Polish War Graves in Qazvin, Iran

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Qazvin has been deleted from the Polish embassy's list of wartime gravesites in Iran. The cemetery no longer exists. High-rise flats have taken its place.

In the summer of 2008, I travelled to the northern Iranian city of Qazvin to find traces of the 40 Polish men, women and children who had died there, victims of the Polish Exodus from Siberia in 1942. What I found distressed and saddened me.

Finding the graves was no easy matter. I knew that they were located in the Chaldean Christian cemetery. But there were two such cemeteries in the city, both of them active building sites .

The first site, not far from the famous Hussein mosque, had already been completely levelled. Nothing of the old cemetery remained except the ancient red-bricked wall that once enclosed it. Local residents directed us to the other site, which was in the process of being developed into a park. Paths and circular features were clearly marked out. But we could find no signs of any graves.

We wandered over to a wooden shack that served as the site office, and were introduced to a tall, soft-spoken, sophisticated, young man who introduced himself as the chief engineer. We asked about the whereabouts of Polish graves, and he answered that they were not far away.

He asked to see our papers, and after studying them intensely for some time, offered to help us. First, however, he drove us to his office in the City Chambers a few blocks away. He served us tea and confectionery, and then brought out a series of very large detailed maps of the building site. They clearly showed 40 graves in an irregular grouping amid various broken stones and unidentified markings..

He was soft-spoken and very polite. He asked whether we would like to have dinner with him that evening, But we were in a hurry, and politely declined. He explained to us that in Iran, any graveyard could be re-used for housing after 30 years if it was not covered by a special preservation order. This particular cemetery did not have such an order.

It was true. In 1955, the Iranian government had approached the authorities in Poland to ask them to contribute something to the upkeep of the Polish plot in Qazvin. The officials had declined, wishing to distance themselves from the events of 1942 which were politically embarrasing for the Polish Communist government. Instead, they had offered only a miserly sum, barely enough to buy a couple of dressed stones. And as a result, the graves had fallen into such disrepair that traces of them were barely visible above ground.

We finally saw the remains of the graveyard ourselves. It was adjacent to the Qazvin Khoda hospital in the centre of the city. It was nothing but building site open to the main road by a hedged driveway: a large open space of dusty earth covered with broken stones.

In the very centre stood three upright monumental stones with the name Filipowicz engraved upon them. This was the name of the Polish doctor who had settled in Qazvin during the war, and who featured in Khosrow Sinai’s documentary The Lost Requiem. Beside them were a few other Christian graves with elegant Armenian letters and crosses still emblazoned on their surfaces.

It was obvious this had once been a very large graveyard. A long red-bricked wall and a ruined house in the corner defined its former contours. On the opposite side of the plot, a tangle of multi-storey steel girders were already approaching fast, and a team of workmen were mixing cement within feet of the remaining graves.

Out of my pocket I took out a list of the names of those buried here beneath my feet. I read them out in a whisper. These forty Polish souls had been dragged at gunpoint out of their homes in the middle of the night and exiled to the work camps of Siberia. They had all survived the ordeal and finally reached the promised land of Iran only to die in Qazvin of unidentified diseases. In 1942, Qazvin was stopping place for the Polish exiles on their way to Tehran from the Caspian port of Anzali (Pahlevi). Qazvin was also host to the stream of covered trucks that carried young Polish soldiers to Lebanon to join the allied armies (via Hamadan and Kermanshah)

Barely a trace of their existence now remained , nothing but a few broken stones and dust. In a few weeks there would be nothing at all to see.

I took a few last photos and began to take my leave. The Iranian workmen, who all this time had been keeping a respectful distance, pushed forward when they caught sight of my camera and began to pose grotesquely like manikins in a shop window.

I left, and headed for the nearby Hussein Mosque to say a prayer in memory of my compatriots. As I entered the courtyard, I was immediately caught up in an elaborate funeral ceremony. A body, wrapped in two carpets and carried on a thin wooden bier, was being processed around the precinct of the magnificent mirrored mosque. Women wailed, and men of all ages sat around weeping openly. For me, the whole scene took on added meaning and significance. I stood and watched from the sidelines, sharing their grief and silently entering their community of mourning.

text and pictures © Ryszard Antolak

Embassy officials regularly visit Dulab (Tehran) and Isfahan Polish cemeteries (which are beautifully upkept), but those at Qazvin and Mashhad seem to have been neglected for years.

The Polish war cemetery at Anzali, the second largest in the country, also has problems. The stones are so weathered away that many of the inscriptions are illegible. In addition, the mature pine trees around them are withering for lack of water. These are all matters for the Polish authorities, which seem to be doing very little, if anything.