Looking for the Łukasiks

dzień dobry

Welcome to our website.

I am Michelle, the oldest of three daughters of Vodek Keller. That's his name now, but during World War II, he was known as little Włodzimierz Łukasik. Born in the middle of the war in a country distant from Poland, he was likely mostly unaware of any other way of life. In 1950, at the age of seven, he arrived in Fremantle, Western Australia, accompanied only by his mother, entering a foreign land with a different language and 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 passed away, my parents cleared out her house and discovered pieces of dried bread stashed throughout her cupboards. Why?

As I got older, I have found myself wanting to be connected to my roots. There were so many unanswered questions in my father's family and it was time to find some answers.

Lucyna, pre WWII

This is where the story begins. 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. Before 1940, she worked as an instructor in an government run undergarment factory in Warsaw. In February 1940, while visiting family in the hamlet of Ostrow (now part of Belarus), she was deported from Poland by the Russians along with her mother, her sister Zofia, Zofia's husband Ignacy, and Zofia's three children, Ryzsard, Alicja, and Bogdan.

Their journey led them from Poland through the gulags and military camps of the USSR, then to Tehran (where our Dad Włodzimierz was born in 1943), Africa, and ultimately to safe havens in Australia and the United Kingdom.

We know very little about his father, Krzysztof Łukasik, except that he and Lucyna met and presumably married at Czok Pak Camp in Guzar, USSR, in 1941/42. We have two photos of him from 1945.

Krzysztof in Polish Airforce Uniform

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 in the hope that someone out there will know something. So come along, and join us on our journey!

#Poland #Sovietdeportations #WWII