Ciocia Dziunia

On a business trip to south-west Poland, I take the chance to stop off and visit my mother's oldest sister, Jadwiga, to us, 'Ciocia Dziunia'. She is a lively raconteur of times gone by, and remembers far more about those years than her younger sisters. Their childhood in Horodziec, their deportation to Siberia, their wanderings across wartime Russia, she recalls in great detail. To me, the most thrilling tales concern the vast forests that lined the Horyn River - and the character of my maternal grandfather, Pyotr Stepanovich Bortnikov. He, according to Ciocia Dziunia, given to telling fantastical stories was a Russian, born in Odessa. His father Stepan Bortnikov was one of the founders of the wheat bourse ('birża') there, who had married Dżanura, the daughter of a wealthy noble trader from Turkistan. Piotr fought on the side of the Whites in the Civil War, ending up in eastern Poland after the Bolsheviks consolidated power. Changing his name to the more Polish-sounding Bortnik, he worked as the forest estates manager for a Belgian magnate, de Pourbaix.

The last part of the story is true, corroborated, checked out. But how much of the 'Stepan Bortnikov' tale is fictitious - I have no way of telling (I suspect it is fictitious).

Ciocia Dziunia corresponds with old friends from Horodziec (today "Gorodyets" in western Ukraine). Below is a snap of a photocopy of a rare pre-war photograph of the de Pourbaix palace in Horodziec. Today, nothing remains of either the palace or of the its estate manager's house where my mother and her sisters grew up.