The Nazis got our name wrong

Sunday, October 14, 2018

Most Fifers will have known someone with a Polish name. After 1945, with the Iron Curtain drawing across Europe, soldiers who had fought in the war found themselves exiled and made their home here.

Largo was the base of  the 1st Independent Parachute Brigade and many Poles opted to remain in Fife, the pits being one of the main employers. They kept their own community alive with the help of places like the Polish Club in Kirkcaldy and events such as the annual dinner dance, so often held in Leven's Caledonian Hotel.

But as well as having 'odd' names, most of our pals didn't realise that the Marysia, Maryna, Micha, Viktor, Stan, Jurek etc they shared a class with had family they rarely, if ever, saw.

This story is no different from those of other second generation Poles, not just in Fife but scattered around the world. But is is a small piece of my family's tale, and one I'm still learning about.

October 16 is the anniversary of my grandfather’s death. I never met him and know very little about him and, until yesterday, I never knew when he died.

Now I know where, as well as when, and the reason for writing this is that I can now imagine what his last days, and probably hours, were like. I wish I didn’t because after all those years of knowing just a small piece of his story more vivid detail has emerged in a very distressing story.

On Tuesday I will think of him, and also remember all my Polish family that has now gone.

What I did know about grandfather Josef Kaspar Morkis is rooted in my childhood memories, and a childlike understanding which, to be honest, I still wish was all I had.

My Ciotka (Auntie) Danuta was a gentle, quiet soul, who spoke softly and cried easily, and often. I only met her a few times when I was a child but I remember she’d hold my face in her hands, tears would well-up, she say something I didn’t understand and hug me. My Polish was non-existent, limited to a few everyday words my father taught me, the ones I couldn’t make out in his screams in the nightmares he had until the day he died, and the odd one I’d recognise at any gathering of the exiled Poles in Fife.

Why Ciotka Danuta is important in this story is that it was she who made her way across occupied Poland to return with ashes given to her by a German that were, supposedly, the remains of her father.

The last time the family had seen Josef, he was naked, being paraded through the streets with others, to be loaded into goods wagons and transported somewhere in German-occupied Europe.

Josef had been the manager of a local mine and had refused to co-operate with the Nazis, and that sealed his fate. The Morkis family had already had problems with the new regime. My great aunt, truly a beautiful woman, repeatedly refused to “go into service” for an SS officer. The final beating she received left her brain damaged.

Most of the family joined the resistance, none knowing the other’s role.

Ciotka Danuta’s journey had been to the Mauthausen, a concentration and extermination camp in Austria,. No-one in the family really believed the remains she returned with were that of Josef, but they were buried in the local cemetery where a headstone still marks his life, and death.

As a young man I tried to find out more about my grandfather’s fate and read about the Nazi death camps. Most people don’t realise there were over 1000 camps with a total death toll estimated to be between 15 and 20 million. My grandfather was one of those numbers, lost in a mass nightmare of unimaginable horror.

I wrote to those who ran the Mauthausen Memorial which had records on the majority of those who perished there, but they had no record of him, and the Nazis were meticulous in keeping records.

The arrival of the internet and more sophisticated digital searches indicated my grandfather had been sent to Dachau in May 1940, and then later records revealed from there, in June, he had been sent to Mauthausen. But still the online memorial had no record of his arrival or fate.

And that was grandfather Josef’s story, until yesterday.

Ironically, I had been researching another tragic tale, this time from my mother’s side of the family, and I briefly revisited my old research into Josef, discovering he had been wounded in 1919, as the war on the Eastern Front raged on with Russia despite the Armistice in the West.

His train journey 21 years later to Dachau was there, and that to Mauthausen, but again the memorial archives had no record of him.

I was about to leave the site when I started keying in variations of the name, and, after all those years I think I was the first member of the family, thanks to technology, to connect with Josef, or as the inscription on the memorial tile in the Room of Names has him, Jozef Markis.

There’s very little detail provided on mis-named prisoner 7478, other than his death on October 16, and at Gusen.

Years ago, I’d read about the notorious Mauthausen and its sub-camps, dubbed by the Nazis as the "bone mill" or "bone grinder", the many sadistic methods of death devised by SS guards, and the quarries, themselves a never-ending Sisyphean torture.

A search online will reveal the depths of depravity the Nazi regime descended to at Mauthausen-Gusen and underline that alongside the yellow Stars of David were the red, blue, green, purple, pink black and brown triangles, and all the other ‘asocials’.

I look at these pictures of the piled corpses and wonder if my grandfather’s body lies among them, another victim of, not just of Nazi brutality, perversion and deviance, but of the ‘them and us’ mentality, nurtured and used through time – the Spanish genocide of the Americas, the British Empire, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, the Middle East… the list goes on and on, and is standing on our doorsteps today.

So, my grandfather Josef deserves to be remembered, along with the fact that those who stand unopposed and unchallenged, will take you, break you, humiliate you, kill you and defile you, and not even care about your name.