Excerpts in English

Joseph Kaingba's lifetime

1900: presumed year of the child's birth in Manchuria, near Mukden, probably to a peasant family.

February 1904 - March 1905: Russo-Japanese War.

February-March 1905: battle of Mukden, withdrawal of Russian troops from Manchuria, Russian officer Bilayevich takes the Manchurian child with him to Russia. They travel on the recently built Trans-Siberian railway.

1905-1910: the child remains first in the care of the Bilayevich couple in Mogilev on the Dnieper, and then in the care of Jakub and Pelagia Ghika in Kamenets Podolsky.

1909: the boy was given the surname Kaing-Ba (from the word he most often uttered when unable to communicate with his new surroundings). In People's Republic of Poland the spelling of the surname will be simplified to Kaingba (in the blog both forms are used, depending on the context).

1910: placement of the boy in the Father Siemaszko's orphanage in Krakow.

16 January 1910: Kaing-Ba's baptism at the Kleparz church in Kraków, combined with his first Holy Communion. From then on his documents show his date of birth as 16 I 1900.

1910-1924: Stayed and studied at the Congregation of the Missionary Fathers of St Vincent de Paul in Stradom in Krakow.

22 July 1924: priestly ordination by Archbishop Adam Sapieha.

23 October 1924: graduated from the Theological Institute in Krakow.

1925-1928: Priestly work in the parish of St Vincent de Paul in Bydgoszcz. Beginning of intimate relationship with Helena Kraskowska.

August-September 1928: leaving the Congregation of the Missionaries of St Vincent de Paulo, departure from Bydgoszcz, short stay in Konin.

4 September 1928: Jakub Ghika dies in Konin.

October 1928 - autumn 1930: pastoral work in the parish of All Saints in Raczków (district of Wągrowiec).

3 April 1930: birth in Raczków of Zbigniew, son of Fr Kaingba and Helena Kraskowska (the child will bear his mother's name).

1931-1938 or 1939: pastoral work in the Roman Catholic parish of St Apostles Peter and Paul in Viznica nad Czeremoszem (Vijniţa) in Romania, on the Polish-Romanian border

1939: Chaplain of the municipal hospital in Kozienice

September 1939-18 October 1940: arrest in Kozienice, German prison in Radom

1940-1945: Years of occupation spent in Warsaw under an assumed identity

July 1945-1961: Parish administrator in Morawin

1961-1979: parish priest in Siemianice

1979-1988: Resident of St. Hedwig of Silesia Parish in Poznań

29 September 1988: Father Józef Kaingba dies in Poznań; buried in Junikowski Cemetery.

 

SELECTED POSTS

19 December 2015

The Russo-Japanese war and I

Only recently it has fully dawned on me that if it hadn't been for the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war in 1904, I would never have been born. Of course, every combination of a spermatozoon and an ovum is the result of a chain of coincidences, but the one that gave rise to the existence of my Father, and as a consequence to mine, was indeed very peculiar. Because my Grandfather, who was later to become Rev. Joseph Kaingba, a Catholic priest, in 1905, as a small boy had been taken away from his native Manchuria by a Russian officer named (probably) Bilaevich or Bilaeff, and his life took a completely different route than expected.

For many years I have been trying to understand this story, and compose it into a kind of comprehensible narrative, but now, when I've entered the seventh decade of my life, I decided that it should be made public. This blog is just a part of a project which should result in a book but I am still not convinced that Joseph Kaingba will be its main character. In fact, what I would most like to achieve, is to commemorate the life and charming personality of my Grandmother, Helena Kraskowska, who in the late 1920s, in Bydgoszcz (Poland), happened to fall in love with a young priest and an Asian, got pregnant, and gave birth to his illegitimate son Zbigniew - my Father.

22 December 2015

Chinese? Japanese? Korean? Manchurian?

Rev. Joseph Kaingba was Asian, but his precise ethnicity has never been established. Different people thought him Chinese, Japanese, even Korean. To my knowledge he believed himself to be Japanese, but I do not know what he based this on. I think of him as Manchurian, because Manchuria was where he came from, specifically Mukden - the one-time capitol of Manchurian state, now Shenyang in China. His son - my father - also favoured the Japanese version. When Kaingba was a small boy, that area of Asia was an ethnic and cultural melting pot, the major battlefield of the Russo-Japanese war - the first 20th century military conflict on such a large scale, with far-reaching consequences for the whole modern world.
Maybe I should do a DNA test? In the end it does matter whether one is a quarter Chinese, a quarter Japanese, or a quarter Manchurian...

23 December 2015

1905

Of what happened in the year 1905 to the child who was later to become Joseph Kaingba, one can only make guesses based on what he himself used to tell on various occassions. When you don't know who you are, you have to construct some narrative of your origin... However, the problem with my Grandfather's stories is that they differ in some important details, although their core remains intact. From my parents I learned only that the child had been brought from China by some Russian to Kamieniec Podolski - now a town in western Ukraina, in those days within the Russian Empire, but for several ages an important fortress of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. After some time a Polish noble family took care of him, and he was educated to become a Catholic priest.
[...] Recently, though, thanks to the rapid progress in digitization of archive sources, I keep finding various articles about Joseph Kaingba in old newspapers and other publications. Usually they present some version of his early life story, based on his own words.
[...] In July 1924 the newly ordained priest Jospeh Kaingba celebrated his first Mass. The event took place in Konin, a town in Greater Poland (Wielkopolska), half way between Warsaw and berlin. The local newspaper "Głos Koniński" ("The Voice of Konin") reported:

[...] Since Rev. Kaing-Ba is Chinese, [...] our community was very excited by this ceremony. [...] The story of Rev. Kaing-Ba life is very interesting and adventurous. As a small boy he was kidnapped during the Russo-Japanese war by Russian soldiers, who brought him to Mogilev on the Dniester river. The child was taken in as a sort of exotic toy by a Russian officer and his wife, who had moved with him to Kamieniec Podolski. There the boy was given to another Russian family, where he was badly abused.
Mr Jacob Ghica, who then lived in Kamieniec, and works in our communal bank, had learned about the terrible situation of the child, and managed to retrieve him from his oppressors. Through diplomatic channels Mr Ghica tried to return the boy to his Chinese parents, but it turned out that they had been killed during the war. Mr Ghica then started to educate his ward, treating him as if he was his own child, and finally, with the help of a local parish rector ('proboszcz') [...], had sent him to a school in Krakow.
After graduating from high school Rev. Kaing-Ba decided on his own free will to become a priest, and entered the seminary. He was ordained in June.

29 December 2016

Kaing-Ba: a new identity

Among the documents relating to the earliest years of my Grandpa's life there is a typed certificate in French issued in 1909 by the Chinese Embassy in St. Petersburg which states that a person named Kaing-Ba is a subject of the Chinese Empire, and comes from the Mukhden province in Manchuria. The document was probably necessary for the child to acquire a new formal identity. Two handwritten Chinese characters are included in the typed text stating the child's new surname, chosen for him by his guardians. Why Kaing-Ba? Because this was the word the small boy desperately repeated over and over, unable to communicate in his new milieu.
A polyglote friend explains that the Chinese characters are pronounced gan1ba2 (the numbers indicate tones), with gan meaning 'sweet', and ba having several meanings - 'little butterball' among others. This interpretation fits in with Granpa's own version; he always maintained that his surname meant 'sweetie'.


1 January 2016

Jacob Ghika

While the Russian officer Bilaevich will always remain for me a vague and ambiguous figure - did he hurt Kaingba, or did he look after him? - Jacob Ghika's image in my mind has become more solid. Looking for his trail, I turned for help to the Society of Friends of Konin (Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Konina), because it was in that town that he spent the last years of his life and was buried there. A young man, Damian Kruczkowski, answered then my mail, and I owe him some valuable information. Jacob Ghika was the son of Anastasius and Julia, nee Monastyrski. The mother was Polish and his father descended in a straight line from Moldovian princes. He studied law in Odessa, but was expelled, for political reasons, from the university in 1879, and became a civil servant in Kamieniec Podolski.
Archbishop Piotr Mańkowski, who as a young priest was the rector in Kamieniec Podolski, wrote about Ghika in his Memoirs:

Though himself a foreigner, he felt like a Pole. He came from an aristocratic Romanian family, and was married to a Polish woman. For some time he run a dormitory for school pupils, but had to give up, threatened by the Russian authorities with persecution for cultivating Polish language and habits in his household. He was always well-liked by local Poles for his noble character, kindness and helpfulness.

During the Polish-Bolshevik war of 1920-21 Jacob Ghika and his wife left Kamieniec. They finally found refuge in Konin. 

21 January 2016

My father, Zbigniew Kraskowski, was a Eurasian hybrid, but this had little effect on his sense of identity. 

He himself tended not to give much thought to his own exotic appearance, and he always evoked positive feelings in those around him, both as a toddler and as an adult. This acceptance meant that his peculiar background was never a problem for him, and certainly not a source of any complexes.

What I like most about the stories of my Grandmother, my Grandfather and my Father is that they are not traumatic. Of course, those few years - from the budding romance and the birth of their child to the stabilization of all three of them - were fraught with difficult and dramatic moments. When I think how Hela must have felt in advanced pregnancy, during childbirth and just after it, in a remote village, which - let's say - Raczkowo still is, in the cruelest (T.S. Eliot) month of April, I am really full of admiration, that after such experiences she retained this enormous joy of life, which I remember in her. In this photo, among the pillows she embroidered with her own hands, she looks like any other happy young mother, though perhaps a hint of sadness can be found in her face. My father, on the other hand, did not experience any sadness in his childhood - being an adult himself, he admitted that great-grandmother Anastasia - whom he called Ma - and her daughters fulfilled all his whims, so he almost grew up to be a domestic despot. But this did not happen, and the fact that from the beginning he was surrounded by such a lush female element, probably not only influenced his later choice of profession (gynecologist-obstetrician), but also the often expressed belief in the general superiority of women over men. He and I were very fond of each other. He died in May 2004 as a result of complications following a bypass operation, carried out, incidentally, by the recent Minister of Health.