I have recently been able to visit my grandfather and was able to get his WWII story written and figured I'd share it with his permission. A couple notes before the story
It is written by him and my Grampa never went to highschool so the English is poor, and due to lack of use cannot speak any polish.
He is 81 and still alive.
If anyone would like to translate that would be appreciated.
He has a light form of dementia so some details were left out
My name is Jan Zary. I was born August 10, 1939 and my father‘s farm in Tarnpol, Poland. This is the same year that World War II started in Europe. When I was about three years old the German soldiers came looking for Polish resistance fighters. They came to our farm to search for my father who is the leader of the resistance in our area. My mother hid my father in the fireplace chimney and lit a fire so the soldiers wouldn’t find him. At a later date they returned and took my family and many other people from the area and loaded us onto railroad boxcars like cattle. We headed to Germany. We lived in these box cars. We loaded and unloaded to work in fields to pick up live and spent ammunition shells and also any other work the soldiers wanted done. It was during this time in the work camp that my sister Mary and my brother Wolfgang were born. most days we had little little or nothing to eat. When we did it would be potato peelings or other vegetable peelings or scraps in boiling water if lucky, my father could sometimes steal food from the Germans by escaping through a hole he had made in the floor of the box car. It was dangerous, as he was taking a chance at being shot and killed. Since our diet was so poor, many people were malnourished or starve to death. My brother Joseph was sadly one of them. He was about seven years old. He was buried somewhere near the railroad tracks. Sometime, before the war ended, my brother Wolfgang was killed by a bomb blast. He was six months old and he was also buried somewhere along the railroad tracks. One day will work to find all the soldiers were gone, but we were all afraid to leave the camp for fear of being killed. Finally, the Allied soldiers came and told us we were safe in the war was over. We are relieved. since we had no home to go to after four long years in the work camps, we were leased in DP camps (Displaced persons), where my mother, Father, 5 sisters, and I lived. I left something out about my family. My sister Anna was not taken by the Germans, she was visiting my grandparents in another town. My brother Piotr, left before the Germans came to the farm and joined the allied forces. we lived in the DP camp for six years until we received our visas to come to America. My mother died six months before we left and my sister, Olga married and stayed in Germany. On November 2, 1951 my father, Adele (15), Mary (8), Bernice (5), Christina (2), and I (12) boarded the ship General CH Muir in Brenernhoven, German to sail to America. We didn't know any English and only had 2 sets of clothes, but we were happy to be coming to America to make a new home and Begin a new life.
