Krysia Griffith-Jones

Krysia Griffith-Jones was a Polish second world war and Soviet gulag survivor, a veteran of the Polish 2nd Corps who served near the frontline in the battle of Monte Cassino, and a translator of Polish literature.

She was born in Łodz and brought up in Warsaw, the only daughter of Irena Broniatowska, the head of a teacher training college, and Mieczyslaw Broniatowski, a civil servant in the Polish treasury.

In 1938 Krysia went to study law at Warsaw University. She started a drama directing course under Leon Schiller at the Polish Drama School. Theatre was her real love. She was also on the editorial board of a cultural magazine. But in 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, she joined the resistance. She was soon betrayed to the Russians, who interrogated her at Grodno and sentenced her to hard labour in the Siberian gulag at Marinsk.

When Germany invaded Russia in 1941 she and many imprisoned Poles were released; seriously malnourished, she spent six months making her way to Iran to join the Polish 2nd Corps. She was commissioned into the women’s service, and trained in Palestine, Iraq and Egypt. She led a platoon supporting Polish troops throughout the Italian campaign, serving close to the frontline, including at the battle of Monte Cassino. While fighting, she and her colleagues discovered that Poland had been ceded to the Soviet Union by Churchill and Roosevelt – they could not return home.

After the war she managed to track down her mother, who had been imprisoned by the Germans for running a school for Polish children. They had not seen each other for five years. She had to wait a further 11 years for a reunion with her father.

In October 1946, in Rome, where she was reading history, she married Morley Griffith-Jones, a young wartime colonel. They came to London, where she took library studies at University College London, then worked in a number of academic libraries.

Krysia translated several plays for theatre and radio by Witold Gombrowicz and Sławomir Mrożek, among others. She also wrote theatre criticism for Polish journals. Before the fall of communism in Poland, she translated, for publication, documents for Solidarity that had been smuggled out of Poland, often by her.

She and Morley retired to Sherborne, Dorset, in 1971. After Morley’s death in 1995, she travelled, read widely in four languages, retained old friends and made new ones, of all generations. She had enormous energy and intellectual curiosity. Source