The Chicopee resident continues to tell his story of surviving Communist oppression, evacuation, forced labor and combat.
Kazimierz Barut, of Chicopee, talks with members of the Armes family of Deerfield after his presentation at the Whately Library on his experiences in the Polish army during World War II. They are, from left, Jared R., Jeffrey R. and Logan M. Armes.WHATELY – Kazimierz Barut was only 15 when his family was deported from Poland to Siberia in 1940 as part of Stalin’s ethnic cleansing.
The 86-year-old Chicopee resident continues to tell his story of surviving Communist oppression, evacuation, forced labor, combat in Word War II and near-fatal illnesses because he believes it is his duty and obligation to pass it on.
Barut spoke to about 50 people recently at the S. White Dickinson Memorial Library in Whately, giving an overview of Polish history and telling his own story of separation from family, war, reuniting with his family in England and emigration to Chicopee to join his uncles in 1956.
The retired master electrician was just a teenager when he and his family were loaded onto a train in eastern Poland and sent to Siberia as part of Russian dictator Joseph Stalin’s ethnic cleansing and mass deportation. There were 96 rail cars as they left Szepietowka; his car held 36 people.
In all, this mass deportation involved 115 similar transports – nearly 400,000 people in one weekend.
Kazimierz BarutStalin forced ethnic Poles from their homes to the subarctic grasslands and forests of Siberia. Never charged with crimes, countless families with children – even entire villages – were packed into overcrowded railroad cattle cars and sent to vast labor prison camps where men, women and children crushed rock for the trans-Siberian railway.
Along the way, Barut was separated from his family, not to be reunited with them for seven years.
During those years, he survived disease and served in an anti-tank regiment in battles including The Battle of Monte Cassino, a costly series of four battles during World War II fought by the Allies against Germans with the intention of breaking through the Winter Line and seizing Rome.
Though he did not elaborate on the gruesome battles, he did speak of the kindnesses he received, like the woman who gave him an extra shirt that belonged to her missing son, and the guard who gave him some biscuits when his train stopped in the woods.
When he learned his family was still alive, “it was like a big rock fell off my shoulders,” he told the Whately gathering. And when he was sent to Iran to guard an oil refinery, he thought he was in heaven, he said.
After the war, he lived in England, worked as a bus driver and learned the electrical trade.
Robert M. Duda, of Whately, arranged for the talk. Noting the many people in the area of Polish descent, he said Barut’s story needs to be told “because there aren’t a lot of these (World War II Polish army veterans) left.”
Duda said it’s important to learn what people endured in that era to come to a free country: “Sometimes we don’t appreciate our freedom enough.”
Tiffany A. Hilton, library director, said “we knew (Barut) would draw a crowd” because of the interest people in the area have in history and geography.