Polish-Belarusian relations

This special Issue of Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropaforschung is dedicated to the relation between state institutions and the national minorities in Poland 1918-1939. In seven case studies it examines the role institutions,  such as the army or or the police, played in nationalizing processes and other conflicts between national minorities and the state.

Jan Konopielko’s memoirs of 1906-1956 are a part of Testimonies of the Twentieth Century – a subseries of the Exiles Library published by the Polish Ethnological Society (Polskie Towarzystwo Ludoznawcze) in Wrocław. This publication was made possible through funds from a project financed by the National Programme for the Development of Humanities.
Jan Konopielko was born on February 12th, 1906 in a village called Kolpeya in the Ashmyany poviat of what was back then the Vilnius Province. He was a son of Agata née Leoszko and Wincenty, both of whom came from the local rich and Catholic peasantry. The Konopielko family grew bigger fast. Jan had 9 siblings. During World War I, in 1915, as the fighting was getting closer to their village, the whole family had to flee. For some time they had no roof over their heads, and finally they came to stay with their relatives in Konstanpol’ye. Jan’s parents decided to place him in an okhronka (a kind of a kindergarden or orphanage, usually run by religious institution – translator’s note) for evacuated children in Radoshkovichi. After coming back from okhronka, Jan started going to a Russian primary school in Matsevichi. However, his attendance was irregular, interrupted by periods of cow grazing or rebuilding the house with his father. Jan only went to school for two years, since after the outbreak of the Russian Revolution the school in Matsevichi was closed, and the whole area was occupied by the German army.
In the first year after the war Jan and his family suffered hunger and diseases, such as dysentery (which affected most of the villagers). At the age of 15, Jan started learning to be a shoemaker. In 1922, he went back to school and after graduating, since he truly wanted to continue his education, Jan demonstrated great perseverance in trying to be admitted to secondary school. In 1924 he got in the Teacher Training College in Boruny, where he completed 3 years. It was at that time that he met his distant relative – Helena Wojciul – who would later become his wife. Jan went on to continue his education in a Teacher Training College in Vilnius, where in 1930 he passed his school-leaving exams called matura. He found a job in a public school in Bile near Konvalishki in his home poviat. Apart from teaching, he devoted his time to participating in the community’s cultural life and social work. He also helped his family, and in particular his younger siblings, to get education. He was respected for his social advancement, so difficult to achieve on one’s own, and under such adverse conditions. In 1932 he was transferred to a one-class school in Rudnia, after a few years to a school in a village called Glinno, and then to Halshany. In 1934 he married his young love Helena Wojciul and in 1935 their first son, Mirosław, was born. At that time Jan was also a student of a higher level teacher training course in Warsaw. When he finished it, together with his wife and son, they moved to Sukniewicze, where he was a director of a six-class school.
After the outbreak of World War II, this part of Poland was under Soviet occupation. Jan and Helena suffered a terrible tragedy. Helena’s family, quite wealthy by the standards of those times, were brutally murdered by some bandits, who used the war chaos to break into rich people’s houses in the area. During the Soviet occupation both Jan and his wife continued teaching in the school in Sukniewicze, but after Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, the school was closed and the Konopielko family moved to a nearby town of Smorgonie. This is where they survived the whole occupation. In 1942 Helena and Jan had their second child – a son named Paweł.
When the Soviets entered the Vilnius Region again, at the end of August 1944 Jan got arrested by the NKVD and put in the Vileyka prison on charges of collaboration with the Germans. He was sentenced to 10 years in a corrective labour colony, and in 1945 he was sent to a camp in the North of the USSR in Molotovsk (now Severodvinsk). In 1946, together with his fellow political prisoners, he was transferred to a special camp near a town called Tayshet, in the Irkutsk Oblast in Siberia (probably, this was the No 7 special camp – Ozerlag). He worked at clearing the taiga and when his health begun to fail he started working as a fireman, canteen worker, and a warehouseman in the lager. In 1953 he was placed in a transit and transmission camp in the Vanino Harbour, from where he was supposed to be sent to the terrifying Kolyma. In the end, he was sent to a camp in Zhezkazgan Region in Kazakhstan. In August 1954 Jan was released from this camp, sentenced to the so-called eternal exile and sent to the E. Thälmann sovkhoz in Karaganda Region (Kazakhstan), where he worked as a builder, but also an accountant and a warehouseman. All this time, he kept on trying to contact his immediate family, who – after his exile – left for Poland and settled in Lidzbark Warmiński. His siblings and other relatives still remained in Belarus. After a year in the sovkhoz, Jan was allowed to settle in Belarus. He went to Smorgonie, where he was reunited with his siblings. At the same time, he did not stop applying for a permission to leave for Poland. It is quite possible that had he stayed in Kazakhstan, he would have returned to his country a few months earlier, since in November and December 1955 the Soviet authorities sent repatriation transports with a few thousand Polish exiles, former political prisoners. Jan, however, managed to get to Poland only in 1956. He joined his family in Lidzbark Warmiński, and started working as a Russian language teacher in a Vocational School in Lidzbark Warmiński, at the same time managing the school’s boarding house. His wife Helena was a teacher in a Pedagogical Secondary School in Lidzbark Warmiński. Jan Konopielko did not limit himself to his professional work, but he also engaged in social and cultural life. His favourite pastime was bee-keeping. He died on December 22, 1985 in Olsztyn. Jan and Helena are buried in Lidzbark Warmiński.
Jan Konopielko’s memoirs cover a few time periods, or maybe even eras, in history of Poland in the first half of the twentieth century. The author describes his childhood, which includes years before 1914 and the years of World War I. He also offers a comprehensive account of his youth and the first phases of his career during the Second Polish Republic. Konopielko brings also up, although not always with the same attention to detail, the issue of the Soviet and German occupations in the years 1939-1944. However, the core of his memoirs is the period from 1944 onwards. As a prison and the Gulag camps inmate, he had to learn to live in extreme conditions, and fight for his survival, alone, far from his countrymen. He was hardworking and smart, and he displayed great fortitude – all the traits that had helped him gain education and good social standing, now let him get through almost ten years of Soviet repressions. Konopielko’s memories contain a lot of information about everyday life, work conditions, relations among inmates and between inmates and guards. The author shares also his observations about the Soviet society, which he got to know during his years in exile. 
Jan Konopielko’s account is interesting for several reasons. What is of particular interest is that his recollections were written when there was very little chance of having them published. Konopielko continued writing till the middle of the 1980s, almost till the very last months of his life. As his health got worse, he would write some parts of the text in hospitals. When he died at the end of 1985, it was not possible to add any corrections or modifications to it, whether required for a hypothetical publication in the future or resulting from political changes of the end of the 1980s. Interestingly, the author, writing his memories down in the 1980s, made a kind of auto-compilation by using also his earlier text which had probably came into existence at the end of the 1930s and was entitled My life story. He intended his memoirs to be bequeathed to his grandchildren.
Usually, when memoirs are written down years later, different parts of the text contain information of different significance, or – if we look at it in a broader context – of different quality of narrative. This is also the case with Konopielko’s memories. However, it should be emphasized that in each part (as the text can be divided into parts, based on chronological order: time till the end of WWI, interwar period, Soviet and German occupations, Soviet repressions) one can find topics interesting both for a reader who simply is interested in the history of the twentieth century, and for a professional researcher of this time in history.
The printed version of the memoirs was prepared using a typescript which is now kept in the Archives of the Polish Ethnological Society in Wrocław (ref. no.: 127/s). Originally, the text was an entry sent in to a contest for memoirs organized in 1988. Editorial modifications were limited to the absolute minimum, and the text was provided with notes containing additional information to make the memoirs easier to read. An extensive collection of illustrated materials coming from the private archives of the Konopielko family is also an important part of the book.

Tłum. Michał Sikora