In the early 1940s, hundreds of Polish children – many of them orphans whose parents had died in Soviet labor camps – arrived in the princely state of Nawanagar on India’s western coast. They were malnourished, traumatized, and stateless. The ruler waiting to receive them, Digvijaysinhji Ranjitsinhji Jadeja, had never met them before. He took them in anyway, at a time when no other government was willing to.
Here is how Jadeja organized the rescue, what life looked like inside Nawanagar for these displaced Polish kids, and why the story remained largely buried for decades after the war ended.
How Soviet Labor Camps Produced Hundreds of Stateless Polish Children
The children arriving in Nawanagar were not random refugees. They were predominantly the sons and daughters of Polish intelligentsia – teachers, lawyers, officers – who had been deported to Soviet labor camps after the USSR occupied eastern Poland in 1939. Many of their parents died in those camps. When the Soviet Union switched sides and joined the Allies in 1941, a window briefly opened: Polish General Władysław Anders negotiated the release of surviving Poles, and a ragged exodus began moving southward out of the USSR toward Iran.
From Iran, the children needed somewhere to go. Britain, which controlled much of the region, was not eager to absorb them into its territories. Several countries passed. Jadeja – who had been following the situation – stepped in and offered Nawanagar as a formal home. He did not frame it as charity. He told the children directly that they were guests of his state, not displaced persons, and that they should consider themselves under his protection. That framing mattered enormously to kids who had spent years being classified as enemies of the Soviet state.
Nawanagar’s School, Food, and Functioning Daily Life for Over 500 Polish Children
More than 500 Polish children eventually settled in Nawanagar. Jadeja set up a dedicated camp with functioning schools, meals, and space for the children to practice their own language, religion, and cultural traditions. Polish teachers who had survived the camps were brought in to run the classrooms. Catholic religious observance – politically suppressed in Soviet captivity – was openly permitted and supported.
The children called Jadeja ‘Bapu’, the Gujarati word for father. Several survivors who were later interviewed described his visits to the camp as genuinely attentive rather than performative – he checked on conditions, listened to complaints, and intervened personally when problems arose. The operation ran from roughly 1942 until the end of the war, with children eventually resettling in Poland, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere as postwar borders were redrawn.
Why Jadeja’s Decision Carries Weight Beyond a Single Wartime Act of Generosity
The Nawanagar rescue sits at an intersection that postwar history rarely examines: a non-European, non-Allied head of state extending formal state protection to white European children at a moment when European governments themselves would not. Jadeja had no strategic obligation, no alliance pressure, and no obvious political upside. What he did construct was a functioning support infrastructure – schools, food supply, legal status – that kept over 500 children alive and intact through the most unstable years of the 20th century. The story remained obscure largely because Nawanagar was absorbed into independent India in 1947, and the princely states left few institutional archives behind. Polish survivor communities in the UK and Poland have worked in recent decades to document and formally commemorate what happened there.
The children who grew up in Nawanagar carried that period with them for the rest of their lives – some returning to India as adults to find the place they had once called home, others passing the story down to grandchildren who eventually pushed it back into the historical record where it had always belonged.
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