Incredible journey from Siberian gold mine to the quiet streets of Bath

Pole Jan Lewkun endured unimaginable horrors during the Second World War before reaching Britain. Tina Rowe speaks to his son Marek.

Archaeologist Marek Lewkun has had to dig deep to discover his father's history, for the quiet watchmaker seldom spoke of his early life – as a slave labourer in a Siberian gold mine.

Jan Lewkun was among more than one million Polish men, women and children whom the Russians deported from Eastern Poland to Siberia in 1940. Stalin regarded them as an expendable force to be worked to death and replaced by the next wave of captive humanity.

Crammed into sleighs, then herded into cattle trucks, they were sent by train over a distance so vast that the journey took four weeks. For Jan, the journey was still not over. He was among thousands sent on by ship north along Russia's Pacific coast, through the Bering Sea, to work in the back-breaking gold mines of Magadan.

"Those ships really were like 18th-century slave ships. The prisoners were slid horizontally onto the bunks, packed tightly together," says his son.

In June 1941, Germany attacked Russia, and the Soviets declared an amnesty so that the Polish slaves could join the fight against the Nazis. By the time they were freed, they had spent nearly two years in hell.

How Mr Lewkun senior and thousands of fellow Poles trekked back through the remote and unforgiving landscape of Siberia and Uzbekistan to the Caspian Sea, to meet British Forces and join the fight, is a story of incredible courage, endurance and ingenuity.

After the war, Jan Lewkun came to Britain, made Bath his home and married a local girl, singer Daphne Whittock. He died when his son was 22. Mr Lewkun , who lives in Norton St Philip, near Bath, learned some of his father's story from his mother before she, too, died, but in recent years he has discovered further precious details and found more survivors and their families through the charity Kresy-Siberia (UK).

The organisation was established to inspire, promote and support research, remembrance and recognition of Polish citizens' struggles in the Eastern Borderlands and in exile during the Second World War.

For the first time ever the public will have the opportunity to find out more about this important section of the UK's population at "Who Do You Think You Are?", the world's biggest family history show, made famous by the BBC TV programme of the same name. It runs from this Friday, February 24, to Sunday at Olympia in London. Kresy-Siberia (UK), part of the international Kresy-Siberia Foundation, will be hosting a stand, and Marek Lewkun will be helping to man it for part of the time.

"I owe the Kresy-Siberia group so much," he says. "My dad died aged 66 in 1986 when I was young and he never spoke to me about the war. He told my mother a certain amount and she passed that on to me before she died, but the Kresy-Siberia group has been such a help, for example, explaining how to trace my father's records, held at Northolt.

"It is amazing how much was there; it even included an address for my father when he was in Italy, and the name of his landlady. Maybe I will be able to find her family, and they may have memories.

"Through the group the son of another survivor from Magadan got in touch with me, and I was also told about a book called No Place To Call Home, the only book by a survivor. I've also got to know a survivor, Valek Jaworski, who as a teenager was taken with his family north to near Archangel. He lives in Melksham, it is a small world.

"My mother told me that Dad said the Russians attacked their family home at night when they were asleep. His father, Antoni, sat up in bed and was shot, but his mother, Tekla, who lay down, was uninjured. Dad had already been captured. The Russians subsequently burnt the house.

"When they reached Siberia he was sentenced to eight years at a trial which he did not attend, and spent two years in the gold mine labour camp.

"He told my mother that one day someone stole his bread ration and, knowing that he would not have the strength to work and would then be shot, he sat down and waited to be shot rather than start work and be shot anyway. A passing guard noticed him and asked: 'Why are you sitting there, you are normally working?' Dad explained and the guard said: 'Pick up your shovel and start working but be here next time I come round.' When he returned the guard tossed a packet of meat sandwiches over the fence. Dad had not tasted meat for months.

"I have been told that more than 10,000 went to Magadan and because of the conditions, and the severity of the weather, he was one of only 583 who made it out.

"After the amnesty they got to Uzbekistan, where they got military training and then they were taken to the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. The distances they travelled by their own efforts were vast."

The British Forces were on the western shore in what is now Iran. Mr Lewkun senior enlisted in the 11th Polish Signals regiment, part of the Polish 2nd Corps which was attached to the British 8th Army. He went to Palestine and Tel Aviv, and while serving in the desert shared a tent with Prince Czartorycki. Years later, when he was a bus conductor in Bath, he met the prince's nephew among a party of Downside schoolboys, after hearing one of the boys say: "Hey, Czartorycki."

Like thousands of the ex-slaves, Mr Lewkun senior fought in the ferocious battle for Monte Cassino and ended his war in Italy, embarking for England from a port near Vesuvius in 1945, and landing at Dover to be greeted by the Salvation Army offering beans on toast and a cup of tea. His subsequent life of quiet domesticity in Bath must have seemed surreal.

His son says: "One of my biggest regrets is that I did not talk to Dad about his life before he came to England. Discovering my father's past has changed my life, and Kresy-Siberia is playing a big part in that."