Alfred Borowicz's fake document of baptism

Alfred Borowicz's fake document of baptism

This is the false document of my baptism, issued by my friend Jan Gustkowicz, a priest in Lwow in the 1940s. At some point the Soviets started the so-called passportization, people were being issued Soviet passports. Whoever couldn't prove to be a local was classified as a refugee and a potential spy. Such people were forbidden by law from living closer than 1,000 kilometers to the state border. Consequently, they were sent to Siberia. Your ID bore the stamp identifying you as a 'paragraph 16' which meant you were slated for deportation. To avoid that, you had to prove you were a local, that is, have a permanent address there and an ID or a birth certificate from there. The address I had from my student years. I went to the ladies where I had lived in lodgings as a student and they gladly took me in. My ID and birth certificate, in turn, were from Wieliczka. They had classified me as a refugee. I went to Gustkowicz, my friend working as curate at the Maria Magdalena church, and he says, 'listen, I shouldn't really give you a false birth certificate because I'm a state official, but this is not any authority for me, it's an occupation, so I have no scruples.' And I got the certificate.
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