We received just one single letter from our father [Kazimierz Grabowski]. It was written in Kozelsk on 26 November 1939; it reached us a few weeks later. Our mother read it to us many a time. Our daddy wrote he was alive and healthy, often thinking about us, worried about us and that he missed us. He said he loved, kissed our mother on her feet... He asked us not to worry about him, because the time would come when we would all be together again...
This letter accompanied us at the most difficult times. It boosted our faith that our father was alive. Even in spring 1943, when the Germans published the lists of Polish officers murdered by the NKVD in the Katyń forest after their exhumation, we did not fully believe in his death [...]. The letter survived the Warsaw Uprising in our mum's pocket, and later on our displacement.
[...] In 1948, our mum started to apply for an allowance after her husband. She was told it was true she was entitled, but she needed to produce documents. At Warsaw's magistrates' court in the Leszno borough she filed what she could, including her dearest keepsakes: her husband's letter from Katyń which survived the Warsaw Uprising and his photograph. They promised to return it in a week's time. After a week they told her to come in two weeks, then after a month, and, finally, advised her to "keep her mouth shut" [...]. The only relics of her husband were lost...
She did not get her husband's pension. Instead, she was given a document that her husband died a natural death on 9 May 1946, so he had a five-year work break and no pension was due.
T. Kaczorowska, Kiedy jesteście, mniej boli... losy dzieci katyńskich [When You Are Here, It Hurts Less ... The Fates of the Katyń children], Gdynia 2003