Obituary of Kazimiera Franczyk
Kazimiera peacefully passed away with her family by her side, at Matthews House Hospice, Alliston on Saturday, October 18, 2025 at 93 years of age.
Beloved wife of late John. Loving Mom of Wanda Rizzuto (late Giovanni), Henry (late Barb), Walter (Lori), Ted, Nelly and late Rick (Robin). Proud Babu of Martina, John Nicholas, Julia (Frank); Lisa, John; Colin; Chrissy, Ashley, Kyle (Ashley); and late Christopher and her great grandchildren Vincent, Stella, Alexia, Jordan, James, Jaxxon, Cassidy (Ryan), Nolan, Kiaira, Hannah, Benjamin, Emily, Maverick and Berkley and great great grandson Oliver. Kazimiera will also be fondly remembered by her extended family and many friends.
Visitation will be held at Skwarchuk Funeral Home, 30 Simcoe Road, Bradford on Wednesday, October 22, 2025 from 6-8 p.m. and on Thursday, October 23, 2025 from 2-4 p.m. and 6-8 p.m. Funeral Mass will be held at Holy Martyrs of Japan Church, 167 Essa Street Bradford, on Friday, October 24, 2025 at 11 a.m. Interment to follow at Holy Martyrs of Japan Catholic Cemetery, Bradford.
In lieu of flowers, in Kazimiera's memory, donations may be made to Matthews House Hospice Foundation.
It broke our hearts when our mom died at 93 at Matthews House Hospice in Alliston. She was happy there, in charge of her own life again, not reliant on care by her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A widow for 22 years, she loathed becoming what she considered a burden to her family. She lived at Matthews House for only 27 hours.
Kazimiera was born in Mostysche, a tiny village, the same hamlet where her mother, Rosalia Bespalko, was born. The nearest city was Lvov. It’s now called Lviv. This region was eastern Poland before the Second World War. It was and remains populated by Ukrainians, and it’s now part of Ukraine. Our mother’s memories of growing up in Mostysche were idyllic, some of the happiest of her life.
She was seven years old when the war started. As Hitler invaded Poland from the west, the Russians converged from the east. Our grandfather, Marcin Podgorski, said Russian soldiers were hungry and ill-equipped. Some had no boots or shoes and marched barefoot. A member of the Polish army reserve, our grandfather was captured. When Russians disarmed him, a Russian soldier seized our grandfather’s satchel of food. A Russian commander stepped up, snatched the satchel, slapped the soldier, and handed the food back to Marcin. “Go home and dig your potatoes,” he told our grandfather.
When the Germans turned their war on Russia in the summer of 1941, what they did to Ukrainians in eastern Poland was horrific.
Nazis took our mother and her parents to Germany to work as forced farm labourers. Feeding chickens, geese and rabbits was our mother’s job. She also learned electrical work, taught by a Hitler Youth, son of the farm owners.
Before the war began, our father, Jan Franczyk, worked for his uncle’s small dairy near Krakow. As his uncle reined a horse-drawn wagon along the sleepy streets of Tomaszowice, dad sprinted to homes and ladled milk from a pitcher into jugs left on the stoop for the milkman. He was 13 when the war started. He and his mother, Josefa, our granny, were also conscripted as farm labourers and taken to Germany. Hunger was our dad’s most profound memory of the war. When Americans liberated the farm he worked, our father had no real clothes left. His clothes had worn out. He wore potato sacks.
What frightened our mom more than anything during the war was the Allied bombing of rural Germany. It was sheer terror. When they heard the drone of the bombers, Marcin, Rosalia and Kazimiera would flee their residence and run to the farm field. They laid low, praying they wouldn’t be hit by a bomb or flying shrapnel.
But our mother and father, like other Poles (we always called ourselves Polaki), were not vindictive. Our dad told his liberators, American soldiers, that the Germans who owned the farm he worked secretly let them listen to radio broadcasts from the free world. They knew that The Allies were, at last, winning the war.
Unbeknownst to each other, the Podgorsdki family and the Franczyk family refused to return to Poland. It was under Communist reign.
Housed in army barracks, they were refugees. Belgium welcomed them. But the deal Belgium offered was the men would work in Belgian coal mines and only the coal mines.
Our families took the deal.
They settled in the same coal-mining neighbourhood of Anderlues, Belgium.
Coal mining was tough and dangerous. Horses pulled coal carts through the dark underground drifts. Polish people love our horses. So we kids were happy to learn that when the coal mines shut down for long holidays, horses were brought to surface and stabled in dark barns, where covered windows were very gradually opened so daylight’s glare didn’t spook these hard-working, equine coal miners as they rested.
Miners were not allowed to smoke underground. They chewed tobacco. Some shared their chew with their horses. When a miner tried to pass by a horse and its coal cart in the narrow mine drift, the horse would gently pin the miner to the side of the tunnel until he shared his chewing tobacco.
Rosalia, my mom’s mother, first noticed Jan. She liked his looks, commended him to my mother. “You know, he has a bicycle,” she said approvingly.
Jan and Kazimiera cycled all over Belgium, mostly on Sundays, the one day a week our dad had off work. They rode as far as Waterloo, where an earlier war monger, Napoleon, was beaten and consigned to history.
Jan and Kazimiera fell in love. They married and had two children in Belgium. In 1951, they, with their parents, Marcin, Rosalia and Josefa, embarked on the adventure of a lifetime. They all emigrated to Canada. Our parents had four more children. They settled in Bradford and lived happily ever after.
The Bourbonnais, Franczyk, Marques, Thompson and Rizzuto families.