Reunion in Naples

Jan Olechny lost two fingers of his right hand fighting the Bolsheviks in Poland after World War I. When the Polish government rewarded him with a 75-acre farm, he thought he was settled for life; the farthest he and wife Josepha ever got from their farm was nearby Pinsk. But during World War II the Olechnys, like millions of others who had thought they were settled for life, started wandering. They covered more ground than most.

Cracow to Kilimanjaro. When the Red armies slogged in to "protect" Eastern Poland in 1939, Jan Olechny was sure the Russians would take action against antiCommunists. One chilly morning he said goodbye to his wife and twelve-year-old son Riszard, set out with a knapsack to walk through the lines and join some cousins in German-held Cracow.

His cousins were not glad to see Jan. There was scarcely enough food to go around. The Nazis seized him, sent him as a slave laborer to an Austrian farm near the Italian border. There news reached him that his wife & child had been sent to a labor camp in Siberia (actually they had gone to Pinega Camp, in the frozen forests near Archangel).

Said Mrs. Olechny later: "At three o'clock one morning Russian soldiers knocked at the door, and told me we had one hour to pack our things and leave. They took us to Pinsk and loaded us into boxcars--60 to a car." As the slow train moved through the Russian winter, five babies froze to death. Their mothers pushed them out into the snow.

At Pinega, Josepha Olechny worked as a woodcutter in winter and a farm laborer in summer. In 1941 Stalin made an agreement with the Polish government in exile to permit Poles in Russian camps to join the Polish forces then being formed in Russia. Again in boxcars, Josepha and her son, following Anders' army to the Middle East, traveled to the Caspian Sea, across it in a cattle boat to Persia. Then a British transport took the Olechnys and other Polish refugees through the Persian Gulf, around Arabia and down to Mozambique. From there they went by train to a camp in Southern Rhodesia. Later they were sent to a new refugee camp near Mount Kilimanjaro in Central Africa.

Austria to New World. At war's end, Jan Olechny was freed from the farm in Austria, was shunted from one D.P. camp to another. Finally he reached Naples. Last month his wife and son, who had located him through the Red Cross, sailed to Naples on the U.S. Army transport General Black.

Before boarding the transport in Naples harbor last week, Jan Olechny sold a few articles of clothing, bought some lemons as a gift for his family. Aboard ship an American officer told him Josepha and Riszard were eating lunch below desk. "I am sorry," he said, "you 11 have to wait." Obediently Jan sat down and waited.

Ten minutes later, for the first time in ten years, Jan came face to face with Josepha and his son, who had grown so tall that he scarcely knew him. For a moment the Olechnys stood still, then they rushed weeping into each other's arms. Last week they prepared to go to Canada, which had accepted them as farmer immigrants. The Olechnys hoped it would be their last trip for a while.

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