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Here is an extract from Jan's story:
"Back then I was a very patriotic nine-year-old and the war started I think with the gardener screaming 'war, war!' We all rushed out and there was this long line of German planes above, flying I guess towards Warsaw (the capital of Poland). After a few minutes of pointing at the sky the crowd panicked.
It's very difficult to understand that when you see planes up in the air. There was really no experience of being bombed before, so when you saw a plane in the sky you assumed it was going to bomb you. So people were rushing around, including myself.
I remember running down a long row of raspberry bushes, thinking 'this is a pretty hopeless way of trying to hide', but I just kept running. I turned a corner and I met this extraordinary apparition, a vision of a very large lady, holding in front of her an enormous picture of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa with a great big guilt frame. All you could see of her really were her eyes and these big red hands holding this frame. She was praying very loudly.
And I couldn't make out whether she was hoping the frame would defend her or the Virgin Mary would defend her. Anyway it kind of stopped my panic because there was somebody who was obviously going crazier than I was. But that was the first day. After that we were part of the great mass of people trekking towards the (River) Vistula.
Like anybody's journey out of it, mine was miraculous in one way or another. There were chances and extraordinary situations.
My father was at that time in Sweden, his cousin was an ambassador there and my father managed to get there (he was hoping to join the Polish Army in Scotland) and he asked for his family to join him.
My mother went to see if she could get a permit to leave and lo and behold there was an old German officer sitting behind the desk who knew her family from before the First World War. He said 'Oh I'll fix you with that,' so he fixed it, but then it needed to be signed by the Gestapo (the German secret police) in Krakow.
They just tore it up and everybody said you can't possibly leave, that's it. But she said 'no I'll try again'. She got another permit from the old German officer and this time because my mother was bilingual (she could speak German as well as Polish) she walked into the headquarters of the Gestapo and started shouting.
'Where is everybody? I need this signed! I've got to get a passenger train this evening, come on. Schnell!' And the young man behind the desk there went whack! and stamped it and we were on a train to Berlin, formally, officially with papers.
Of course at any moment we could have been arrested but somehow we arrived in Berlin and then we had to wait formally and officially to get visas for Denmark.
The Russian submarines were operating in the Baltic, the war with Russia had broken out, so we waited for a week. We were bombed by the British - so I have been bombed by the Germans and by the British - and then we eventually turned up in Sweden, which was neutral and I became a Swedish boy for three years. My father went and joined the Polish Army here (in Britain) and he asked for us to come and join him.
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