Mr. Joseph Dubicki remembers the day of his family’s liberation in Germany nearly eighty years ago like it was yesterday.
“As far as the childhood is concerned I remember very little. Because it was not that good,” Dubicki said.
Now blind and 86-years-old, Mr. Dubicki can still vividly paint the picture of his small rural town in Poland once known as Cielechowszczyna, which is today Belarus.
As he sits in his assisted living home in Lafayette beside his wife Kathryn, he starts from the beginning of his memoir, piecing the pages of his life together starting from his earliest memories.
“We didn’t have electricity. We did not have any water, running water. We did not have any sewer system. So, you know how people used to live in the 1800s? That’s how we lived in Poland,” Dubicki said.
A quaint and quiet village on the outskirts of the once-town of Naliboki was made up of 50 residences along the same stretch of road.
He refers to his village as “an extension of his family” calling his first few years of life “quiet and peaceful.”
Dubicki said the village was made up of self-sustaining farmers like his parents Franciszek and Wernonica, and families who would attend Catholic church on Sunday.
The same church that would be burned to the ground during the Naliboki Massacre.
“World War II broke out in 1939. My father got mobilized to defend his country,” Dubicki said.
Dubicki would not see his father for three years after he was drafted.
“Seventeen days later he got captured as a prisoner of war and sent to Germany,” Dubicki said.
In 2005, after Mr. Dubicki’s father passed his sister Lucia found their father’s memoir which encapsulated his thoughts and feelings that were never spoken.
As he moves through various labor camps in Germany he writes about his periods of grueling hours of manual labor, near-death experiences of starvation, frostbite and a lice outbreak.
He achingly longs for his family and homeland- repeatedly praying to God and his patron St. Theresa in his writings. As he’s imprisoned, he writes:
“I guess the best one can do in this situation is this; to live, wait and, and hope.”
“He was in Germany until 1943,” Dubicki said. “When the Nazis’ Operation Barbarossa went into Russia he was released because he was a laborer at that time to come home and visit his family. Well, he came home to visit the family and never did go back.”
Dubicki writes his father wrote upon returning home that he was shocked by what he saw. Sand-covered mounds along the roadside were burial sites of murdered Jews.
While working as a slave laborer in Germany, he received four censored letters yearly from his wife, leaving him utmost surprised by the ruins of his town.
Dubicki said his father was able to hide from the Nazis for months knowing he could be shot at any time for not having documentation of his freedom.
But close to home in the Naliboki Forest Russian partisans were hiding in the woods from the Nazis.
“And they survived by robbing the villages and stuff,” Dubicki said.
In May of 1943, Russian partisans were out of supplies and food. They met with leaders of the Naliboki self-defense force in the Naliboki Forest to discuss a peace agreement and proposed the townspeople give them anything they could spare.
They agreed to stage an attack where Russian partisans would shoot in the air and the self-defense force would return fire in the air.
The Russian partisans agreed to also burn down any old buildings to make it look like an attack.
Unfortunately, a member of the Naliboki self-defense force was unaware of this plan and fought back by throwing a grenade into a group of Russian soldiers.
As a Russian partisan commander lay dying, he ordered his soldiers to kill everyone “wearing pants” meaning all men and boys.
“They came into a nearby village which was Naliboki and they start robbing the people in that town and in that silly little battle that they had they killed 128 men,” Dubicki said.
This day would be known as the Naliboki Massacre.
The day after the massacre, Mr. Dubicki’s father says he was digging a pit to hide his children in after hearing a gunshot fired in the forest.
Russian partisans came to the front yard of the Dubicki residence to question Dubicki’s father on who had fired the shot and who had armed weapons.
Dubicki would learn later on after reading his father’s memoir that he was a part of the Nalobiki defense team but would not reveal who had been shooting.
“And he tried to explain to him that he was an escaped prisoner of war from the Nazis they wouldn’t listen,” Dubicki said. “So they got all of us together our whole family and some neighbors into a big ole group. Set up a machine gun on the ground and the Commander told my Daddy he was gonna count to three and if he doesn’t tell who’s been shooting or who’s got guns, they were gonna kill us all. And what are you gonna do once you're standing in front of the gun? So he starts counting off one, two and by time he gets to three my Daddy picks me up and holds me in front of him and my Momma picks up my sister so theyre’d be no orphans left. And then when he said three, he asked the same question my Daddy in his memoirs wrote that he didn’t know why but for some reason at the top of his lungs he hollered “St. Theresa save us.” The Commander says I will not shoot and picked up the machine gun and they all left.”
Dubicki’s father writes about the moment he and his family were nearly face to face with death writing:
“I [did] as I was ordered with deep sorrow and an ocean of tears… Here we [were] awaiting the last moment of our lives and the coming death for which we were guilty of nothing… I was asking God, our Lord, to save us. I repeat[ed] God’s name over and over again. My mind [was] racing. I thought. How can this be? I survived the war and a dreadful captivity only to come home well and alive just to lose my life with the rest of my family.”
Dubcki and his family tried to live as “normal” a life as possible in the summer of 1943, continuing with working in their fields and never straying too far from home, not even for Mass.
He said many Polish soldiers began to band with the Russians to fight the common enemy- the Nazis.
On July 22 of 1943, the Nazis caught wind of a Polish and Russian plan to blow up a railroad bridge that was the main rail line the Nazis used to connect Berlin, Minsk, Moscow and Warsaw.
They unleashed “Operation Hermann” which wiped out all partisans hiding in the forest as well as any villagers who were aiding them.
Dubicki said 60,000 Nazis burned the Naliboki Forest as well as many neighboring villages.
A few weeks later, the village of Cielechowszycyzna under Nazi orders was given two days to pack their personal belongings.
“They were gonna take all the villages out and they took out like 35 villages, they burned them to the ground and made us go to the nearest train station to be moved into trains to be shipped to Germany as slave labor. And right behind us they burned everything to the ground so they’red be nothing to go back to,” Dubicki said.
Dubicki writes in his memoir he later realized just how fortunate his family was to escape.
Back in the town leaders who had survived the Naliboki Massacre were murdered. His priest was locked in a granary and burned alive- while others such as his church organist were lined up and killed by a Nazi firing squad.
The Nazis also locked and burned residents unable to travel in their homes and sent the elderly and sick to concentration camps.
Dubicki along with his family, aunts, uncle, cousin and grandmother arrived at the train station in Stolpce, Poland after a two-day journey.
His father was forced to leave or sell their horse and farm animals. Dubicki writes it broke his father's heart to have to trade his horses for a loaf of bread.
In Stolpce, the family was loaded onto box cars with slats heading towards western Germany for nearly two weeks. They periodically would make stops to sleep or be given physical exams.
Dubicki recalls receiving the smallpox vaccination where those administering the vaccine dipped a scalpel into serum and administered the medicine by gashing it into his arm with the scalpel.
A scar that he still has today.
Dubicki and his family, as well as sixteen other families from nearby villages, disembarked the train in Oldenburg, Germany heading to a camp in Westerstede Germany.
“All of us were housed in a big ole warehouse where they used to repair locomotives, and about 250 people lived in that one building from 1943 until liberation,” Dubicki said.
Dubicki said at the campsite his parents were given Nazi workbooks for any documentation and they were all given armbands with the letter “P” for Polish.
“My parents worked on the railroad lines, repairing the railroad lines after B-17s bombed the heck out of them,” Dubicki said.
Dubicki writes his father would become the camp’s chief cook and bottle washer remaining in this role for the rest of his time at the camp.
Each enslaved family was given a bucket of soup and a portion of hard, black pumpernickel bread.
“All we had was soup,” Dubicki said. “Soup and pumpernickel bread black bead.”
Dubicki writes about one instance of being so hungry where went to the camp garden and found left-over onion tops and put them on a piece of pumpernickel bread adding some salt and calling that a “meal.”
Despite Dubicki’s father being chief cook, Dubicki writes after someone would die or fall ill from starvation, he would get together with others to meet with camp administrators pleading for more rations. But that plea would go unheard.
Dubicki writes shortly after his family was at the camp his grandmother became gravely ill after eating a tomato.
The Nazis had allowed her to seek treatment in a Catholic hospital where she died and was buried in a local cemetery.
Dubicki also describes the camp’s conditions saying they slept on large pallets of whatever bedding they had brought from home.
He said there were no shower facilities and the family used up or wore out almost every article of clothing and blanket during their captivity.
Throughout their stay, there was one item Dubicki’s mother wouldn’t use.
A homemade soap bar which he would find out years later contained 24-karat Czar Nicholas II rubles inside. Payment from her work in the Naliboki Forest as a young woman.
“She took a knife and carved in there stuffed all the coins in the soap,” Dubicki said. “And closed it back up, and nobody ever knew she had it in there.”
After two years on May 3rd of 1943 as what Mr. Dubicki describes as a cloudless day, he heard what sounded like thunder.
“I was trying to figure out what was going on because we heard this thunder in the distance, which we knew was not thunder but it was artillery fire going on.” Dubicki said. “So, we knew the battle lines are getting closer and closer to us.”
Dubicki said something felt “off that day” and no guards were in sight.
What a fellow slave laborer would see next when walking into town would change everyone’s lives.
“So, he was walking through town, and he saw these vehicles come into town with a little flag on them which white over red which was Polish flags,” Dubicki said. “And he heard the troops, and the vehicles talk Polish so he ran up to him he says “Come! Come! I’ll show you where we are! I’ll show you where the camp is.” That’s when they came into the camp and liberated us. That was May 3rd of 1945.”
Dubicki said as soon as his camp was liberated soldiers came in with bread and butter. A moment he will never forget.
“That was the first time in about five years that I had a piece of white bread with butter and sugar on it,” Dubicki said.
For the next three years, the Dubicki family would live in various Displaced Persons Camps throughout Germany.
“And we stayed from 45 through 48 in western Germany going from one refugee camp to another,” Dubicki said.
The family quickly learned Germany had been divided into four occupied zones: Britain, France, the US and the Soviet Union.
Dubicki’s father refused to head home to the ruins of Poland with his family and would spend the next few years living in these camps waiting for the day the U.S. would open their borders for displaced persons.
“Well, we went from one DP camp in Germany to another because they tried to make our life miserable,” Dubicki said. “I’m talking they it was the British we were under British control so it was the British army they tried to have everybody go back to Poland. No one wanted to go back to Poland because we knew Poland was under communist rule.”
Dubicki began school in the Displaced Persons camp-run Polish school.
“My Daddy taught me how to read and write so when the war was over and we were put into refugee camps they had schools for us,” Dubicki said. “So I went to a Polish school but in refugee camp for 45 through 48. And that’s where I picked up math, and history the rest of the courses that come with elementary school. So, I finished seven elementary grades in a Polish school in refugee camps before I came to the United States.”
Dubicki and his sisters went on to receive their communions in an Episcopalian church that had been damaged by cannon fire during the war and he would serve as an altar boy.
Dubicki writes about playing “war” with other children at these camps, in trenches they dug or in existing bunkers and underground tunnels. They’d use real guns, ammunition, and grenades they’d found in tunnels.
He’d also picked up soccer which he’d later go on to play in high school where he was a top player.
“We made our own soccer ball out of pigs bladder,” Dubicki said. “You blow up pigs bladder and tie it off and that was the ball that’s how we played soccer. Barefoot at that.”
In 1948 Dubicki’s father’s prayers were answered.
“The U.S. Congress authorized 200,000 Eastern European refugees to allow them to enter United States,” Dubicki said.
Under a sponsorship from the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the Dubicki’s were assigned a sponsor from a couple in Uvalde Texas where his parents would work on his ranch.
The family went on a thirteen-day voyage until they reached Louisiana.
“We got on a ship which was General Howze, U.S. Naval transport carrier,” Dubicki said. “U.S. General Howze where we arrived in New Orleans on Labor Day of 1949.”
The family not knowing a word of English, headed for the train station in New Orleans where they’d board the train to Uvalde.
They were supposed to meet their sponsor Mr. Gray at the train station in San Antonio but because their ticket said Uvalde, they road to that stop.
Dubicki said Mr. Gray quickly realized there had been a miscommunication and nearly 80 miles away, he sent someone to meet the family.
As the family stood on the platform in Uvalde clutching their suitcases, they saw headlights and a man emerge from a vehicle and right away Mr. Dubicki’s father saw something recognizable.
“A white collar,” Dubicki said. “It’s a priest!”
“Even though we couldn’t communicate I think my Daddy took out his Polish-English translator and they were able to communicate,” Dubicki said.
For nearly three years his father worked as a ranch hand helping Mr. Gray while his mother worked as a housemaid. His parents were paid small wages and the family was able to live in the guest house.
When asked what life was like in America when Dubicki first arrived he said this;
“Oh, very beautiful and when we were in camp my Daddy told himself that if he ever gets out, Germany all that mess, that he will work for anybody that will have him for free for two years.”
Dubicki and his sister attended Catholic School in Uvalde, and although he had completed five years of Polish schooling in Germany, he and his younger sister were both placed in the 1st grade where they would use Polish-English translation books.
The next year he and his sister transferred to public school where he was placed in the sixth grade.
Despite Dubicki having learned algebra and geometry which were not yet in the U.S. curriculum, he was held back.
“They held me back a year,” Dubicki said. “They held me back a year so I would be in the same class with my sister to make it easier on us to learn the language.”
Dubicki describes his childhood in Uvalde in his memoir saying he attended church on Sundays, where he served as an altar boy, and talks about his experience of riding a horse for the first time in a cowboy outfit and going into town on the weekends where his family would sell the eggs their chickens had laid for groceries.
Although his father excelled as a ranch hand, he could never adjust to the Texas heat.
“He couldn’t stand it anymore and he asked Mr. Gray our sponsor if he could be released from his positioning so he could go to New York where he had some cousins over there and the weather was much colder than it was in Texas,” Dubicki said.
After two years in 1952, the family headed on a train from Uvalde to New York City.
“My Daddy went to work on a duck farm in Brookhaven,” Dubicki said.
The family lived in Long Island and moved into a new house provided by their new Polish employer living onsite at the Leskowicz Duck Farm.
His father would tend ducks on the farm and his mother worked part-time in a duck processing plant.
In 1953 at age 16 he began attending Bellport High School.
“And I happened to be able to graduate in the top 10 percent.,” Dubicki said.
Dubicki worked part-time on the duck farm during high school- gathering eggs from the duck houses before school and after school, he’d remelt and refilter the wax they used to remove pinfeathers on the ducks.
Dubicki played soccer for the first three years of high school and was crushed when he couldn’t play his senior year because he was 19 years old.
“Later on I found out that by holding me back a year I was too old to play soccer in my senior high school year,” Dubicki said.
Dubicki became a naturalized citizen after graduating high school and went on to study electrical engineering at Clarkson College of Technology in Potsdam, New York. In college, he joined intramural soccer and ROTC.
“After high school I attended college, but I didn’t do so well,” Dubicki said. “I was really good in high school, but nobody ever taught me calculus. So I went to college, they hit me with calculus, and I could not handle it.”
In 1958 Dubicki was a 1A draft choice and chose to join the Air Force to avoid going into the Army. He headed to the New York City recruiting office to enlist.
He was then headed back where his journey in America started- in Texas, after being placed at Lackland Airforce Base, just outside of San Antonio Texas.
After completing a series of tests in basic training Dubicki’s results determined he would go into the specialty of electronics after receiving the maximum score.
He was then sent to the Electronics Navigation Equipment Repairman school at Kessler Airforce Base in Biloxi, Mississippi.
“Went up served the total duty at Goose Bay, Labrador where I applied to become an aviation cadet,” Dubicki said. “They sent me to Harlingen Texas where a year later I had gold bars on my shoulders and silver wings on my chest. I was one of America’s best.”
He was commissioned as a second lieutenant and Aeronautical rating of navigator. He was then sent to Waco, Texas to restore the aviation curriculum.
“I was stationed in James Connally Airforce Base in Waco, Texas at that time as an aviation cadet instructor teaching military subjects and and navigation subjects to young men to become officers in navigation in the Air Force,” Dubicki said. “And while I was in James Connally Airforce Base I met my wife Kathryn she was attending Baylor University.”
Dubicki said he got Kathryn’s number through a friend and called her up on a Friday evening in 1962 asking if she’d like to get a drink at the Officers’ Club.
Kathryn said she’d get a coffee instead of a drink, and after hanging up the phone Dubicki was on his way to Collins Hall at Baylor University.
“And so I picked her up at Baylor University,” Dubicki said. “Oh, and she said “how am I gonna know who you are?” I said well I still have my uniform on but I have my name tag that says Dubicki on it and I’m gonna drive up in my fancy car! Which I had a 59 Chevrolet convertible. White with red interior, top down wow!”
It didn’t take long for the two to get married and had a Catholic marriage ceremony on June 15, 1963, at the Chapel base.
“Guess what else we have?” Dubicki asked. “We have the top of a wedding cake in the freezer! We had a military wedding and the wedding cake looked so good that I could not take the sword and put it in and destroy it so I went down to the second level and just saved that one and it stayed with us for 60 years.”
Dubicki writes his parents met his wife for the first time on a trip to New York where they were attending his sister's wedding.
His parents were no longer working at the duck farm due to pollution-related concerns and bought a house in Patchogue. His father worked installing garage doors until his retirement.
Dubicki said during his visit, his mother gifted him and his sister her prized possessions as wedding gifts that she’d been carrying around for years.
“So she got the coins out and gave four to my sister and four to us,” Dubicki said.
After years of the coins sitting around on a shelf in their home, Kathryn decided to make something special with the coins.
“She took the four coins to our jeweler in Victoria, Texas and he took two of those coins and put one and the other reversed and gold chains all around and fixed up a real nice necklace with those fortune rubbles,” Dubicki said. “That’s two of them. The other two he took and made me some cuff links.”
In 1965 while in Waco he was sent to Maxwell Airforce Base in Montgomery, Alabama to attend Squadron Officer school while Kathryn was finishing up her last semester at Baylor University.
While in Montgomery Dubicki says although he could have been promoted from first lieutenant to captain in just a few weeks, he’d decided to leave the Airforce.
“They said that they had too many officers in the Airforce and does anybody want to resign their commission and leave otherwise we have to forcibly make people leave,” Dubicki said. “I said I’m gone. And so I left the Airforce and got my discharge papers and joined Kathryn’s Daddy on his business in Vanderbilt Texas which was a cotton gin.”
In December of 1965 Dubicki and his wife settled in Vanderbilt a small community of about 600 people.
“Her Daddy had a cotton gin and then he bought some land, so we had a cotton gin and a farm about 450 acres and that’s where we worked,” Dubicki said. “Later on we built a commercial grain storage and receivership where I used to buy grain from the farmers and sell for export.”
Their firstborn Julia was born July 8, 1966, and a year later he and Kathryn’s father began building a house with her father leading the project.
Dubicki writes he continued working on the project until Kathryn’s father suffered a heart attack and died in 1971. He at first didn’t know how to continue but by 1972 he and Kathryn were able to move in.
On December 15, 1972, their second daughter Stephanie was born- Katherine planned a six-year age gap so they could comfortably afford to pay for college tuition.
Dubicki and his brother-in-law started and operated many businesses together including a small bulldozer service company, a grain elevator business company, and a cotton and grain hauling business called K&D Trucking.
“Eventually our cotton gin went out of business because they quit farming cotton around first part of 1970,” Dubicki said. “But in 1994 or five cotton came back strong so we had this building and equipment in it, but the equipment was old so we got rid of it and fathers came to us my brother-in-law and myself and wanted to know if we could sell the property and build a cooperative cotton gin. And so we did we built a cooperative cotton gin and we managed it for them until I retired in 2004.”
Not long after moving to Vanderbilt, he joined the local volunteer fire department. By 1980 he and other volunteers saw there was a dire need for a new fire truck, as the only one in the town was a 1956 pumper truck.
Dubicki said a friend of his who was the president of the board of the Johnson Foundation which donated money to charitable organizations encouraged him to collect bids on fire trucks and send him the information.
Sure enough, the foundation provided the funds for a new fire truck.
Dubicki and other volunteers formed a fire district by combining four small local volunteer fire departments along Highway 616 in the towns of Vanderbilt, La Ward, Francis and Lolita.
“See when I was in Texas, and I got to Vanderbilt we had absolutely nothing,” Dubicki said.
“ When I left we had EMS, we had fire, we had ambulances, we had firetrucks, we had new fire stations. I started the second fire district in the state of Texas. I was able to collect taxes and really build up the southern part of our county into a very organized EMS and fire department.”
Once the fire district was formed after they had financial resources through taxes, he began working to form an EMS department, which he would also volunteer for.
At the time the closest rescue vehicle was located several miles away in Lolita and even if they were to respond they were little to no help because the personnel lacked emergency training.
“We had a backwards system where you know you have to wait for the phone to ring at your house or something to call for help,” Dubicki said. “And so I improved that by getting paging system established and if the calls came in for emergency to a Sheriff dispatch they were able to dispatch us.”
Dubicki said through the Johnson Foundation the towns of Vanderbilt and Lolita were able to receive their own ambulances and modern emergency communication systems that included pagers.
Soon, 80 trained volunteers were ready to respond to emergencies after Dubicki enlisted volunteers and arranged for training.
“I guess Airforce trained me for that,” Dubicki said.
“Eventually our cotton gin went out of business because they quit farming cotton around first part of 1970,” Dubicki said. “But in 1994 or five cotton came back strong so we had this building and equipment in it, but the equipment was old so we got rid of it and fathers came to us my brother-in-law and myself and wanted to know if we could sell the property and build a cooperative cotton gin. And so, we did we built a cooperative cotton gin and we managed it for them until I retired in 2004.”
Dubicki and his wife moved to Lafayette in 2004 to be closer to their grandchildren and attended Mass at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist.
“Found out that our daughter that was living here in Lafayette gave birth to a daughter,” Dubicki said. “And Kathryn said “Well, I’m selling everything, we’re moving to Lafayette. I wanna watch my grandchildren grow up.” And sure enough, they did.”
As for his parents who remained in New York, his mother passed away in 1992 and his father lived to be 98 years old and passed away in 2005.
Shortly before his father’s death, Dubicki was looking at his hometown in Poland on Google Maps saying everything was bare but a lone apple tree that had once been an orchard.
Dubicki said when a former neighbor visited Poland, she returned with a branch from that tree which was placed in his father’s coffin.
Dubicki's eyes lights up as his aid tells him to sing for me a Russian love song his mother taught him.
“It’s a Russian love song where this maiden goes out along the river and the father’s floating away. She climbs to the highest point along the river and sings a love song to her fiancé who is far far away fighting the enemy,” Dubicki said. “And she sings the song to an eagle flying way up high so he can take the love song to him.”
The song Dubicki sings strikingly emulates his mother’s life of longing for her husband away at war.
When asked if Dubicki has lived the “American Dream,” he replies assuredly, “Heck yes.”
The message Dubicki hopes readers to get out of his memoir is to inspire those through a life of faith, perseverance and devotion to his country as he has.
“I want them to get out of it what they can do for the country as I have done.”
