The Polish War Cemetery at Anzali (formerly Pahlavi), Iran

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The grand, wrought iron gates of the Polish wartime cemetery are permanently padlocked and have not been opened for decades. Entrance is gained via a smaller, more prosaic, gate at the western end of the compound. As with the other Polish war cemeteries in Iran, the site is cared for by the local Armenian community, a service for which it deserves a deep debt of gratitude.

Arrived with a bouquet of red and white flowers in my hands, I am welcomed at the door by the caretaker, Mr. Reza Moghadam, a slim, gentle, self-effacing man who leads me leisurely through what looks like a secret garden rather than than a graveyard. We pass a couple of tiny Armenian churches, now turned into mausoleums, surrounded by gravestones inscribed with Armenian characters. The vegetation is lush and the air is heavy with the scent of roses, pomegranates, and flowering bushes.

A few moments later, we arrive at a low metal gate – the entrance to the Polish cemetery – and the contrast with the previous section is immediately evident. There are precious few bushes or plants to be seen anywhere: only a few thin saplings standing here and there, most of them struggling to survive the intense July heat. Apart from a few shaded areas close to the perimeter wall, it is bare, sandy, almost desert-like.

At the centre stands a high rectangular column of white marble lavishly engraved with a Polish eagle. Below it, in English and Polish, are inscribed the words:

“This is the resting place of 639 Poles, the soldiers of the Polish army of the east, of General Władysław Anders and civilians the prisoners of war and captives of the Soviet camps who died in 1942 on the way to their homeland. Peace to their memory.”

There is an earlier commemorative stone lying in the soil a few feet away. Brown and disfigured by time, its inscription can still be made out, but only with considerable difficulty:

“Pamięci żołnierzy Polskich kobiet, mężczyzni i dzieci, do kraju ojczyznego zdradzających na ziemi obcej zgasłych i tu pochowanych w roku 1942”

I lay down my bouquet of flowers in front of it and sit down on the ground to mourn my fellow countrymen. All around me lie small, neat gravestones, close together in long cemented rows. The names and dates on many of them are decayed and weathered. Two have crumbled away altogether.

One grave stands out among the others: a new headstone which was erected only recently by a young Polish couple who arrived to replace a relative’s crumbling headstone. It is higher higher than the other stones, upright and of proud grey marble.

Mr Moghadam, who lives in the cemetery and tends the graves, receives no salary or remuneration for his services, only the house he lives in, donated to him by the Armenian community. Together with his wife, he survives on donations from visitors and well-wishers. In the last year, only three visitors from Poland had come to the cemetery. And with the recent volatile political situation (following the Iranian elections), he does not expect any more in the immediate future. "They are frightened to come", he says bluntly.
“People sometimes ask me whether I am afraid to live in a cemetery,” he continues as we walk among the headstones. “But I always tell them: why should I be afraid of the dead? It is the living I should be afraid of.”

In the course of our conversations, he lets slip that he is an artist and I persuade him to show me his paintings. In a shed near the front gate I rummage through a stack of large oil paintings executed in thick, vibrant colours. The themes range from Iranian history to religious icons. Above us, on the stone wall of his work shed, he has painted a gigantic figure of Christ rising from the dead with outstretched arms. “This is purely for myself”, he says, and smiles shyly.

Several years ago he received a commission to paint a series of icons for a church in Turkey. But the consignment disappeared (stolen most probably) somewhere on the way to its destination, and he lost everything. A short while later, he was asked to work for the Iranian government making propaganda posters, but he refused, saying it was not the kind of work to which he was suited.

Eventually, I ask him about the sad state of Polish cemetery. He lowers his head, and nods slowly. Two years earlier he explains, the winter here was so severe it brought down many of the mature pines in the graveyard. He planted new ones to replace them, but only a few had taken root for lack of water. He directs my attention towards a vague stone structure in a distant corner of the plot. “We have a well here”, he says. "Can you see it? It has a motorized pump that still works. But the difficulty is getting the water from the well to the trees”. What is required is a long length of pipe and a few minor repairs to the pump.

I begin to become heated. The year before, after a previous visit to the cemetery, I had written several letters to the Polish Embassy in Tehran informing them of the matter and asking for help. But they didn't have the courtesy even to reply. A few weeks later I wrote to them again about a different matter, the imminent disappearance of the important Polish wartime cemetery in Qazvin (Northern Iran), which was threatened with demolition from developers. The matter was urgent, but the cemetery could still be saved if they acted promptly and decisively. Again, there was no response whatsoever, and a few weeks later the embassy quietly removed the name Qazvin from the list of Polish wartime cemeteries on its website. This was the sum total of their involvement with the problem. Shame on them!

Angry and exasperated, I finally went out and purchased the necessary plastic piping myself, on behalf of the men, women and children who had died here in exile after enduring horrific conditions in the work camps of Siberia; fellow citizens of a country whose government is unable to afford 25 metres of plastic tubing to sweeten the memory of their existence.

© Ryszard Antolak