Martin Stepek's Polish Paper Trail
Martin Stepek clearly recalls the moment when he realised he was a bit Polish.
It was at a Scotland-Poland international at Hampden. He'd been invited to the match alongside a group of his father's friends and many of them were old soldiers or sailors.
"A few of them were wearing their military medals, " Martin explains, "and they stood to attention as the Polish national anthem was played. Some had tears in their eyes."
It made Martin think of the families - brothers, sisters, parents - that many of them had left behind during the Second World War. He remembered one man describing how he had buried his dead brother in shallow earth in a Siberian labour camp.
"Until then I had always thought of myself as completely Scottish...but that was the blip."
Martin came in to see me tonight at Pacific Quay and told me how he had spent the last eight years researching his own family history. He produced a huge lever-arch file stuffed with old photographs, letters, maps and postcards...many dating back to the early years of the twentieth century. There were documents too. We tend to think of wartime Europe as a place of chaos and yet the bureaucracy of governments functioned well enough to record the movement of entire populations - even those being sent to their deaths.
The story of Martin's father is remarkably similar to my own father's experiences. As young men, both were imprisoned in Siberia until the Soviet Union sided with the Allies and allowed the Poles to join the free army or navy. Both joined the navy and both settled in Scotland after the war after marrying Scottish girls.
Mister Stepek Snr. started a chain of electrical stores that were well known in Lanarkshire and the east end of Glasgow. Martin now runs the and lectures on the strengths and weaknesses of such business models.
But our meeting tonight was like encountering a kindred spirit. We discovered we both wish we could speak fluent Polish. We talked about that slight sense of feeling like an 'outsider' when people talk about Scottish ancestry, although both our mothers were of Scots-Irish descent.
And I discovered we had one more thing in common.
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