‘Crossing Borders’ was an installation utilising photographs, digital imagery, texts and a map of memory: created by Brendan Jackson,
Pamela Wells and Stephen Stepien with The Anglo-Polish Society (Wolverhampton/West Midlands) on this project.
Members of the Society shared some wonderful photographs with us, spanning several decades, and we tape-recorded personal histories. Workshops were also undertaken with young people from the Saturday morning Polish school. These source materials were combined together to create digital collages output as transparencies, turning old suitcases into light boxes, along with a photographic triptych spanning the 20th century. These were installed as part of an event at the Polish Club in Wolverhampton and later exhibited at The Lighthouse Media Centre. Part of the exhibition was a large digitally altered map (all political boundaries removed) on canvas of the Polish diaspora of the Second World War. Participants were invited to mark, with gold and silver thread, their journey from their homeland to the West Midlands of England.
Thank you to the following individuals who contributed to the stories and images:
Carol Augustynowicz
Jack & Doreen Byng
Irene Cook
Aliki Dimakopoulou
Halina & Helena Glebocki
George Janos
Mira Kisiel
Luke Laba
Henryka Lappo
John Mellor
Rose Mita
Bill and E. Misiura
Adam Rausch
Millie Seed
Czeslaw and Anne Saykowski
Emil and Freda Slusarczyk
Vicky and Ania Szizechowska
Sophie & Nina Wozmirska
Text excerpts:
When we got to the hotel, there was a little man in civilian clothes who said: “We are going to cross the river to Yugoslavia. Hands up who can and who cannot swim!”
I was on the run somewhere outside of Romania. I saw the Russian army coming. They came in thousands, in thousands they were coming.
In 1939, at the age of 12, I sat the entrance examination for the grammar school. My brother and sister were already at grammar school. Unfortunately, I failed the exam, much to the disappointment of everyone.
I remember no-one spoke on the way home. Then war broke out. The Germans invaded in the West and the Russians invaded in the East.
We were taken to Russia.
We were in a camp in Arkangelsk, Camp Pohoreloje. The Russians deported about 2 million people from this border into labour camps in Russia. Poles, Lithuanians, Hungarians, we were chopping wood, big big forests, big trees. Women, children, everybody had to work. I had to carry food out to the workers in a big pack on my back. The food was collected from a central kitchen in the camp. There was a thin watery soup, not edible, so I had to collect berries and mushrooms to help stop people starving to death.
We were moved to East Africa, by boat at first, through the Persian Gulf under military escort, to the coast of Africa and then into Uganda, to a camp for civilians that came out of Russia. There were a lot of those camps, not only in Uganda, but in Tanganika, South Africa, wherever there were British colonies where they would accept civilians. So I landed in Massindi, my home for the next six years. I continued my schooling there. The school we went to, it wasn’t a posh school at all, straw on the roof, low mud walls halfway so you could see what was happening in the next class.
On the continent the frontiers were very elastic and they didn’t know what to do with the young people. We came here because we thought it was a little bit of adventure.
When I come to England, I thought it was the last place on earth! I didn’t like it at all. When they took us to Haverford West it rained ten times a day and I thought: Oh welcome to this… And I looked to run away from this.
I thought, Oh my goodness! In Italy, we got four years lovely weather and then they bring us here. Oh my goodness, I did not like it.
