Jan Glazewski never forgot the story of the family treasure Reproduction/Facebook/Jan Glazewski
A story that seems straight out of a novel was published in British newspapers this week.
In September 1939, a Jewish family buried a hoard of silver and fled their possessions in eastern Poland as their country was divided between the Nazis and Stalin’s Russian regime.
The head of the family, Adam Glazewski, stayed on the property near Lviv now part of Ukraine in 1939 to confront the Russians, who drove him from their lands and nearly executed him.
The four children have restarted their lives in different corners of the world. Son Gustaw went to South Africa, but the legend of the family treasure was never forgotten by the Glazewski family.
Treasure map was not drawn until much later
Map from memory of Jan’s father Wikimedia Commons
Eighty years after the escape, Adam’s grandson Jan Glazewski used a treasure map drawn by his father Gustaw and managed to recover the lost hoard of silver, currently worth thousands of pounds.
Jan Glazewski, 69, is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Law at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He told The Mirror that he asked his father to draw a map so one day he could go to the property and look for the treasure.
“He gave me this map in 1989, along with some instructions, and he drew it from memory 50 years after he left.”
Gustaw died in 1991, but it wasn’t until 2019 that Jan began searching for the family’s lost treasure.
“Dig Where the Forest Begins”
Jan began searching for the treasure, assisted by his niece Layla and two Ukrainian metal detectors. According to the retired teacher, the map his father drew of his head showed the family estate in its original location, but the house had been destroyed by the Russians. Despite this, Jan managed to find the foundations.
“There was a dotted line across a cultivated field which is just bush today. According to the map I would have to walk 100 meters and then go down a slope. My father’s instructions were: ‘You must dig where the forest begins. Get our silver’.
But 80 years later, Jan didn’t know if the forest had receded or gone uphill. There was also a chance that the treasure had already been saved.
He said he felt instinctively that his father and uncles would not have walked far down the slope, where it became steeper and overgrown. The metal detector proved him right and Adam’s grandson finally found the treasure.
“I was very excited”
“I was very, very emotional,” he said. Some of the items were grabbed by Jan’s mother, who died when he was just seven and ran away with Gustaw.
“One of the things we took was a jewelry box, and my niece said, ‘These were probably put away by your mother; they are your mother’s ornaments.’ So here I was, touching things that she kept 80 years ago. very exciting thing for me.”