SerpApi.Org
Eleven-year-old Wiesław Stypuła held on tight to the bench in the back of a military truck, one of several carrying him and other Polish children through the Indian countryside. Only a sudden bump in the road shattered the monotony of the journey on that autumn day in 1942. The trucks passed through the gates of a coastal settlement in Gujarat State and came to a halt.
Polish children—some as young as 2—emerged from the vehicles, blinking and shielding their eyes from the sun. They were thin and looked sick; many were shoeless and dressed in rags. The children had been detained in labor camps in Siberia, victims of the Soviet push to deport the Polish intelligentsia and their families in the early years of World War II. Now, the Soviets had agreed to allow the youths, many of whom had lost their parents en route to Siberia, to seek refuge in other countries. Traveling via Turkmenistan and Iran, Stypuła and his peers endured weeks of transport to India, the first state to offer them shelter.
Standing at the gates to meet the children was a man in his late 40s. Maharaja Digvijaysinhji Ranjitsinhji Jadeja, ruler of the princely state of Nawanagar, would ultimately welcome an estimated 600 to 1,000 young Polish refugees seeking safety amid the chaos of war. That day, his daughter, Princess Harshad Kumari, stood nearby to greet the new arrivals. The youths “looked so miserable, and their clothes hung about their frames,” she later recalled. “And this was their state, we were told, after they had been fed and cared for” at transit camps along the way.
The maharaja’s booming voice broke the silence. “Do not consider yourselves orphans,” he said. “You are now Nawanagaris, and I am Bapu, the father of all the people of Nawanagar, so also yours.”
Years later, survivor Karolina Rybka recounted the profound impact of the maharaja’s hospitality. “Nobody wanted us,” she told CBC News in 2019. “I have no idea what would have happened to us, a thousand kids. The war was everywhere. … He saved our lives.”
War had arrived in Poland on September 1, 1939, when the Nazis invaded the country from the west. Sixteen days later, the Soviets invaded from the east, following through on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, an agreement between the two world powers to split Eastern Europe into neighboring spheres of influence.
In February 1940, the Soviets initiated mass deportations of Polish civilians, sending an estimated 320,000 to 500,000 members of the intelligentsia—entire families of military officers, civil servants, landowners, teachers and anyone else deemed “socially dangerous”—to labor camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan. Many died along the way, traveling in unheated cattle cars in the middle of winter. Others succumbed to harsh conditions at the labor camps.
The situation changed suddenly in June 1941, when Adolf Hitler broke his nonaggression pact with Joseph Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, transforming Moscow from one of Poland’s captors into an uneasy ally. The following month, the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement freed Polish prisoners detained in Soviet camps and authorized the formation of a Polish army in Soviet territory.
With supplies dwindling in the Soviet Union, officials agreed to evacuate tens of thousands of Polish refugees, most of them women and children, to Allied-occupied Iran. Where the former prisoners would go from there remained unclear. The Polish government-in-exile, then operating out of London, was hopeful that the United Kingdom would assist. But when the British Foreign Office proposed moving the refugees to British India, local officials shared reservations about accepting such a request.
Indian authorities questioned who would take on the financial burden of caring for the displaced persons’ health. Especially critical was the case of the Polish children, many of whom had spent their formative years in Siberian labor camps and now suffered from tuberculosis, typhus, dystentery and diseases linked to malnutrition, among other ailments.
Officials deliberated the British proposal while taking into consideration India’s own wartime food shortages, which would result in the deaths of some three million people in Bengal between 1943 and 1944.
Digvijaysinhji, who was then serving as India’s representative in Britain’s Imperial War Cabinet, heard about the Polish orphans’ plight and decided to step in. The maharaja announced that he would personally invite the children to stay in Nawanagar as his guests while politicians worked out a more comprehensive Polish refugee policy.
At the time, Nawanagar was one of more than 500 nominally sovereign Indian princely states ruled by local monarchs, as opposed to provinces under the the direct administration of the British Raj. It was essentially an island “of self-rule in the occupied country of India,” albeit one that was still “severely subjugated,” Anuradha Bhattacharjee, author of The Second Homeland: Polish Refugees in India, wrote for Live Encounters magazine in 2015.
Digvijaysinhji was born into one of the princely states’ most celebrated families in 1895. After spending his formative years in England, he fought with distinction in World War I. He succeeded his uncle as the ruler of Nawanagar in 1933.
The maharaja’s decision to proceed independently, before Britain and India had officially committed to helping the Polish refugees, was an extraordinary one. He had no historical connection to Poland, no strategic reason to act, nor external pressure to respond. He was driven only by what Leo Amery, then-secretary of state for India, called “practical common sense.” As Digvijaysinhji reportedly said, “If God has sent me these children, it is my duty to care for them.”
The maharaja’s authority rested entirely on his recognition by the British crown. To step forward for the Polish children before the British authorized him to do so might jeopardize that recognition—but this was a risk that Digvijaysinhji was willing to take.
Anu Radha, an Indian filmmaker who spent years researching the story for her 2013 documentary, A Little Poland in India, tells Smithsonian magazine that the maharaja’s defiance of the British was entirely in character. “Obviously, the British were very upset that he didn’t ask for their permission,” she says. “But he told them, ‘It’s my money. Where I spend it is my affair, and I don’t have to ask anybody.’”
The camp that Digvijaysinhji built for the children near his summer palace on the Kathiawar Peninsula, in the small village of Balachadi, was designed to provide young Poles not only with shelter but also with community. It featured a school, a library, kitchens and a Catholic church. Planned out by Nawanagar’s chief engineer and supervised by the maharaja’s personal secretary, the camp held a few dozen elongated barracks that could each accommodate about 30 children.
To the young refugees, Balachadi soon felt like a home or a summer camp rather than simply a functional settlement. In total, nearly 1,000 children between the ages of 2 and 15 would pass through its gates over the course of the war. (Twelve young Polish Jews briefly stayed at the camp before traveling on to Haifa, in what was then British-controlled Palestine, in 1943.) Those 16 and older were eventually moved to a larger camp in Valivade, the main installation for Polish refugees in India. It was financed in full by the Polish government-in-exile, with the blessing of the British and Indian governments.
Polish teachers evacuated alongside the children ran the Balachadi camp’s school. No suitable building for these classes existed, so the maharaja donated his personal guesthouse as a makeshift school. Initially lacking sufficient Polish textbooks, the upper classes launched a self-help drive. “We would copy the textbooks by hand so that [younger] children could use” them, too, Stypuła recalled in A Little Poland in India.
To appease children unaccustomed to spicy Indian food, Digvijaysinhji recruited and trained local cooks to prepare milder fare. The general sentiment among the refugees was later summarized by Danuta Urbikas, whose older half-sister spent time at the camp. “For my sister, it was the first time in her life that she had some stability and a sense of ‘home,’” Urbikas told Atlas Obscura in 2018.
The maharaja attended the children’s school plays and activities, including sporting events. A Polish prewar actress organized cultural performances, while a former professional soccer player led the camp’s numerous athletic classes and structured team events, including soccer, basketball, volleyball and field hockey.
Because the Balachadi camp initially lacked proper equipment, the children and their teacher had to get creative. “We had to make a ball ourselves,” out of “the socks of all the boys in the barracks,” former resident Roman Gutowski recalled in the documentary. Before long, Balachadi boasted players capable of competing against local Indian and British military teams. The “maharaja would sit in a deep armchair, clap and applaud us,” Stypuła later said. “And when we won the final match 2-1, he applauded for us, not his own team.”
Outside of school and sports, the children dedicated most of their free time to scouting and religious responsibilities. As with sporting events, the maharaja attended traditional religious ceremonies, such as Nativity plays and Easter services.
Digvijaysinhji regularly referred to the youths, without any self-consciousness, as his own children. This was a claim that carried the full weight of the maharaja’s character. Anu Radha notes that Digvijaysinhji took great care to make the children’s Polish identity feel honored, not merely tolerated.
“He insisted that every day, the Polish flag should be hoisted in the camp, and all children sing the Polish national anthem, in spite of the fatherland not being free,” she tells Smithsonian. On Christmas, Anu Radha adds, the maharaja arrived at the camp dressed as Santa Claus, carrying gifts that he had procured for the refugees. “For him to become Santa Claus for these children—he was that kind of a person.”
As World War II drew to a close and the postwar political landscape grew clearer, the young refugees received an unwelcome piece of news: Representatives of the newly formed Soviet-backed, Polish-led Lublin government informed the children that under international law, orphans were the responsibility of their country of birth. For those at Balachadi in 1945, this meant relocating to a country under the thumb of the communist power that had deported them to Siberia in the first place.
According to Bhattacharjee’s 2012 book, The Second Homeland, which remains to this day the definitive English-language treatment of the subject, some boys threatened to jump overboard if the authorities forced them to return by ship to Poland. Captain A.W.T. Webb, the principal British refugee officer in India, reported that the adult Poles living in Valivade were “convinced that there is a plan afoot to transfer them to the clutches of either the Russian (Soviet) or Lublin governments.”
To prevent the orphans’ forced return to communist Poland, the maharaja, the camp commander and clergyman Franciszek Pluta, and British liaison officer Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Clarke collectively adopted the children in a single legal proceeding confirmed by the Nawanagar court. Meanwhile, the International Red Cross worked to trace surviving family members and determine where each child could be safely resettled.
The last convoy of children left Balachadi in November 1946. Those still living at the camp at the time were temporarily relocated to Valivade, outside of Digvijaysinhji’s domain. Missionary organizations contacted by Pluta helped relocate 81 children to the United States. Other refugees resettled in the U.K., Australia, Canada or the U.S. as displaced persons. Some of the children chose to return to Poland.
Digvijaysinhji died in 1966 at age 70. For many decades after the war, only the survivors themselves and the maharaja’s family members remembered his efforts on behalf of the young refugees.
It was Anu Radha’s 2013 film that helped carry the story beyond Poland’s borders, reaching audiences across South Asia and eventually the world. She’d first learned about the maharaja by chance, during a conversation with India’s ambassador to Poland.
“I could not believe that this one man, from an obscure land of Gujarat, had done this work,” the filmmaker tells Smithsonian. The survivors she eventually interviewed—men and women by then in their 80s—had been waiting for somebody to ask about their time in Nawanagar. “They have been wanting to tell their story and wanting everybody to know their story,” Anu Radha says. When they heard the name “Gujarat,” she adds, “they became much younger.”
Today, the maharaja who said yes when everyone else said no is recognized across Poland. The Good Maharaja Square in Warsaw pays tribute to his legacy, as does a network of nearby schools named in his honor. In 2011, the Polish president posthumously awarded Digvijaysinhji the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.
Still, for the survivors and their descendants, no honor can ever fully repay what they experienced on that autumn day in 1942, when a broad-shouldered man in formal attire looked at a group of hollow-faced children in need and welcomed them home.
This article was originally published on Smithsonian Magazine. Read the full story here: This Indian Maharaja Saved Hundreds of Polish Orphans During World War II, Offering Them Refuge When No One Else Would © 2026 Smithsonian Institution.
