She was a tall, quiet lady, almost stately. She had come a long way: from somewhere in Poland she had been taken to Siberia, escaped west somehow and joined the millions of refugees loose in Europe in the mid 1940s, and then for good reasons had found her way to Scotland.
Our Polish community dates from that war. A Polish army garrisoned the east coast from Aberdeen to the border, and when Poland fell to communism many chose to stay. They settled, married locally, and grew old. The wartime generation has now largely faded; and a successor generation integrated without difficulty.
From time to time I still come across survivors with tales to tell: like the cavalryman who rode out against tanks in 1939; or the officer from the Polish armoured brigade that held the northern strongpoint of the Falaise gap in 1944, wreaking terrible, long awaited vengeance on the retreating Wehrmacht.
Our tall, stately lady did not talk much. After a hip fracture she was too frail and confused to go straight home to her little flat in Marchmont. In a rehabilitation ward, making little progress herself, she was watchful and, in her muddled way, alert.
She would listen carefully when spoken to, as though trying first to work out what language was in use. She replied in English or Polish, more often the latter as time went by. At night she was reportedly more anxious than she was by day. Sometimes, but only at night, she became quite distressed.
As weeks passed her behaviour became odder. She was reluctant to part with things that should not have mattered, like used tissues, and explained angrily why, but not in English. In theory she should have gone to a nursing home, but there were concerns about her agitation.
We took a liberal view of official guidance and in due course transferred her to an NHS long term care bed. In her new placement she was at first nervous but later settled, adapting to the routines of ward life, occasionally helping other patients—it seems that at some point before or during the war she had done some nursing—though she remained wary of men in dark suits.
In her last months she started to hide scraps of food in odd places. Eventually she declined to a final illness. By then she was calm. In one of her last conversations in English she told someone she thought this camp was quite good, and the guards very kind.