out even the sick people to vote. Most of the population voted in blank, but at the end of the day the results were: 99% of the population has voted for the Communist candidate. This was Irma’s first election in her life.
She spent 4 to 6 months in jail in Stanislawowie (Poland) where she was constantly interrogated in the middle of the night, and she was tried and sentenced - (she was not present during this trial) - under the Russian Code 58 10 12 6 which means counter revolutionary element, spying , etc, etc. and sentenced to ten years in jail in Siberia plus ten years of life outside jail (but) in Siberia (she could not leave), with no citizen rights or liberties whatsoever.
Ema was taken to prison in Poland first and there she was very badly beaten during interrogations, tried, sentenced (she was not present during this mock trial) and sent to Siberia. Irma says that Ema fared worse than her at the interrogations because she was not very bright and so did not know how to defend herself.
From the jail in Stanislawowie, Irma was sent to Siberia. The cattle train stopped first in Melitopol where they were given black bread and water from the river to drink. As a result, she got typhus and nearly died, and she remembers being dragged from the train and put onto another one which took her to Odess, Harkow and then on to Moskow, where she stayed at the “infamous” Lublyana jail. On the journey between Harkow and Moscow she found herself alone in the same carriage with a woman who had been charged with the murder of seven people. She was so petrified that she just sat dumb and mute, without uttering one single word during the whole journey. When they finally arrived in Moscow and had to get out to change trains Irma found her voice again and the woman turned to her in surprise and said “But you can talk, I thought you were dumb”. Here they were made to get out and were made to kneel during one whole day at the station. When she was finally allowed to get up, her knees felt as if they were made of cotton wool. From there she went on to Kotlas where her clothes froze to the walls of the carriage, it was so cold. All this journey across Russia was done partly inside cattle trains and partly on foot where she was made to walk for endless kilometers in thick snow, without food or water, and weak from hunger and disease.
Kotlas was a key camp, as from there all prisoners were divided into different groups and each group was sent on to a different camp even further north into Russian Siberia.
From there she was taken, part on foot and part in cattle trains to Komi USSR in the Círculo Polar Ártico, beside Workoty, also known as the Russian Taiga. The prisoners wore rags and wrapped newspapers around their feet and inside their boots to keep the cold away. They were made to march for days on end in snowstorms and waist high snow, guarded permanently by guards with machine guns and dogs. She was constantly transferred from one camp to another camp. The Russian Nobel Prize of Literature, writer Aleksander Solrzenitzyn wrote a book “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and here he describes the life of a prisoner in a Russian concentration camp during twenty four hours, and Irma happened to be in just that same camp. If you read the book you can picture more clearly what a twenty four hour day was like for her. The camps were surrounded by barbed wire and a guard in a tower guarded it day and night so no one would escape. But there was no escape, really, as there was nowhere to go, the Tundra was vast, empty, ice-cold with scarcely any inhabitants. Even if you managed to escape, you had to walk for hundreds of kilometers with temperatures below 50ºC, without food or shelter of any kind. In the Circulo Polar Artico the cold lasted for ten months and when spring finally came and the snows melted swarms of tiny mosquito-like insects emerged from the ground so the prisoners would wrap their arms in rags to avoid being bitten.
Irma remembers once a prisoner who had tried to escape. Soldiers with dogs finally caught him and brought him back covered in blood. He was then tied up naked to a tree and left. By next morning these mosquitoes-like insects had swarmed over him and bled him to death.
When the prisoners were taken out to work in the spring they were given special nets to put around their heads so these insects would not get at them - they were so bad.
The prisoners were made to get up at five in the morning, given a cup of hot water and marched to work. Irma worked in the forest cutting trees for ship-masts (and later building roads). The temperature was 50ºC below zero and the snow waist deep. They worked in pairs. First they had to cut branches and pile them on the snow so you would not sink into the snow, and then start cutting the trunks. The blades of the hatchets and the saws were blunt and the prisoners weak. Every prisoner had to cut five and a half cubic meters of logs per day. If you complied you got a bigger ratio of bread, if you did not your ratio of bread was reduced.
One day the prisoners cutting the tree next to her cut it at a wrong angle and it fell on top of her. Luckily only the top of the tree with all the branches (and not the trunk) fell on her. But as the snow was waist high, with the weight, she just sank down to the bottom of the ground and so did not die. Towards evening, all the loose branches and leaves had to be burnt and cleared up but pine needles tend to let out sparks which would fall on the prisoner’s jackets and catch fire. Many times Irma found herself on fire. She also tried to save a bit of old bread from the previous evening which she would toast in the fire. This toasted piece of bread, she would put in her pocket and in the morning put it into the hot bowl of water and imagine it was coffee.
The prisoners were not given any food during the whole day while they worked in the forest cutting trees. The only food they were given was the bowl of hot water in the morning before leaving for work. At night they returned to the barracks. Their clothes were all frozen and hard as wood from having been all day in the snow. Curiously, this in a way gave them some kind of protection from the cold. But when they returned to the barracks all these frozen clothes started to melt and were sopping wet. Nobody got dry clothes, so you had to take them off to sleep. For dinner she got a bowl with soggy cabbage and some minute fish floating in water and a piece of bread, but the seize of the bread depended on the amount of cubic meters of timber you had cut. As Irma had no strength her ratio of bread was always reduced. For two years she saw no sugar, fruit, meat, etc. Next morning at 5 they had to put on their sopping clothes on again and were once again marched out into the freezing cold to cut trees. Once again the clothes froze on their bodies.
These concentration camps were jails inside jails. Political prisoners and common criminals were all put together, but it was the common criminals who ruled the jail and therefore the political prisoners. Even the guards were scared of them. One day a delegation of the KGB (Russian Secret Police) came for an inspection of the jail and the overcoat of one of these men disappeared (was stolen) but was never found and the KGB decided not to pursue the matter further, so powerful were these common criminals.
So Irma tried to keep on good terms with everybody, specially with the common criminals. The men were kinder and more understanding than the women. The biggest crime a prisoner could commit in jail was to steal the bread of another prisoner.
Ema was in a concentration camp in Uzbekistan (Taszkent) further south and so the climate was milder.
In the Circulo Polar Artico where Irma was, the nights were white, there was practically no difference between day and night, and this is extremely tiring. But what was really fantastic was to watch the Estrella Polar, when all the sky had all the imaginable colours.
While Irma was telling me all this, she told me that she does not really want to talk about it all, that she has been trying to forget it all during all these years, and that at times she feels as if all this horror just did not happen, it could not have happened. I guess it is a mechanism of defence that the mind has in order to keep sane.
In the concentration camps there were three kinds of lice and fleas.
When Germany attacks Russia, who was part of the Axis (Russia, Germany and Italy), the Russians join the Allies. The Polish army was concentrated in camps in Romania as Russia and Germany had invaded Poland. This Polish army went on to fight in France and when France fell they went on to fight in England. Irma’s husband, Stas was a pilot in the French Air Force and later on joined the RAF as squadron leader. Irma was in a concentration camp in Kolyna on the Peczora River near the Arctic Pole.
A Polish government in exile was set up in London and this was recognized by all the free world. Zaleski was the first president of this government. This government pressed the Allies so that Russia would let go its political prisoners from its concentration camps.
Meantime, Russia had organized a Polish army in Poland under Soviet leadership. Irma’s brother Stephan Ways became part of this army and was one of the first soldiers to march into Berlin with it, getting a gold medal – something he never talks about. After the war Stephan went on to finish the Military Academy, later on he studied Engineering and finally a Doctorate in Philosophy – Irma says that at school he was always a brilliant student. He worked for the government in Poland after the war.
These political prisoners which Russia was forced to free came from camps all over Russia and concentrated in Buzulk, Central Russia. Among those freed were Irma, Okulicki and General Anders who became Chief of the Polish army forming in Buzulk.
Irma managed to get a job in headquarters. When they first arrived here, sick, weak and starving, all they got to eat were bowls and bowls of black caviar. They lived in barracks full of fleas. She was suffering from terrible avitaminosis, was horribly bloated and her body was terribly chapped, so she bandaged herself all over with rags, arms, legs, etc. On their way to Buzulk, they passed through Moscow which was being bombarded and people thought that she was one of the victims, she was so bandaged.
She stayed in Buzulk for a few months until committees were organized in order to prepare new documents and papers for all the people arriving from the camps, they created divisions, etc. As a uniform they were given only shorts, a blouse and some enormous Russian boots, and later on a fur hat. The combination was awful. Here she started to look for her sister Ema, whom she finally traced to Teheran in Persia (Iran).
She then moved from the barracks to a room rented by some Russian peasants. One day she was out walking and she did not realize that her cheeks had become frost-bitten. Some passerby quickly grabbed some snow from the ground and began rubbing it on her face as otherwise her skin would start falling off. She ran back to the house and called the army doctor who gave her some medicines, but her cheeks did not heal. One night the Russian peasant she was living with told her to throw out all the medicines and try and get a goose. This was forbidden, but she crossed a small river to the next village at night and managed to get a goose. The peasant woman cut off all the grease, melted it and put it into a jar which she told Irma to rub on her face. This simple medicine saved her skin. But she never knew what had happened to the goose she had bought, it was probably eaten.
From Buzulk they were transferred to Krasnowock, a port on the Caspian Sea (the Caspian Sea is between Russia and Persia) and there they waited to be transported by sea to Persia (now Iran). But the conditions were terrible, the Russians were not willing to help, and this Polish army was joined by thousands of Polish refugees who, when the Russians had invaded Poland at the beginning of the war, had been taken forcibly from their homes and resettled in isolated places of Russia. (Read Jadwiga Orda’s account of her resettlement, and how only one of her five children survived, Mariela Arno now living in Brazil). The Polish army tried to help these people by sharing with them their own ratios and giving them uniforms so they could blend with the army. But there were too many of them. They were all trying to cross the Caspian Sea and leave Russia. Irma finally managed to get on to one of the last ships available, but they were crowded like sardines, with no bathrooms, and the strongest would just grab you and push you into the sea to drown, as here there was only room for few. When the ship finally sailed she could see all these poor families following the ship into the sea trying to scramble in. They finally arrived in Pahlevi (Iran), stayed there for a time and then on to Teheran. From there they were taken to Jangijul (30 km form Bagdad), then to Palestine (now Israel) where she volunteered for the WAF.
Irma arrived in Scotland where she completed a course for recruits. In England she did an under-officers course in Winslow and specialization courses at the Officers School at Windermare. She worked as a teleprinter operator for the army.
In London she entered a contest – which she won – to study Medicine, but could not go on as she had no documents. Instead, she was accepted at the University of Architecture where she got a scholarship of twenty pounds per month, getting a leave of absence without pay form the army in order to study. She also studied Journalism in England.
While in England, Irma met my father, Stas, and they decided to emigrate to Argentina as there was no work for Polish people in post-war Britain.
[Effects of World War II: 6,000,000 (six million) Polish citizens – 22 % of the population – died during World War II. Of these, 600,000 were actual war casualties. The greatest loss, approximatel 4,500,000, was lost due to mass extermination, deportation, exile and emigration.
The damage to industry and culture in general from the war has been impossible to estimate. The Germans were responsible for at least 4/5 of these losses; the rest was the responsibility of the USSR. World War II was thus the greatest catastrophe in Polish history in terms of total loss of life and property as a result of the thorough and premeditated attempt at genocide.
At the end of World War II the Russians did not allow the Polish people to march in the victory parades although Polish contingents had fought in the British and French air forces. The Allies (England and the USA) did nothing to stop Russia].
