*** From [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Konrad M Lepecki) The Guardian (London) February 21, 2001 SECTION: Guardian Society Pages, Pg. 6 HEADLINE: Facing up to the past; The Horrors Of Persecution And Gulags Still Haunt Many Polish Exiles In Britain. Could A New Book Help Social Services Be Sensitive To That Trauma? Chris Arnot Reports Stanislaw Stepien looks slightly surprised when I turn down his offer of another glass of vodka. It is late on a dark winter's afternoon and I have already accepted a good slug on top of a cup of tea and a ham sandwich. Politely, I hope, I have declined further offers of cake and apple pie. Even by Polish standards, the Stepiens are generous and hospitable people. Stanislaw tops up his own glass. Then, eyes twinkling mischievously beneath bushy eyebrows, he leans forward and says: In moderation, I can take plenty.' He is a powerful-looking man with a military bearing. In his 89th year, he is still tilling a fertile acre of garden behind a semi on the edge of Bradford. His wife, Leonia, is 84 and slightly stooped, but just as full of fun. You can laugh; you can cry,' she says at one point. And in the course of nearly three hours of conversation, she does both, occasionally dabbing her eyes with a neatly folded handkerchief. She talks with measured composure about wartime experiences of unimaginable cruelty and deprivation. Along with her first husband and his family, she was rounded up by Soviet troops and transported to Siberia in cattle-truck trains soon after Stanislaw and his comrades had fought a brave but doomed battle against the Nazi invaders from the west. Having survived the packed, freezing, insanitary trucks, she was put to work helping to fell trees in a forest. She worked for 12 hours at a time, up to her chest in snow. If you cried, the tears would freeze on your cheeks,' she recalls. She drank melted snow. The brick-like bread she was given to sustain her had to be melted over pieces of burning wood. Leonia was freed after Hitler's armies invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. So began an epic journey, all the way down to the Caspian Sea, across to Tehran and then on to Palestine. From there, she was flown to Britain. Her first husband, Romuald, was killed in 1945 while flying a Lancaster bomber over German cities. She met Stanislaw after the war, in the Leicestershire town of Melton Mowbray. The remarkable thing about the Stepiens' story is that, in Polish terms, it is not particularly remarkable. Almost as remarkable is how little most of the indigenous British know about these stories. Large numbers of Poles have been living among us since the second world war. Over 160,000-strong at the time, they made up the biggest group of political exiles to settle here since 1918. Yet sometimes it seems that not much has changed since the 1950s when Leonia revealed to workmates at a Bradford textile mill a little about the appalling conditions she had endured in Siberia, and somebody asked her: Why didn't you write and complain to Stalin?' Forty years on, the first generation of settlers are reaching an age when many of them need help from the caring services. Are those services geared up to cope with their special needs? They will be in Bradford, if Barbara Stepien-Foad, daughter of Stanislaw and Leonia, has anything to do with it. As social services development manager in the city's Shipley area, she is well aware that there are elderly Poles who are more isolated and more mentally scarred than her own sprightly parents. Yet our home-care people providing services in eastern European homes were finding clients very reluctant to ask for help,' she says. They have always been self-reliant survivors. But they've carried what happened to them between 1939 and '45 into old age. In retirement they have more time to dwell on the past. Too often we are reaching them at a crisis point when what we really need is more preventative work. To give them appropriate help, though, we have to understand what they have lived through.' Accordingly, she has set up a course to educate social workers and others on the culture and wartime history of Poles and other eastern Europeans. I'm not aware that other areas are doing what Bradford is doing, apart from Reading where Age Concern set up a similar scheme that has since collapsed because of lack of funding,' says Michelle Winslow, co-author of a new book which should prove invaluable for those who want to know more. The book, Keeping the Faith: the Polish Community in Britain, provides an outline of how their country was carved up by invaders from the west and east, coupled with extracts from the personal stories of elderly Poles. Winslow took her tape recorder to centres all around the country. But many interviews were done in Bradford and her native Sheffield where she was, until comparatively recently, a state enrolled nurse. A career break led her to a history degree and a PhD on Polish migration to Britain. In the course of it, she became aware of the high incidence of mental health problems among immigrants from eastern Europe. As long ago as 1956, the rate was identified as four times higher than that of the indigenous population. The reasons are not difficult to discern, as Winslow points out. Apart from all the trauma they went through during the war, at the end of it they faced the crushing blow that they couldn't go back without risking death or arrest. They'd lost their families and their homeland. Meanwhile, Soviet propaganda had got through to some people here who were shouting fascist' at them in the street.' The post-war Labour government was evidently not immune to Soviet propaganda either. Foreign secretary Ernest Bevin urged the Poles to return to their liberated country' and, in order to appease Stalin, Polish servicemen were excluded from the London victory parade in 1946. Never mind that one in eight of the pilots who fought against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain had been a Pole. It's hardly surprising that many survivors remain obsessed with the second world war. It was that obsession that intrigued Tim Smith, a photographer with an interest in oral history, who provided the pictures for Winslow's book (of which he is the co-author) and carried out a few of the interviews. Many British people went through awful things during the war,' he says, but at the end at least they knew they were on the winning side and they still had a homeland. The Poles had lost everything and had nowhere to go. No wonder they see it as the pivotal event of their lives.' And no wonder it still haunts them in old age. I wanted to go back,' says Stanislaw, but I knew friends who did and finished up in Siberia. I stayed in England because here I was free,' he says, hammering the table with a heavy forefinger. I try to look forward rather than back,' he goes on. Tomorrow is more important to me than yesterday - tomorrow when I know which seeds are going to come through in my garden.' But he also knows that for himself, his wife and other elderly Poles, the horrors of yesterday retain an all too powerful grip on today. Keeping the Faith, The Polish Community in Britain, is published by the Bradford Heritage Recording Unit in association with the University of Sheffield at pounds 9.95. To order at a special discount price of pounds 7.95 plus p&p, call Culture Shop on 0800-3166 102. -- Konrad M. 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