Human Connection and Hope

This year I visited the Red Cross Museum in Geneva and the permanent exhibition that explore themes around humanity,  dignity, human connection and identity. The exhibition tell a number of really powerful stories about the work of the Red cross through the eyes of the people it helps. It was an incredibly well-designed and thought-provoking exhibition introducing you to twelve human sized witnesses that invite you to reach out and interact with their stories.

As part of the ‘Restoring Family Links’  section of the exhibition, we walked through a corridor with thousands and thousands of record cards, organised by surname.  I guess because of my own family history I was particularly moved by this but amongst them all I was glad to spot ‘Hope’.

Restoring Family Links

 

Restoring family links – ‘Hope’

 

Woven Bark Shoes – Ray Mears

Recollection from Dave Jackson:

Whilst having a chat with Gramps about his childhood in Drohiczyn, he described to me how they used to make shoes from tree bark. He described how they would remove the bark from this ‘special tree’ cut it into strips, them weave it into a shoe. For laces to hold them onto their feet , they would unpick hessian from an old sack.
 
When I asked him if he wore socks with these shoes, he said “No, we didn’t have socks, but in the winter we would wrap our feet with strips of hessian from an old sack, and if your feet got wet they would dry very quickly ”
 
He couldn’t remember the name of the ” special tree “, but some weeks later I was watching a Ray Mears survival programme, during which he visited a village in Belarus….and amazingly an elderly man made a pair of these shoes for Ray, exactly as your Gramps described to me! He also mentioned the name of the ” special tree “, It was called the ‘Lemon Birch’.

Mieczyslaw Brojek

Mieczyslaw Brojek was born in the small village of Gaska near Lublin in Poland on the 15 August 1923. However most of the official documents state his D.O.B. as 1921 – this is because he had lied about his age so that he was able to join the Army.

One of four children, Mieczyslaw was the second youngest child of Wladyslaw Brojek and Scholastyka Brojek. His spent his early childhood with his two older brothers Stanislaw and Henryk and his younger sister Julka.

Administrative map of the Voivodeship (19 February 1921 – 1939) via I, Graffer.

The family moved to the Drohiczyn Polewski (a small village lying between Brest and Pinsk) Where Wladyslaw had his own small Butchers Shop. Their house was typical of the area, being of wooden construction, with an earthen floor and straw covered with calico to serve as a mattress. I’m guessing the house looked something like this one in Suchowola. I remember my dad telling me how when he first visited Poland he immediately recognised these wooden slatted houses which Gramps had described to him. I remember Gramps telling me about the big wooden barrels of gherkins outside the house, this sounded amazing to me, afterall gherkins were one of my favourite food types when visiting Nan and Gramps!

The Brojek children only went to school during the winter months as they were expected to work on their Uncle’s farm during the summer. So of course they did not have much of an education, but this was standard practice in the rural communities of Poland at the time.

It was whilst the family were living in Drohiczyn that Mieczyslaw was arrested and taken away by the Russian soldiers.