By Anthony Bishop Digest General Correspondent
Jazz musician August Agboola Browne was in his forties, and had been in Poland for 17 years. He fought for his adopted country during the Siege of Warsaw when Germany invaded.
Survived the war in which 94% of the residents of Poland’s capital were either killed or displaced.
In 1956 he emigrated with his second wife to Britain, where he died in his fifties. A form he filled out to join a veterans’ association in 1949 is the Rosetta Stone to his life story. It was filed away for six decades, until 2009, when Zbigniew Osinski from the Warsaw Rising Museum came across it.
He was born in Lagos, then part of the British Empire, and came to Poland via Germany in 1895. He is commemorated on a small stone monument in Warsaw.
‘Sheltered ghetto refugees’
Browne’s form does not say what inspired him to leave Nigeria, or make Poland his destination. But by the 1930s, he became a celebrated jazz percussionist playing in Warsaw’s restaurants. In the resistance he distributed underground newspapers, traded electronic equipment and “sheltered refugees”
Warsaw Uprising August-October 1944
- The Polish underground, known as the Home Army, attacked the German occupying forces on 1 August
- They swiftly gained control of much of the city
- Germany sent reinforcements and the nearby Soviet army did not help
- The Poles surrendered on 2 October after 63 days
- 200,000 civilians and 16,000 Polish fighters died
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica and Warsaw Rising Museum
As a citizen of the British Empire, Browne had the opportunity to leave Poland. He first settled in Krakow where he married his first wife, Zofia Pykowna. The marriage failed but at the outbreak of the war, Browne arranged for his children and their mother to seek refuge in England. But perhaps committed to the Polish struggle, Browne did not go with them.
‘A quiet, private man‘
Tatiana, his daughter from his second, much longer, marriage to Olga Miechowicz, was born and brought up in London. She is now 61 – her father died in 1976 when she was 17.
She remembers him as “very quiet, very private, and quite distant” and that he never discussed his background. Tatiana is not certain why neither of her parents told her much about their past. She suspects it was to bury the trauma they endured and atrocities they witnessed. But there was no discussion and now she wishes they had told her more.
‘Quick wit and real charm’
Jozef Diak from Sudan and Sam Sandi had served in the Polish army during the Polish-Bolshevik War. How the musician, who as a black person would have been so conspicuous, was able to survive in Nazi-occupied Poland remains a mystery.
Experts say there may have been two other black Warsaw residents in the interwar years, professional entertainers whose traces disappear during the occupation. Dr Michael Modell, who treated Browne for cancer, remembers him as a “lovely family of lovely people” The story emerged in 2009 at a time of heightened patriotism and xenophobia in Poland.
It drew immediate interest from across the political spectrum and there were calls to memorialise Browne as a national hero. It was not until last year that a small monument to the Nigerian-Polish resistance fighter was finally unveiled, said Krzysztof Karpinski, a jazz historian who served as vice-president of the Polish Jazz Association.
He died at the age of 81 in 1976 and is buried under a plain headstone in a north London cemetery.
There is no sign of the traumatic and tumultuous events that he had been part of, which reflects the way he apparently lived his life in London.
“To me, it was just me growing up at home with a mum and dad. Whatever our life was, it was my normal,” Tatiana says.
