Waiting to be Heard

About the Book

Waiting to be Heard is the voice of the persecuted, the brave, the hopeful, the betrayed and the determined. It is a testament to the strength of the human spirit and to a generation that did not see itself as ‘victims,’ but as ‘survivors.’

Studies of the War and post-War years have traditionally focused on political and military history. In recent years there has been a greater interest in the social consequences of the War. Nevertheless, discussions relating to the displacement of the Polish-born usually focus on the Holocaust interpreted as a Jewish-only phenomenon. Yet, in the years 1939-45, Poland lost 6,029,000, or 22%, of its total population, including approximately 3 million of its Christian residents.

Many of those who survived the War, at its conclusion, were scattered all over the world; by the end of 1945, 249,000 members of the Polish Armed Forces were under British command, with 41,400 dependants in the United Kingdom, Italy, East and South Africa, New Zealand, India, Palestine, Mexico and Western Germany.

These refugees have long sought a voice for their experiences. The website, www.PolishDiaspora.net, was created in 2006 by Dr. Wojciechowska as a forum for their voices. The international deluge of interest in the project resulted in Waiting to be Heard. While some participants had talked and written about their experiences before, the majority had not discussed their experiences with anyone outside their immediate social circle. And the memories are still painful, as exemplified by one participant who said, “God, I askyou; allow me to forget those days and weeks when I lay on piles of corpses in the hope of finding a tiny bit of warmth; allow me to forget the licking of ice from the walls of the cattle wagons; allow me to lose my memory of those years!”

About the Author

Bogusia Wojciechowska is the daughter of two Poles who met in England in 1948. Her father, who had been in the Polish Army, did not want to go back to his home, near Lwów, as it was no longer a part of Poland. Some of his family had been deported to Siberia and had perished there. His own father, forcibly moved from the land inhabited by the family for generations, was living in Poland in poverty. Bogusia’s mother, meanwhile, had lived in Warszawa until the end of the Uprising in 1944. Like so many of her family, she was taken to a concentration camp in Germany and, then, as a slave laborer to Austria. Some members of her family perished in German camps.

Her determination to give recognition to the suffering of her parents’ generation, a generation that has been marginalized in history for the sake of political expediency, led to this book. Waiting to be Heard is both a tribute and testament to that unheard generation.

Bogusia has a BA in History and a MA in comparative Social History from the University of Warwick, England, and a PhD in Economic and Social History from the University of Kent at Canterbury, England.