A NEW book will detail how the former chair of Hamilton Accies survived the Gulag and the Second World War to make a successful life in Scotland.
The incredible account of endurance and also the kindness that kept Jan Stepek alive has been penned by his son, Martin, who started the biography after his father suffered a series of strokes.
Until then he had known little about the early years of his father who built up a flourishing TV and radio business and was well known in the west of Scotland.
Martin said he was prompted to begin his research after his father nearly died in 2002.
“Once he had recovered from the strokes and could walk and talk again I made up my mind to get him to sit down and tell me his story,” he said. “The beauty was that he opened up and this avalanche of tales came out.”
The result is a story that is bittersweet.
“There is tremendous loss but also tremendous acts of kindness,” said Martin.
The first few years of Jan’s life were tough but happy. He was born on a smallholding in Maczkowce but normal family life ended with the outbreak of war and Poland was invaded by both Germany and the Soviet Union in a pincer movement.
The family were on the Soviet side, forcing Jan’s father to flee as he had won honours fighting in the First World War and had been a prisoner of war in pre-Bolshevik Russia. That meant he was considered an enemy by the Soviet Union and when he was tipped off that he was about to be arrested and executed, he made his way to the German side of Poland where he helped to plan resistance manoeuvres.
Around a month after Jan’s father left, the rest of the family were rounded up as part of a mass deportation that saw an estimated 1.2 million people stuffed into cattle trains and transported to forced labour camps in the Soviet Union.
“It was basically an ethnic cleansing of the Poles in eastern Poland,” Martin explained.
Jan, his mother and two sisters spent three weeks in horrendous conditions in the trucks which were only opened after 10 days to take out the dead.
They ended up in a camp near the Arctic Circle and would have stayed there until they died had Hitler not reneged on his deal with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union.
The Polish Prime Minister in exile in London, along with Churchill, then made a deal with the Soviets to release the imprisoned Poles so that those who were of fighting age could help the Allies.
“They were spread right across the Soviet Union but they just opened the gates and told them to make their way to the Polish officials in southern Russia,” Martin said. “People in the Far East who were being worked to death in coal mines had to travel something like 10,000 miles.”
It took the Stepek family four months to get to what is now Uzbekistan.
“They had no money so they walked, stole carts or stowed away on goods trains, almost like outlaws in the Wild West,” said Martin. “My grandmother was very unwell after being in the camps and after a couple of months she could no longer stand so they had to cart her about.”
When the family finally made contact with Polish troops they found themselves in the midst of chaos as so many troops and civilians were on the move.
“Civilians were heading east out of the war zone while the munitions and soldiers were heading west,” Martin said. “There were rumours of people in carriages in railway sidings left to die.”
The Stepeks finally got across the Caspian Sea to what is now Iran but it was too late for the siblings’ mother, who died of starvation at the age of 39. Jan’s youngest sister was 15 years old but weighed less than four stone because of the deprivation she had suffered.
However the two sisters made it to safety in Palestine while Jan joined the Polish Army. Already weak, however, he caught typhus and his weight plummeted further to five stone. He recovered and rejoined the war effort, finally ending up in Britain where he was sent to Plymouth and Kirkcaldy for training as a radar operator in the Polish Navy. He was still in Plymouth when the war ended and was allowed to settle here as his part of Poland had been annexed into the Soviet Union and is now part of western Ukraine.
His two sisters also ended up in Britain as all the Poles in the Middle East were evacuated in 1948 when the Arab-Israel war broke out.
Sadly their father had died of cancer in 1943, without knowing his children had survived or that his wife had died a year earlier.
The book ends there but Martin intends to write a sequel about the life his father made for himself in Scotland.
After studying electronics at the Royal College of Glasgow, Jan used his wartime radar training to set up a business repairing radios, quickly establishing a solid reputation.
In 1949 he married Teresa Murphy from Rutherglen who was one of 11 children brought up by their mother on a miner’s widow’s pension after her husband died of peritonitis.
Teresa had left school at 14 to help support the family but studied at night school to become a qualified bookkeeper and helped Jan go into business, selling TVs in 1955.
The start of their married life was not easy as they quickly had three children and lived in a single end where Jan had to repair the radios in the hall.
He finally made enough money to move into a three storey Georgian townhouse in Hamilton where, remembering how he had survived through the kindness of strangers, he regularly invited homeless people to come in for a meal.
“He had a huge sense of gratitude to the Scottish people for giving him another chance at life,” said Martin.
Always willing to help the community, he accepted an invitation to join Hamilton Accies as chair even though he knew nothing about football.
He did know about survival however, and it was this survival instinct that kicked in when some of the board started pushing for a merger with Clyde.
“The SFA approved the merger and all the Accies games were cancelled as Clyde were going to be the joint team but my dad managed to overturn that and get the fixtures reinstated,” said Martin.
“He saved them and although they have never been a massively successful team they spent seven years recently in the Premier League and none of that would have happened if it had not been for him.”
Jan died in 2012 with his wife Teresa dying just three weeks later.
They are survived by 10 children, numerous grandchildren and great grandchildren.
The book will be published by Glasgow-based Fleming Publications shortly.
