Jacket Notes

Jan Glazewski

When I started my job at the University of Cape Town in the late 1980s, my father handed me a hand-drawn map. It was accompanied by a page and a half of typed instructions headed “Route to Chmielowa”. The map depicted the location of the family silver which he’d hastily buried alongside his three brothers in a forest on my grandfather’s estate, then in east Poland, at the onset of World War 2 when he heard the Russian army was approaching.

Since childhood I’ve been intrigued by the thought of family silver buried somewhere in a forest in Eastern Europe. So it was with anticipation and trepidation that I entered Ukraine in 2019, armed with my late father’s rough sketch map and typed instructions, the last sentence of which read: “On the left side of the pencil drawn map you will see the broken line going from the stone wall towards the forest ... it is there on the border of the forest but already among the trees that you must look for our silver and my hunting guns.”

Accompanied by my Polish cousins, I undertook my first trip to Ukraine in 2004. In Lviv I was thrilled to locate my grandfather Adam’s grave as well as his double-storey pre-World War 2 house where my father grew up. I didn’t find the treasure.

It was 15 years later that I again navigated the same country road. This time I intended to undertake a serious search and was accompanied by my niece Layla and two Ukrainian men, Taras and Vladimir, armed with metal detectors. After two days of searching, we found the manor house foundations which served as the base point of my father’s dotted line leading to the forest.

Taras was exploring the left of the dotted imaginary line lower down the slope. His detector bleeped a few times but these proved false alarms. I suggested he come up the slope a bit. Within minutes his detector was bleeping. He took a probe and plunged it into the soft earth. We heard a metallic thud. Next he used his spade. Vladimir cheerfully announced: “Maybe a bomb” in his Ukrainian accent. I took a few steps back.

But there was a glint of metal in the black earth. A brass candlestick appeared. Then Layla handed me a silver jewellery box. Inside was a silver spoon wrapped in a Polish newspaper which crumbled at my touch. There was a small silver milk jug, trinkets and a gold cross embedded with amethyst. I was holding my late mother’s precious possessions, which she had once hurriedly packed away. The most dear to me is a christening spoon engraved Gustaw, my father’s name, which I placed in my shirt pocket close to my heart.

My adventure took place shortly before the pandemic. Afterwards, while writing my memoir, Putin’s army invaded Ukraine. That prompted me to revisit my father’s 25-page mini-memoir, which begins with the sentence: “September 1939 war breaks out.” His account of how he, my mother and his brothers fled their family home, crossing the Dniester River by ferry into Romania, echoes the present. Then as now, refugees were streaming into neighbouring countries.

I left the site carrying the engraved christening spoon with a degree of pride and as a token of memory: it was my father’s wish that I find our silver and his hunting guns, and I did.