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My father, Adam Kolczynski, was born on 5.6.1915 in Slomkowo, a hamlet in the Plock
region of central Poland. At the age of around 19 he joined the Polish Air Force. At the outbreak of World War II he, along with many other servicemen, left Poland to continue the struggle abroad, first in France in 1940, where he was based wth the French Air Force in Lyon. On the fall of France he was evacuated to England and there
retrained in piloting British aircraft under RAF command. In 1942 he was posted to
317 Polish Squadron as a Flying Officer.
His duties included convoy patrols and sweeps over France. In April 1942 he had several encounters with the enemy, destroying and probably destroying 2 Focke-
Wulf 190s. He was also attacked by a FW-190
and had his aircraft damaged. In August of that year his and other Polish squadrons gave air cover to the Allies' raid on Dieppe and the subsequent retreat. He was involved in the downing of a Dornier 217.
In 1943 and early 1944 his squadron carried
out "Ramrod" probing raids over France and the Netherlands. On D-Day his squadron, as part of 131 Polish Fighter Wing, gave air cover to the Normandy landings. During the rest of that summer and into the autumn they were involved in further Ramrod operations, escorting bombers, and armed reconnaissance, destroying numerous enemy military vehicles. After October he was posted back to the UK and trained in flying Hurricanes, having previously flown Spit-fires. He rejoined 317 in August 1945, this time as part of the Allied occupation forces
in Germany. The squadron finally gave up its planes in 1946 and my father joined the Polish Air Resettlement Corps. He had met my
mother, Christine Hoon from South Africa in 1945. Because of the political situation in Poland after the War he decided not to return. He and Christine became engaged and eventually moved to South Africa where I was born. My father resumed his interrupted law studies and eventually became a senior
lecturer at Natal University. He died while
still employed there on 24.10.1971. Among his wartime decorations was the Polish Cross
of Valour (Krzyz Walecznych) with 2 bars. His final rank was Flight Lieutenant.

My mother, Christine Hoon, was born in London on 1.6.1912 but brought up in South Africa. At the outbreak of World War II she was in Europe, and joined, first of all, the London Ambulance Service. She then transferred to the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) and served as a driver with the Southern Command on the Isle of Wight and in the West Country and also with Polish Forces in Scotland. In 1943 she was posted overseas to North Africa and Italy, as one of a FANY unit providing back-up services to Polish ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Army parachutists, resistance agents,who were flown from near Brindisi to be dropped in their occupied homeland. She became engaged to one of them, Captain Jan Serafin, who lost his life in a parachuting accident. A number of these agents (known in Polish as "cichociemni" - the dark and silent) were involved in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. At the end of 1944 my mother was posted back to the UK and worked at a Polish Army camp in Scotland, helping to run a canteen with the young Sue Ryder.
She met my father in 1945 and they married in 1949 in South Africa. Many years later Christine met again some of the men she had known in Italy in 1944. Among other things she worked as a volunteer for the Sue Ryder Foundation and also wrote a detailed memoir of her early life and war service. She died on 28.6.2002 aged 90, in Gloucestershire, England.

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