Full Name of the person I wrote about: Mordecai Szwajcer. He is the father of a close family friend. Mordecai was born on the 10th of October 1919 in a small village called Busko Djroz, Poland. He passed away on the 21st of January 2002 in an English hospital.
Mordecai was the youngest of 4. He had a sister named Sarah and two older brothers, David and Shmuel. Sarah didn’t have a job, but his brothers had. David was a watchmaker and Shmuel was a tailor. He and his brothers left Busko and went east towards the Russian border when the Germans invaded Poland. When they arrived at the border they were rounded up by the Russians and were shipped to Siberia to the Gulags, along with other Poles had tried to escape. The reason they were sent to the Gulags was because of a pact Russia made with Germany. Mordecai and his brothers were put into different camps for unknown reasons. The camp Mordecai was placed in was a camp for criminals, and was a hard labor camp. His brothers were put into a regular Gulag meant for everyone else. While Mordecai was in the labor camp, he had to cut down trees. They were released from the Gulags in 1942 because Germany invaded Russia. After they met up with each other, they headed south, all the way to Iran and India. One night when they were sleeping outside on their way to Iran, Mordecai felt something heavy sitting on his chest, so he opened his eyes and saw that there was a huge rat sitting on him looking for food. Eventually they got to India and took a boat to East Africa.
When they got to East Africa, they went to a big refugee camp in Uganda. Mordecai was very good at learning languages, and because of this he was able to learn English at the camp quite fast. The people that ran the camp needed volunteers to drive to Nairobi to get supplies. Mordecai volunteered to drive even though he didn’t know how to. He and his brothers were finally released from the refugee camps and they settled in Nairobi. Mordecai got a job as a manager for a hostel. Eventually he married Kathe Richter in 1949 in Nairobi. He was quite successful while he was working, and he took any opportunities he could get. He started a jewelry shop and he went into property development. He had two kids while he was in Nairobi, and was naturalized in 1954 and moved to England with his family in 1962. He passed away in Royal Free Hospital, Camden in England on January 21st, 2002, because of heart disease.
