POLISH war hero and long-standing Summertown resident Kazimierz Michalski, who has died at the age of 104, lived through some of the most turbulent events in recent history.

Mr Michalski, of Thorncliffe Road, who died on April 12 on a visit to Poland, was well-known in the city for fighting a robber in his own home at the age of 101.

Mr Michalski survived turbulent events in Polish history and a sentence in a Siberian Gulag.

And despite living in England since the Second World War, he always maintained a connection with the town of Sieniawa – funding libraries and educational charities there.

The son of a Polish wholesale merchant, he married Joanna Ribbenbauer from the neighbouring town of Sieniawa in 1934.

In the inter-war period Mr Michalski practised law as a solicitor’s clerk touring the towns and villages of the region.

He received a nomination to become a junior judge in 1939, but his legal career was cut short by the outbreak of war.

Poland was invaded both by troops from Germany and the USSR under the Nazi-Soviet pact.

Mr Michalski found himself on the German side of the line but walked through the woods at night to the Soviet side to join his wife and baby.

He was picked up by Stalin’s secret police, condemned in a perfunctory trial to penal exile for being a bourgeois enemy of the people and deported to the Gulag in Siberia.

His wife and son, Andre, were deported without trial to the wastes of Kazakhstan as the relatives of a political convict.

After being transported in a cattle truck they were dumped without food or water into deep snow beside the railway line.

They were saved by Kazakh horsemen, and survived the winter in a yurt, frying cockroaches and grasshoppers to survive.

After the breakdown of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1941 an amnesty was issued to Polish Gulag prisoners.

On his release Mr Michalski made his way, without tickets, supplies or money, from Pechora in the Arctic Circle more than 2,500 miles to Uzbekistan to join the Polish Army. Learning from another released prisoner that his family was in Kazakhstan, he again set out on foot on another journey of more than 2,000 miles to rescue them.

They returned to Uzbekistan in 1943, and were later evacuated to Persia with the Polish Army which joined with the British in the Middle East. His wife and son were sent to India for three years and Mr Michalski marched with the army through Persia, Iraq, Syria and Palestine, to Egypt where his Polish Second Corps joined the British Eighth Army.

He served in the Italian Campaign, fighting in the Battle of Monte Cassino and liberating Ancona and Bologna.

After the war, on arriving in England, he worked in the Cherry Blossom shoe polish factory in London before moving with his family to Oxford in 1953.

He went onto become the manager of foreign books at Blackwell’s and then a curator of the international law section of the Oxford University Law Library.

He retired in 1973, having moved to Thorncliffe Road and was active in local Catholic circles and in the Polish Veterans Association and was a regular member of the congregation at Blackfriars Priory, in St Giles.

In 2004 he celebrated 70 years of marriage to his wife Joanna , also known as Janina, who predeceased him.

Mr Michalski’s funeral was held in Sieniawa on Saturday. He is survived by his son Andre, 75.

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