It was curiosity that prompted my excursion from the family graves at St. Roque’s Cemetery. I stumbled upon the tomb of a Frenchman and a plaque dedicated “by their sorrowing parents” to pair of siblings, one of whom died at nine months and the other at 15.
Amidst familiar colonial names like Williams, D’Souza and McKertich I spotted, on a simple Gothic-style tablet, the unusual name of Kazimierz Czarnecki, a Varsovian merchant and navy seaman.
According to his headstone, Czarnecki “died while serving his country”. This made me eager to investigate the historical ties between India and Poland.
Turns out that during WWII, when Hitler was enforcing his eugenic ideologies through genocidal operations, 640 Jewish and Catholic children were shipped from Poland to India where they were given asylum by Maharaja Digvijaysinhji Ranjitsinhji Jadeja of Nawanagar. However, Czarnecki was 39 when he died in 1945, thus eliminating the possibility that he was one of the young refugees.
My best guess is that he was part of a naval convoy that was en route to Japan. According to The Polish Review and Eastern European Affairs, Volume 4, (published in 1944), “Even in the Far East, on the Pacific and Indian Oceans, Polish ships are doing their share in the struggle against Japan.” Poland allied with Japan during the 1905-1907 Russo-Japanese War, but declared war on them in 1941 due to pressure from the UK (where the Polish government was in exile) and the US post the Pearl Harbor attack. Japan’s Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō’s response to Poland was as follows: “We don’t accept the Polish declaration of war. The Poles, fighting for their freedom, declared war under the British pressure.”
Drifting Dandelion 