News

Surviving Warsaw 1939-1945: Untold Stories of Occupation and the Ghetto

(5 November 2012)

Dr. Marek Szablewski will give a talk at 14:15pm on Sunday 11 November atHolgate House, Grey College. Dr Marek Szablewski, a Durham university physics lecturer born and brought up in Sheffield and has recently returned from an eight-week Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship (www.wcmt.org.uk) to Europe. The aim of his Fellowship was to research his hidden Polish family history and the journey that brought his parents to Yorkshire after World War Two.

Marek travelled to Warsaw to work on his project “Surviving Warsaw 1939-1945: untold stories of occupation and the ghetto”, digging up information from archives and museums, talking to relatives and visiting sites of special interest in order to fill in the gaps in his late father’s stories and documents. He uncovered information about his grandfather Stefan and how he drew on the skills developed during his career as a printer, revolutionary socialist, conscript, prisoner of war, escapee, insurgent, police officer and undercover detective to hide his third wife, who was Jewish, and their daughter during the Second World War and Nazi occupation of Poland.