100 years back and 1000 miles east. Looking for Auntie Janina
I have always felt uncomfortable being English. British is fine, but English always seemed to mean something I am not. When I was young there were many people who said you weren’t “proper English” unless all your Grandparents were born here. My grandfather, Czesław Rogiński, was not born here. He was Polish, and he spoke with a strong Polish Accent. The people who spoke of the grandparent rule were saying it to exclude second and third generation Black or Asians, not me, but it’s still a message I internalised and while it caused me a lot less harm than it did to Black Britons, it still hurt.
Other than my Grandfather, the roots of my family tree are deeply English. I discovered that I have had ancestors in Yorkshire since the late 15th century at least. But it doesn’t follow they were Anglo-Saxon; the North of England was part of Danelaw and some words of Yorkshire dialect are near identical to Old Norse. When I visited Iceland I felt immediately at home.
At school I learnt German, and I have picked my German studies up again as an adult. I have a growing appreciation of German culture, thinkers and writers. There are, of course, aspects of Englishness (and Britishness) that I love. William Blake. The Bronte sisters. Trial by jury. Trade Unionism. All very cool. But I don’t feel a pride at being English. I’m thankful that I was born here and not some place with no infrastructure where I might have been married off at twelve and never learned to read. But I can’t feel pride at the mere accident of my birth.
I stayed up until three in the morning on the evening of the Brexit referendum, drinking Mojito mix (the only booze left in the house by that point) with my partner James as I watched the Sunderland drop (where the value of the pound did an uncanny impersonation of Alton Towers’ Oblivion ride,) got it into my head that it would all be all right and went to bed. I awoke with a throbbing skull and reached for my phone to check the result.
“I already looked,” said James. “I’m sorry.”
Once the hangover cleared and the screeching impending sense of doom settled into murmur, the first thing I did was Google “Polish Citizenship.”
I was not alone in this. Applications for Irish Citizenship skyrocketed. Logically, it makes little sense, I hadn’t used my freedom of movement before, other than for holidays, and realistically I am unlikely to up sticks to the continent to work. My German isn’t up to anything more than telling people where the train station is and that I like football. What I wanted to protect was not so much my European Treaty Rights, but my Europeanness. James and I are internationalists at heart and while I appreciate there are legitimate left wing arguments against the EU, we both firmly believe we are better off in partnership with our neighbours than in opposition to them.
I look sort-of-Polish. Not that most Brits would notice, it’s not something that’s as noticable or as discriminated against as being a person of colour, but on more than one occasion people have spoken to me in Polish (including a shopkeeper of Pakistani heritage, who had seen my nose and the four pack of Tyskie I was buying and greeted me in Polish. Which was a lovely gesture but I had no idea what he was talking about.) After Brexit I felt less safe on public transport, although I knew I had a defence in my voice — my flat Yorkshire vowels mark me as “not foreign” (a rule that applies to my Polish peasant’s nose, but wouldn’t work if I had brown skin. Racism isn’t very logical.) I understood why my father had Anglicized the name.
It turns out Poland is fairly strict on citizenship. I can’t be a Polish Citizen (not automatically at least) because my father wasn’t. Never mind that the reason he wasn’t is all down to Stalin.
Where my Grandfather was born is one of those places where the inhabitants don’t necessarily cross borders, but borders cross the inhabitants. The village was at times Russia, at times Poland, and is currently in Belarus. The nearest city was Wilno (currently know as Vilnius) which is in Lithuania. Lithuania is a lot more relaxed about citizenship than Poland, a great-grandparent is all you need. It wasn’t a huge stretch of the imagination that one of my great-grandparents held some form of Lithuanian citizenship. Unlike Belarus, Lithuania is in the EU. I took a break from encouraging my son to meet a nice German girl and delved into the family history.
My Grandfather, Czesław Rogiński, was born on Christmas Eve in 1914. His story is one of those that is both extraordinary and ordinary, as he lived in extraordinary times.
We know his parents were called Antoni and Julja (née Rynkiewicz) and we think they were peasant farmers in a small village called Paszele, where my granddad was born. They also had two daughters, Janina and Helena. At some time around the end of World War One, Antoni and Julja contracted Spanish ‘flu and died. The girls were adopted and Czesław was sent to an orphanage in Wilno. The family smallholding was sold to pay for the upbringing of the orphaned children and so Czesław was given an education that probably saved his life. He graduated as an engineer and went to work for the Polish Air Force as a draftsman. We know in 1939 both he and Janina lived in Wilno, Czesław near the train station and Janina on ulica Szeptynkiego.
On 1st September 1939 Hitler’s Germany attacked Poland. On the 19th September the USSR seized Wilno. By this time my Granddad had already crossed the border to Latvia alongside many other Polish armed forces and was interned in a prisoner of war camp in Daugavpils. Google translate cheerfully translated his records as saying “Intern in a Job Camp.” Granddad did describe his time at Daugavpils to my father as being “like a holiday camp,” at least in comparison to what followed. In June 1940 the USSR occupied Latvia. Poles and Latvians alike were rounded up and sent to the gulag. Czesław spent the next two years in a series of labour camps. Many were even less fortunate — literally thousands of Poles were shot and buried in the forests, most notably at Katyn. On one of the rare occasions he spoke of the time Czesław told my father that his engineering skills were useful to the authorities and that is what kept him alive.
In 1941 when the USSR joined the allies, Czesław boarded the steamer Llanstephen Castle and arrived in Glasgow on 3rd October. He rejoined the Polish air force, operating as a franchise of the RAF, as a gunner, flying in Lancaster Bombers. After the war, in 1946 he married Nina Bell, my Grandma. He lived in Leeds until his death in 1994.
Granddad did not speak much of his past, certainly not to his granddaughters. I had always known he was an orphan, but it was only after my Grandmother died in 2012 that I discovered he knew who his parents were, and only when I started looking at the family tree that my father mentioned that Czesław had sisters.
We don’t know what happened to Janina after 1939, or Helena at all. I don’t think Granddad did, or if he did he wasn’t telling.
Race isn’t really a thing, not scientifically at least. Culturally it may be but if you pick two black people, or white people at random, the genetic differences between them will be as much as the genetic differences between a white and black person. The differences are the ones we see and so note. Skin colour, hair texture, nose shape, eyes.
The definition of race for the purposes of British equality law includes colour, nationality and national origin. In deciding what is a “race” the courts have looked at aspects such as a shared language and culture.
While I wouldn’t argue that Yorkshire is a race for the purposes of the Equality Act, if you understood what I meant by grebbing, we probably have a shared culture and language.
Greb: (colloquial, Yorkshire) verb. To eject saliva from one’s mouth. To spit.
I sent a tube of my spit off to Ancestry.com’s lab, a place I imagine to be cut into the side of a mountain, surrounded by armed goons on Segways. I was told results would come in 6–8 weeks and so I waited. Christmas was coming and I had plenty to be getting on with.
In the Christmas market in Woking (where I now live) there was a Polish man selling Baltic amber jewellery. I told him that when I was a girl I have an heart-shaped pendant made of amber, with a pre-historic fly suspended in it, like the fly at the start of Jurassic Park. “I don’t have any flies,” he said apologetically. I told him my grandfather was Polish. He said I must have good genes and be “an unbreakable woman.”
I said I wasn’t so sure about that, it’s only a quarter and that seemed to be mostly my liver, which processes vodka with an alarming efficiency (not so much whiskey.) The rest of me is just English. My ankle certainly hadn’t been unbreakable. I bought a little silver pendant with a circle of amber.
The next day, unexpectedly early, I got an e-mail to say my results were in. Genetically, at least, I’m less English than I feared.
The big genealogical companies have millions of data points of DNA, family and migration history and from that they can extrapolate an ancestral history.
As well as that they can search their databases for people who may be related to you. Alongside my ethnicity results there was a list of possible forth cousins. I recognised a few of the family names from my research into my English tree, and it confirmed some of the very early Yorkshire ancestors.
I started off using Ancestry.co.uk because that’s what my mum uses, but it isn’t great for Polish family history. I had also uploaded my tree to MyHeritage where there were a lot more Europeans. The great thing about DNA testing is that you can download your raw data and then upload it to other sites for free, you don’t have to test for each site. I had already found a potential (as yet unconfirmed) record for great-aunt Janina on MyHeritage so that was the first place I uploaded to.
I also uploaded my results to Gedmatch. Gedmatch is a free website where you can search their databases for matches. As well as the matching capability it has other tests — you can find out if your parents were close relatives, it will guess your eye colour. And it has a huge array of Admixture tests to estimate ethnicity.
I was reminded that DNA testing would be horrible in the wrong hands when I went off to Google what “WHG” meant (it’s Western Hunter-Gatherer) and the top result was from Stormfront, the far-right blog. I clicked on the link before realising what it was, so Google probably thinks I’m a racist now. Stormfront forum members were sharing their results to show off how white they were (they had all conveniently edited out the matches with low numbers which may have been a little more colourful.) You can input any test ID to any of the tests, experimentally I ran one of the Admixture tests of someone I had found with a shared surname in their family tree, and found they were very Baltic. I could have run the Jtest, which measures against Ashkenazi Jewish populations. Most people with Eastern European heritage (including me) will have a small percentage of DNA that shows up as Ashkenazi, some people will have more. The people with more probably won’t want to interact with the Stormfront people. I certainly don’t.
On the other hand there are (exclusively white) people who seem desperate to find that black/Native/Jewish/Rroma ancestor to add a bit of exoticism to their existence. In no way as bad as the Stormfront crew, they still have a strange view of race. My 15% Scottish/Irish/Welsh doesn’t make me Celtic, and were it, say, Cherokee, it wouldn’t give me any insight into the oppression of those people or the right to wear their sacred symbols. As you will know if you read my other posts I am somewhat of a Cymruphile, but this isn’t genetic, I just love a lot of Welsh people (especially James, my breaker of bad election news.) I don’t have the right to play at being Welsh, and a distant black ancestor doesn’t give the right to claim the cool bits of Black (usually African-American) culture while enjoying all the white privilege your pasty skin gets you.
DNA testing isn’t a substitute for the hard work of tracking down documents, but I’m still hoping for a breakthrough. So far I’ve found some third cousins in Lithuania. Third cousins share a set of great-great-great grandparents. None of the trees go back that far yet. I’ve found a 5th cousin with a Hrynkiewicz on her tree, the Hrynkiewicz married a Vilnius man. Nothing that will fill the (sizable) gaps in my Polish tree, but confirmation at least that I’m looking in the right part of the world. I’ve joined a very helpful Polish genealogy group on Facebook. I’ve drafted a letter to send to the parish where Czesław was christened (the parish is now in Lithuania, the church in Belarus.) I just need to pluck up the courage to risk insulting a priest (or maybe two) through the medium of Google Translate.
I don’t realistically think I’ll ever get a Lithuanian passport, and so I ask myself why I’m doing this. I’m not truly patriotic for any country, I don’t want to demonstrate any racial “purity” (nor do I want to co-opt an ethnic identity on the shaky basis of DNA (except maybe Welsh.))
I do want to know what happened to Helena and Janina. Who adopted them? Was that a better deal than the orphanage, or worse? Did they survive the war? Emigrate? Have children? Who were they?
But more than that, as I get older (I have one of those birthdays with an 0 in it this year) I have a need to find where I fit into this world. Czesław’s story is not the typical Polish emigration story (although it did happen to thousands of Poles.) Most people in the Polish Genealogy group are American, their ancestors left Poland before the first world war. But the second world war scattered, and decimated, populations. My DNA results bring up distant cousins in the UK and the US, but also in Finland, Lithuania, Germany… we are international. If the records could go back far enough, they’d show we are all, every one of us, cousins.
So hi, Cousin. Great to meet you! Where are you from?
