dzień dobry
Welcome to our website.
I am Michelle, the eldest of three girls born to Vodek Keller. Well, that's who he is now, but back then in the time of World War II, he was little Włodzimierz Łukasik. Born midway through the war in a country far from Poland, he was probably for the most part unaware of any other way that life could be. He was seven years old when he arrived in Fremantle, Western Australia with only his mother in 1950. A strange country with a different language and a very different culture.
His mother Lucyna (our Babcia or grandmother) was strange to us. She had a funny accent and her sentences came out wrong. Her kitchen smelled funny (now I know it was butter and dill for the most part), and the food was strange to us. We usually spent Christmas Eve at her house but I thought this was just because Mum liked to have Christmas Day celebrations at home - not because we were actually celebrating Christmas - wigilia - the Polish way. She squeezed us too hard and she usually always had lollies for us. We liked to swing on her clothesline out the back because it was on a hill.
I was twelve when she died. Too young to understand the past and much too young to ask questions.
When she died, my parents cleaned out her home and found scraps of dried bread hidden all through her cupboards. Why?
As I get older, I have found myself wanting to be connected to my roots. There are so many unanswered questions in my father's family and it is time to find some answers.
So this is where the story starts. Lucyna Kaczynska was born in Makow Makowie, Poland in December 1909 to Stanislaw Kaczynski and Franciska Buksicka. She had two brothers and four sisters - Ryszard, Kazimierz, Marta, Zofia, Ana and Stanislawa. Prior to 1940, she was working as a kindergarten teacher in Warsaw. In February 1840, while visiting family in the hamlet of Ostrow (now part of Belarus), she was sent packing from Poland by the Russians with her mother, sister Zofia, Zofia's husband Ignacz and Zofia's three children Ryzsard, Alicja and Bogdan.
From Poland, their travels took them through the gulags and military camps of the USSR, into Tehran, Africa and then finally to homes of safety in Australia and the United Kingdom.
Our father Włodzimierz was born in Tehran, Persia in 1943.
We know next to nothing about his father, Krzysztof Łukasik apart from he and Lucyna met and married in Czok Pak Camp in Guzar, USSR in 1941/42. We have two photos of him, dated in 1945.
How did it all begin? Exactly where did they go and how did they get there? How did they survive? And what happened to them all after the war ended?
In the hope of piecing together our puzzle, we are reaching out to the world wide web to find some answers.
I am planning to spend a month in Poland next year (2018) and would love to find out enough about my family to go and stand where they stood, to see the place their miraculous journey began from and to water my Polish roots.
But in the mean time, we have created this webpage, a facebook page and an instagram account in the hope that someone out there will know something. So come along, and join us on our journey!
