12 R E C O L L E C T I O N S
Family Histories
KWIATKOWSKI Family
1 The Kwiatkowski Family 1915 - 1939
By 1915, law and order in the Volhynian Governorate of the Russian Empire began to break down locally and in practice stability didn’t return until well after the 1919/20 Polish-Russian war. It took until mid twenties before fairly normal life resumed in the impoverished neighbourhood.
The Kwiatkowski family home was in Futor Kościelny Ostrów since 1863. This area was completely agricultural with limited employment and the success of your own crops influenced your family life in all its aspects. The National Forestry Service was probably the largest employer. My grandfather, Lucjan Kwiatkowski, worked at their Michalin headquarters but this only provided necessary cash which devalued after the 1917 Revolution.
Lucjan Kwiatkowski passed away in 1923 leaving my grandmother, Aniela, at home with two young daughters, Bronisława (“Bronia) and Czesława (''Cesia”, not a spelling mistake). The oldest daughter, Antonina, had married a few years previously. The property was maintained by my grandmother with help only from her teenage daughter, Bronislawa, but needed a lot of work to restore. My father, Stanisław Kwiatkowski, returned home from military service in Berezno in January 1924.
His first tasks were to sow wheat and plant potatoes and begin repairing winter damaged outbuildings. By the following summer, he had completed the most urgent jobs and had the time to join in the social life of nearby villages. Whatever the material circumstances, this always thrived with regular weekend gatherings somewhere within walking distance of 10-15 kilometres. They were always well attended and it was during one of those that my father lost his heart to Leontyna Bronowicka (”Lonia”) of Bronisławka (village no longer in existence). Stanisław and Leontyna, our parents, married a year later (Dad didn’t give up easily) on the last Sunday of August 1926. He began changing the house into a family home by extending the building while Babcia Aniela with Bronislawa and Czesława remained in the old part. My sister Jadwiga was born a year later, brother Tadeusz in 1929 and I, Zbigniew, in 1936.
Where exactly was the house located? For those interested; using a satellite map locate the road heading east out of Białaszówka (now in Ukraine - vul. Nezalezhnosti, Balashivka). Where the road kinks south-eastward there is a crossing of unmade tracks.
hard to make ends meet until Rudnia Potasznia Church offered him the job as sole Administrator of their 400 hectares estate. It was mostly woodland and was practically on our doorstep. Meanwhile the whole area began to improve. A paper mill was set up in nearby Mokwin on the Słucz river. The surfacing of one of the eastbound roads provided employment as did a program of timber felling and replanting which involved Dad as well. One of his duties included regular night patrols to guard against illegal tree felling which was rife. So was alcohol brewing which police based in Berezne (16km) and Bystrzyca (12km) found difficult to stop. It was completely ignored by Dad on his patch because there were also regular smugglers from the Soviet Union.
It was our parent’s hard work and efforts over ten years that brought us security and comparative affluence until 1939.
Meanwhile a new 6 form school was built and opened in Rudnia Potasznik (village no longer in existence) where my sister Jadwiga (“Jadzia”) and brother Tadeusz (“Tadek”) went for the first time in 1939.
Of the other people living in Futor Kościelny, Nikolaj (“Kola”) Prokopczuk and his brother Oleksandr (“Duma”) were father’s close school friends and fully proved their friendship by supporting us with food whilst we were deported and exiled in Darowatka. That was until the German attack on Soviet Union cut all contact. My father’s other very close friend Dmitryj Pradun got involved in politics and very bad company. He was sentenced to a reduced term of imprisonment and released before war broke out but died of TB a few years later.
The left turn leads north-eastwards to Futor Kościelny which is not marked. In my childhood there was a pond of a small ruined mill where the unmade lane led through Futor Kościelny Ostrów to give its full name (ostrów is an old word for island - marsh and waterways encircle the area).
North of the ford by the pond, past remains of a tiny cemetery, the first houses were the Bendyks, followed by the Kuriata families, the last two on the left were my great uncle Adolf’s and ours. A hundred metres further is the stream with a ford where I played in 1939. Białaszówka at that time had a Post Office, Village Council Office, Orthodox Church, a four class school but very few shops. North-east of the main part there was a smithy owned by Malicki, a Ukrainian as were the vast majority of the town’s inhabitants. During late twenties/early thirties my father was employed by the Michalin based National Forestry Service but found it
The standing timber in Futor Kościelny was bought by a firm from Berezne. Its owner with his two sons were frequent visitors to our home. They were only interested in usable logs so Dad used casual labour at personal expense to stack the lopped branches into cubic meters and sold them for firewood. The profits less his expenses were shared with the Potasznia Church which was building a replacement for the existing Chapel. This wasn’t completed at the time the war broke out. The timber programme, supervised from Michalin, lasted a few years. Additional income from my mother’s breeding and selling of cattle and sheep and very efficient production of garden vegetables enabled them to plan for a new house and begin stockpiling the necessary materials by the time of my birth in 1936.