When war and Soviet deportation tore through Poland in the early 1940s, thousands of its citizens found an unlikely refuge on India's western coast, in a story that is still remembered on both sides today.
According to an article by Polish Institute New Delhi, the refugees' journey began in tragedy. In February 1940, Soviet authorities began the first mass deportation of Polish citizens to Siberia and other parts of the USSR, and many deportees endured transport in overcrowded cattle wagons, and large numbers died from hunger, disease and extreme conditions. Survivors were forced into gruelling labour in mines and forests through brutal winters.
The situation changed only after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, when Stalin, needing Allied support, agreed to an amnesty for the Poles and allowed the formation of a Polish army under General Wladyslaw Anders, as per an article by TRT World.
What followed was a punishing evacuation. Freed deportees moved south from Kazakhstan, Siberia and across the Soviet Union to collection points in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, then crossed the Caspian Sea from Krasnovodsk to Persia, as per Kresy-Siberia Virtual Museum.Nearly 3,000 refugees died within months of arriving in Iran, and more than 15,000 of the evacuees there were children, many of them orphaned along the way.
From Persia, some refugees travelled onward to India, then still under British rule. Maharaja Digvijaysinhji Jadeja of Nawanagar, ruler of the princely state of Jamnagar, was among the first to offer help, taking in Polish children at a camp he built at Balachadi, on his seaside estate in Gujarat. He greeted the arriving children by telling them he was their "Bapu", or father, and after the war he took steps to prevent their forced return to a communist-controlled Poland.
The princely state of Kolhapur, in present-day Maharashtra, went on to host the largest of these settlements. A camp for around 5,000 refugees, mostly women and children, was established at Valivade near Kolhapur, receiving its first arrivals in mid-1943 and continuing until most refugees returned home by 1948.
Valivade grew into a fully functioning town with its own schools, a church, shops and even a cinema, and refugees came to call it "Little Poland".
Around 78 people who died at the camp were laid to rest in a Polish cemetery that still stands there today.
The two governments have kept the memory of this episode alive in recent years. In September 2019, Poland's then deputy foreign minister Marcin Przydacz unveiled a memorial pillar at Valivade, attended by around 20 Poles who had lived there as children.
Warsaw also has its own tribute: a "Good Maharaja Square", named in honour of the Jamnagar ruler.
In 2024, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited a related memorial in Warsaw during his trip to Poland, calling it a tribute to the compassion shown by Kolhapur's royal family.
