It's Holocaust Memorial Day. This is a photograph of my great-grandparents, Joachim and Amalia. Before the war, they owned a woodwork factory in Krakow.

By the time this photograph was taken, we think, they were living in a flat in the ghetto with their son Edek, his wife Hannah, and their young grandson Ryszard. And, very possibly, many others.

All were dead by 1945.

I don't want to bore anybody with this, because I know I send similar tweets every year. But if there's time this evening I'll come back to this thread and tell the amazing story of how my grandfather survived. Thanks.

So, here’s the story of my Grandpa Joe. He died when I was 3, so what follows is sketchy and has taken a lot of work to uncover. Lots of it, I’ve only discovered recently. But I think it’s broadly right.

Warning: this will be quite long.

It’s September 1939. When Germany invades, Joe is living in Warsaw. He has a job as an engineer for hospital equipment and a girlfriend called Sulamita. She’s a teacher and five months pregnant. The day of the invasion, they get married.

Under Nazi occupation, Joe must wear an armband and can’t visit hospitals. So, no work. What to do? His family are in Krakow, which is no better. One brother, Leon, has already fled to Brazil, but at that point you might as well try to get to the moon.

So a few months later, with her heavily pregnant now, they flee across the border in to Russian-occupied Poland, winding up in what is now known as the Ukranian city of Lviv. Tens of thousands of Jewish Poles do the same.

Their daughter is born here. They’re illegal residents, though, and before long, though, the whole family is arrested and deported to Pasiolek Ugolny, a gulag in Siberia. Here, as apparently a big and strong man, he was put to work as a woodcutter.

Then Hitler invades Russia, too. Stalin frees the deported Poles, but they have nowhere to go. Like thousands of others, Joe, Sulamita and their daughter head South West, to get out.

By April 1942, they’ve made it to Karmine, now Navoi, in what is now Uzbekistan. As the crow flies, it’s a journey of little under 3000 miles. This account gives some idea of what that journey could have been like: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19586595

I don't know if that's what it was like for them. "Bodies falling out like sticks" etc. But probably. By the time they reach Karmine, all three of them have typhus. Sulamita dies. Their daughter, now aged two, also dies. We have never known her name.

Even Sulamita’s name, I only discovered a month ago, thanks to some old papers which taught me most of this. For the rest of his life, he doesn’t speak of them. My mum - who comes into this story later - first heard of their existence in her late teens.

Now alone, Joe keeps going South. From Russia, he sails across the Caspian Sea to Tehran. From here, he travels through Iraq. Eventually, he winds up in Palestine. Treated here in hospital, this big, strong, wood-cutting man now weighs 7st, or a bit over 44kg.

From here, things get easier. As an engineer, he’s signed up into the Polish bit of the British RAF. He’s put on a boat to the UK which avoids the war by sailing around Africa. In England, eventually, he meets my grandmother. She’s also a Polish refugee, but that's another story.

Back in Poland, nobody is left behind. Literally, nobody. Had Joe not been deported to the gulag, he’d almost certainly have died in Lviv. Most Jews did. Likewise his family back in Krakow. From what I can tell Sulamita’s family, from Warsaw, were similarly wiped out.

In the whole world, he only had one birth relative left alive. That was Leon, the brother who made it to Brazil.

So, three years after it was all over, and almost a decade after war began, Joe went to see him in Rio. I wonder what they talked about?

And that's what I'm thinking about today. https://www.het.org.uk/