A ROYAL Air Force veteran who was evicted from wartime Poland before settling in Chelmsford has died aged 87.
Ex-Marconi engineer Edmund Wergiliusz Woloszczuk died in Broomfield Hospital after a long battle with dementia.
His wife Vera has paid tribute to the "talented man", whose stories of escaping gunfire and surviving starvation in Eastern Europe will live long in his family's memories.
"He was Polish through and through," said the 82-year-old, of Gordon Road, Moulsham Lodge, whose husband never obtained a UK passport.
"His proudest achievement would have been having children and his work. He did like it and while it was stressful, he enjoyed it and his family were very proud of that."
Edmund was born in Lutsk, now a Ukrainian city, in August 1926 into a farming family.
In 1939, however, as the German army invaded, Russian soldiers gave them 20 minutes to leave home and ordered them onto a train to Siberia. In the months that followed, refugees stole food from passing farms, would go to the toilet in a hole in the corner of a carriage and the dead were thrown on to the tracks.
After settling in Siberia, Corporal Woloszczuk enlisted with the Polish army, being shipped to Iran, Iraq and Palestine, before enlisting in the allied RAF.
When he was finally demobbed in 1953 he looked for work outside the force, joining Marconi in New Street, Chelmsford, as an instrument maker.
He went on to help design 31 British patents for antennae on land, sea and air.
While lodging at a hostel for ex-servicemen in Springfield Road, he met Vera, of Wickford, at what used to be the Odeon Dance Hall.
"He came over and asked me to dance and that was it," she said.
Vera, however, had to move her husband into Manor Lodge care home in 2010 after he left the bedroom one night and bizarrely opened all the home's internal doors.
He died on Wednesday, April 23, from advanced Parkinson's disease and dementia.
One of Edmund's two sons Wieslaw, 58, a contractor for BAE Systems, will always remember playing with tools with his dad.
"He put in double glazing and I would be their basically helping and passing things.
"Whether I was much use to him at age 10 or 12 I don't really know."
While there are more than 700 Polish people now living in Chelmsford with two Polish shops in the city, Wieslaw can only imagine there being a handful when Edmund arrived.
"He would have been proud of what is happening now, but he was most interested in his family and work," he said.
Edmund is also survived by son Julian, 53, and eight grandchildren.
