In February 2002, as I was passing through the beautiful city of Arusha in Tanzania (which was then awash with bouganvillia), I suddenly remembered the stories my mother and grandmother had told me about the wartime Polish resettlement camp at Tengeru, where they had spent several years. During the war, thousands of Polish citizens had traveled out of the Siberian work camps across Russia, Persia and India, and many of them had ended up in Tengeru. The resettlement camp was somewhere near Arusha. That was all I remembered.
Against the background of Kilimanjaro, which dominated the horizon, we sought out anyone who might know of the Polish camp. I asked our Tanzanian driver whether he had heard of a place called Tengeru, or about a Polish war-time camp. Yes indeed, he answered. There was a small district outside Arusha called Tengeru. He could take us there. But never having heard of a Polish camp, he stopped at a local police station to inquire. The friendly Tanzanian policeman was very helpful. He knew all about the Polish compound, gave us directions and phoned ahead to prepare for our arrival. The site of the old Polish camp, we learned, now lay within the grounds of a large agricultural college. We needed special permission to enter it.
Turning in from the busy road, we drove down a beautiful lane bordered on both sides by ancient and very lofty trees. Fingers of shadow caressed the car as we drove. The road was narrow and uneven, causing the landrover to bounce up and down. Bananas grew all around us in the rich red soil.Halfway down the lane, a slim elderly Tanzanian in a torn jacket and a strange fur-lined hat stood waiting for us. The irregularities of his stubble and the dilapidation of his clothes were very evident. He was to be our guide for the last mile of the journey. He spoke no English, but told us through our interpreter (the driver) that he could remember the time when the Poles were here in the 1940s.
Finally, we came to halt. The old man took my hand, led me out of the landrover, and pointed with a long bony finger into the distance . Before us was a whitewashed wall with a metal gate. Before it stood three Tanzanian women holding bunches of keys. They welcomed us, unlocked the gates, and we were able to enter.
It was a large cemetery: all that remained of the Polish compound. A scattering of broad trees here and there gave some pleasant shade. Near the entrance, a simple stone monument told (in Polish, English and Swahili) that these were the graves of Polish exiles who had been unable to return to their homeland. There were two or three hundred headstones, each one clean and bleached white in the hot African sun.
I walked among the headstones for some time, reading the Polish names and dates, looking at the Roman and Orthodox crosses, (as well as the few Stars of David) carved upon them. The most recent dated from 1963! All of the stones were beautifully clean. Only a long growth of dried yellow grass grew among them. I could not discover who tended these graves, but they had been lovingly looked after.
It was a very emotional experience. So many Polish names! So many who had died on African soil without being able to return home. My mother had spent several months here in 1944, I remembered, before being sent to Scotland as a nurse. But the rest of her family, my grandmother, aunt and uncle, had spent four years in Tengeru hating every moment, constantly harassed by the UNNRA to leave for any godforsaken area of the world, (Poland, even): anywhere but out of their hands. But they had nowhere to go. Their country had been handed over to Stalin by those “loyal allies” for whom they had fought (Britain and the USA).For me, it was a resurrection of buried history: the memory of the betrayal of a country by its allies. The shame, the ignominy of that act had been concealed and barely mentioned in history books. This was the place where several hundred of those Poles had ended their lives, waiting in vain to return home, all but forgotten under the baking heat of an African sky.
My eyes began to fill with tears. The old man, who all this time had been standing respectively at the gates with the women, came towards me. He too had tears in his eyes. He embraced me tightly. He told me that he remembered the Polish inhabitants of the camp with affection. Many times he had come here with his mother to sell bananas.
“Does anyone ever come here to visit?” I asked him.
“No”, he explained through our “interpreter”. Although we learned that a film crew from Poland had arrived several months earlier to shoot some footage for a documentary. Apart from them, no-one ever came.
“And who looks after the graves?” I inquired.
The old man did not understand, but smiled, showing the ruins of some teeth. He embraced me again. I thanked him warmly and pressed a few dollars into his hand. He nodded, smiled sadly to himself and disappeared.
We took a few last photographs and returned to the landrover, meditating on this episode of buried Polish history. Even among the lush vegetation and rich banana groves of East Africa, it was a sad and lonely place.
