People often forget that when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, it acted in collaboration with the Soviet Union. The two totalitarian regimes had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact earlier that year, agreeing to partition Poland. Sixteen days after Hitler attacked the western border, the Red Army launched an eastern offensive. The two great powers carved up Poland according to plan and for a while co-existed peacefully, before jumping at each other’s throats in 1941. Stalin’s attack on Poland orphaned thousands of children, who were then were relocated deep into the Soviet Union, in camps and temporary orphanages where they were often left to die of illness or hunger.
Following the 1941 amnesty agreed under the Sikorski-Mayski pact, tens of thousands of Polish citizens scattered across the USSR – from Kazakhstan to Kolyma – began making their way to the points where a Polish army was forming, and a search began for orphaned Polish children still held in Soviet children’s homes. Some of these young refugees found shelter in Iran, Palestine and Lebanon, others in New Zealand or British colonial territories in Africa, and 1,500 women and children ended up in Santa Rosa, Mexico. The largest single group, however, was bound for India.
From hell to paradise
The Maharajah Jam Saheb of Nawanager, before going to the front, photo: Mary Evans Picture Library / East News
For most of the Polish children who ended up in India, the journey began at a makeshift orphanage in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, where many arrived severely malnourished and suffering from typhus, malaria, tuberculosis or scurvy. The pre-war singer Hanka Ordonówna, one of the era’s biggest stars, was among their carers there and on the journey that followed. From Ashgabat, the children were taken to Mashhad in northeastern Iran for several weeks of quarantine, before a team of experienced Sikh truck drivers carried them along a still-unfinished and dangerous road through what is now Afghanistan to Quetta, just over the border from British India.
In 1941, an amnesty allowing the destitute little refugees to leave the Soviet Union was declared. Some of them eventually found refuge in Mexico, New Zealand and other distant countries, but India was the first state to offer them shelter. Maharaja Jam Saheb Digvijaysinhji Ranjitsinhji, the ruler of Nawanagar, a princely state in British India, volunteered to provide hundreds of children with a home. As a Hindu delegate to Great Britain’s war cabinet, the maharaja was well aware of the international situation at the time, and his generous nature prompted him to immediately come forth with his offer. The children were transported to India by members of Anders’ Army (a Polish armed force formed in the Soviet Union after the amnesty), the Red Cross, the Polish consulate in Bombay and British officials.
Rescued Polish orphans, photo: Vesper Publishing
On reaching India in April 1942, the children were first housed at Bandra, near Bombay, while those with tuberculosis were sent to a sanatorium in the hill station of Panchgani. Relief efforts on the Polish side were co-ordinated by Kira Banasińska, a social activist and painter married to Eugeniusz Banasiński, the Polish consul in India.
The first group, 170 orphans, travelled 1,500km in trucks from Ashgabat to Bombay (now Mumbai), from where they went to Balachadi, a small seashore town in north-western India, 25 km from the Maharaja’s capital Jamnagar. Compared to the hell they had experienced in the Soviet Union their destination must have seemed like paradise.
The maharaja greeted the newcomers with the following words: ‘You are no longer orphans. From now on you are Nawangarians , and I am Bapu, father of all Nawangarians, so I’m your father as well’. He built dormitories in which each of them had a separate bed. He also generously provided for the children so that they could study, play and eat to their heart’s content.
Nawanagar was one of 568 princely states that, while allied with Britain, retained a degree of autonomy and were not formally part of British India. Beyond his own resources, Digvijaysinhji persuaded dozens of fellow maharajas to contribute to the children’s upkeep, and a Polish Children’s Fund was established in Delhi, drawing on private donors, businesses and the Indian Red Cross. Its committee included the Catholic Archbishop of Bombay, Thomas Roberts, a representative of the Chamber of Princes, British government representative Captain Archibald Webb, and consul Banasiński. The historian Anuradha Bhattacharjee has estimated that the equivalent of over €6.5 million (in 2008 terms) was raised for the children’s welfare.
Asked in an interview for the émigré paper Tygodnik Polaków ‘Polska’ why he’d taken the children in, the maharaja spoke of being moved by the suffering of the Polish people, and hoped that, by the sea and in the mountains, the children might recover their health and forget what they had endured. He traced his interest in Poland back to his youth, when his father took him to a League of Nations meeting in Geneva, where he met Ignacy Jan Paderewski – an encounter that left a lasting impression on him.
At the ‘Polish’ maharaja's
Jam Saheb with rescued Polish orphans, photo: Centrum Studiów Polska-Azja
Between 1942 and 1946 over 600 Polish children found a home in India thanks to the maharaja. They were all provided with food, clothes and medical care. The kind ruler let the guest house of his Balachadi palace be used as a school so that his little protégés could learn to read and write. A special library with Polish books was set up so that they wouldn’t forget their mother tongue.
Children arriving at Balachadi ranged in age from three or four to fifteen or sixteen. By the time the settlement closed, an estimated 1,000 children had passed through it over four and a half years. It was run by the military chaplain Fr. Franciszek Pluta, with the daily discipline of a barracks – morning exercise and roll call, the children lined up facing the direction of Poland. Maria Skórzyna headed the primary school, while the settlement’s scout troop was led by Janina Ptak, who had lost her own child in the USSR and devoted herself to the orphans in Balachadi. Janina Dobrostańska, a pre-war actress from Bydgoszcz, ran the drama section, and two doctors seconded by the maharaja, Kirit Ashani and Anant Joshi, looked after the children’s health. Sport was organised by Antoni Maniak, a former footballer for Lwów’s (now Lviv) Pogoń club – the settlement’s football team is remembered for once beating a side from the Indian Navy’s nearby base. The children also played volleyball, grass hockey and even went camping.
An orchestra was formed, taught by musicians from the maharaja’s own ensemble, and the settlement’s library held Polish books printed by émigré publishers in the Middle East. One residential block was converted into a clubroom with a radio and gramophone, along with a handful of Polish records – including the popular hit Pamiętasz Capri (You Remember Capri).
The children staged plays for religious and national anniversaries, including Christmas nativity performances, which the maharaja rarely missed. After the representations ‘he would invite the young actors for a festive tea and give them sweets’ writes Wiesław Stypuła, one of these rescued orphans, in his book W gościnie u ‘polskiego’ maharadży (editor’s translation: At the ‘Polish’ Maharaja's). He would also reward the performers with 1,001 rupees. Asked once about the significance of the extra rupee, he explained it was a down payment on the next good show.
But life at Balachadi wasn’t without its troubles. A malaria outbreak in the autumn of 1942 had to be brought under control, and with only a handful of adults overseeing hundreds of children, discipline was often loose – former residents later recalled night swimming, cliff-jumping, and barefoot games through fields where cobras and scorpions lurked.
There was no secondary school on site, so older children were sent to schools in Bombay, Karachi or Mount Abu, and many boys joined the Polish Armed Forces in the West once they came of age.
When the war ended and the orphans had to return to Europe, both the children and the maharaja were heart-broken. A government emissary arrived from Poland to persuade the settlement’s residents to return – and was booed for her trouble. Children with relatives in the free world were identified separately from those who had lost everyone – for the latter group, a court formally recognised Fr. Pluta, the maharaja and British official Geoffrey Clarke as their legal foster parents. Eighty-one children later left with Fr. Pluta for schools in the United States – a move communist Poland’s press would brand him an ‘international child abductor’ for.
Good Maharaja Square
Digvijaysinhji never requested financial compensation for his grand gesture. His only wish, which he mentioned during a conversation with Polish general Władysław Sikorski, was to have a street named after him in liberated Poland. Sadly, his dream didn’t come true during his lifetime. The communist regime was highly reluctant to recognize the orphans’ plight, since it would have shed light on atrocities perpetrated by the Red Army. It was only after the political turn of 1989, when Poland became a fully independent state, that a square in Warsaw was named after Digvijaysinhji. Since 2012, a small park in the city's south-western area of Ochota is called the Square of the Good Maharaja. A monument dedicated to the kind-hearted prince was also erected, and he was posthumously given the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.
A school in Warsaw also bears Digvijaysinhji’s name. Decades on, former residents remembered their time in India as ‘my second home’, ‘the happiest period of my childhood’, and, in one telling phrase, a time when ‘I was a child again’.