Tengeru Polish Refugee Camp

Tengeru Polish Refugee Camp

Polish Refugee Sites in Africa (Large and Small Circles)

During World War 2 John was the commandant of Tengeru Polish Refugee Camp near Arusha, Tanganyika. He not only shows up in documents as such, but is mentioned in various books as well as appearing in photographs in the Camp.

Tengeru Polish Refugee Camp was one of over 22
different camps that housed 13,000 - 19,000 Polish exiles spread out across East and Southern Africa, some with more than 6,000 people, others with just a handful of families. Children were the vast majority of the refugees. 

Tengeru Camp with Mount Meru (4562m) in background

So how did John Minnery come to be the Commandant of a Camp for Polish Refugees in Tengeru near Arusha?   Indeed, of more interest is the question of how did so many Polish citizens end up so far away from home in a refugee camp in East Africa?

To explain this we need to briefly retrace events from the start of World War Two.

Germany invaded Poland on September 1^st 1939 from the West.  Only two weeks later on September 17^th 1939 Russia invaded Poland from the East. The joint invasion of Poland had been agreed as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed less than one month prior.  The Red Army’s invasion of Poland has, in the Western world, been played down in our collective memory due to Soviet Russia becoming Britain#s ally in 1941. 

The Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland was “as cruel and tragic as the Nazis’ in the west” (British Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore).

I have extracted the Wikipedia description of the deportations of Polish citizens from Poland undertaken by the Soviets :

“In 1940 and the first half of 1941, the Soviets deported more than 1,200,000 Poles, most in four mass deportations. The first deportation took place 10 February 1940, with more than 220,000 sent to northern European Russia; the second on 13 April 1940, sending 320,000 primarily to Kazakhstan; a third wave in June–July 1940 totaled more than 240,000; the fourth occurred in June 1941, deporting 300,000. Upon resumption of Polish-Soviet diplomatic relations in 1941, it was determined based on Soviet information that more than 760,000 of the deportees had died – a large part of those dead being children, who had comprised about a third of deportees.

Approximately 100,000 former Polish citizens were arrested during the two years of Soviet occupation.  The prisons soon got severely overcrowded with detainees suspected of anti-Soviet activities and the NKVD had to open dozens of ad-hoc prison sites in almost all towns of the region. The wave of arrests led to forced resettlement of large categories of people (kulaks, Polish civil servants, forest workers, university professors or osadniks, for instance) to the Gulag labour camps and exile settlements in remote areas of the Soviet Union. Altogether roughly a million people were sent to the east in four major waves of deportations.  According to Norman Davies, almost half of them were dead by the time the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement had been signed in 1941.”

However,  following the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941 on June 22^nd 1941, the Soviets were now allied with the Western powers.  On July 30^th 1941 Stalin, Churchill and the Polish government in exile in London came to an agreement which saw an “amnesty”  for Polish citizens effectively freeing them from Soviet imprisonment. 
  

I have extracted the following from the site http://www.dpcamps.org/poland.html :

“These journeys, often several weeks long, brought new suffering and tens of thousands died from hunger, cold, heat, disease and exhaustion on that trip to freedom. For many, the help provided by the United States and Great Britain was too little and too late.

During the two great evacuations (the first, between March 24 and the beginning of April 1942; the second, between August 10 and September 1, 1942), from Krasnovodsk across the Caspian Sea to Pahlavi (Iran), and the smaller overland evacuations from Ashkhabad to Mashhad (in March and September 1942), about 115,000 people (including some 37,000 civilians, of whom about 18,300 were children) left the Soviet Union. The soldiers of Anders's army went on to fight in many battles, including the one at Monte Cassino; the civilians, because they could not be repatriated, were forced to remain in foreign lands for the remainder of the war.

The first stop of the refugees evacuated with Anders's army was Iran, where they found temporary quarters in large transit camps initially located in Pahlavi and Mashhad, and later in Tehran and Ahvaz. While Gen. Anders's troops were subsequently transferred to Palestine and from there to Iraq, the civilians remained in Iran. To accommodate the refugees, a sprawling stationary camp was established in Isfahan. Because it housed several camps for the thousands of orphaned Polish children, it came to be known as the "City of Polish Children." 

The relief assistance afforded by Polish, British, American, and Iranian authorities soon improved their living conditions and brought the devastating contagious diseases under control, diseases acquired in the Soviet Union which continued to rob the refugees of their lives even after liberation (over 2,000 refugees died in Iran alone).”