Tag #106341 - Interview #91108 (Boleslaw Janowski)

I wanted to go back for Rachela. In late fall 1945, by then as an officer, I think I was a second lieutenant, I went to Alma Ata to bring my wife back. As a courier I had a permit to travel from Moscow, I was in military uniform, I even had a gun. Wherever I went on any business, the first thing they did was to take the gun and sniff the barrel to check that I hadn’t fired it on the way by any chance. In Alma Ata I found out that my wife was working in the Polish school in a town called Kirovskiy, some 300 kilometers to the north. And there we were told that they couldn’t let her go there and then, but they would do it when the 1946 summer vacation started. And indeed, there was a mass repatriation then and my wife returned in June 1946. From then on we lived together in Warsaw. My wife worked as an archivist in the Party History Institute.