Julian Gringras and his children Ania and Roman

This a photo of me and my children, Ania and Romek. Ania is sitting on a donkey. This photo was taken in Warsaw in 1955.

My wife didn't work after the war. She worked before, in the Soviet Union.

After the war she looked after the baby, kept house, cooked and so on. She didn't have to work, as things worked out; I never suggested that she look for a job.

I didn't spend a lot of time with the children: Ania was born in 1948 and Roman in 1951. As much as time allowed. I worked away a lot.

I returned from the Soviet Union in 1946. I landed up at the PUR, the State Repatriation Office, I didn't go to Kielce, but was sent to Lodz.

And in Lodz I landed a Warsaw contact, as they say; you see in Warsaw in 1946 the authorities of the People's Republic of Poland, PRL, were forming.

Then I was summoned to Warsaw by one of my Polytechnic friends who had already taken up posts in the government authorities - or lower down, but high enough up to summon.

And so I went to Warsaw, where I was at once billeted to an apartment on the 6th floor, on Stalowa Street, with a family. Still with my wife. Inseparable by that time, we were. It lasted 63 years, a good spell. And I got a job straight away.

At that time the government ministries were being set up in Poland. I was put in power engineering, because in the Soviet Union that's what I'd generally worked in.

I was promoted fast, because they lacked people; there weren't any experts, people with experience, and I became someone on the Central Power Engineering Board. I was this chief inspector.

From the beginning of 1947 until the end of 1948 I worked as the head of an investment procurement mission in Czechoslovakia. I built up this little organization, a dozen or so people worked in it.

In 1948 I worked in the PKPG [State Economic Planning Committee, the most powerful institution in Poland], in 1949 I was director of the Central Power Engineering Board, and then I moved to work in the heavy plant industry.

Photos from this interviewee