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On 10 March 2002 the historian Janusz Radziejowski passed away in Warsaw. He was perhaps best known for his book on the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, published in both Polish (1976) and English (1983).
Janusz Radziejowski was born on 3 June 1925 in Kyiv. His father, Henryk Politur, was politically active in the Polish Socialist Party and later joined the Communist Party of Poland. He emigrated to Soviet Ukraine in 1919 and worked among the Polish minority, becoming a co-founder and vice-director of the Institute of Polish Culture of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Janusz's mother, Jadwiga, was a physician. She was born in Siberia as the granddaughter of an exiled Polish insurgent.
In 1933 Henryk Politur was arrested and sent to a camp in Kazakhstan, on an island in the Caspian Sea. His wife and children (Janusz and Wanda) voluntarily followed him there in the fall of 1934, but were forced to leave in the spring of the following year. They settled not far away, in Guriev (today Atyrau). Janusz told me that as a child he became a favourite of the criminals (ugolovniki); he remembered them as friendly but violent. In 1937 Politur was shot. Jadwiga Radziejowska, who continued to work as a physician, also raised the children of her arrested sister-in-law. She died of spotted fever in 1942.
In 1943 Janusz was put to work in a munitions factory, where the conditions were extremely harsh. He readily volunteered for the Polish Armed Forces, which were being formed then in the USSR under the command of General Berling. He fought with Berling's army until it reached Berlin and witnessed many atrocities. In later years he repeatedly told me that even though he himself was not a believer, he felt religion was beneficial in restraining man's bestial impulses. The war taught him that. He received decorations for his service at the front, including Crosses of Valour. He did not have a high opinion of such honours, however.
The war's end found him in Gleiwitz (Gliwice) in Silesia, where he is said to have spoken out for fair treatment of the German civilian population. In 1948 he was ordered, as a Soviet citizen, to leave the Polish Armed Forces and return to the...