A story that seems straight out of a novel was reported in British newspapers this week.
In September 1939, a Jewish family buried a silver treasure and fled their property in eastern Poland as the 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 face the Russians, who drove him off their land 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 only drawn much later
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 silver hoard, currently valued at thousands of pounds.
Jan Glazewski, 69, is a retired professor of environmental law at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He told The Mirror newspaper that he asked his father to draw him a map, so that one day he could go to the property and look for the treasure.
“He gave me that 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 the search for the family’s lost treasure.
‘Dig where the forest begins’
Jan began the search for the treasure aided by his niece Layla and two Ukrainian metal detectors. According to the retired professor, the map his father drew from his head showed the family manor house in its original location, but the house had been destroyed by the Russians. Even so, Jan managed to find the foundations.
“There was a dotted line that ran through a cultivated field — which is now just bush. According to the map, I would have to walk 100 meters and then go down a slope. My father’s instructions said: ‘Where the forest begins, you must dig to get our silver’.”
But 80 years later, Jan didn’t know if the forest had receded or gone uphill. There was also the possibility that the treasure had already been rescued.
He said he felt instinctively that his father and uncles would not have gone far down the slope, where it became steeper and overgrown. The metal detector proved him right, and Adam’s grandson finally managed to find the treasure.
‘I was very excited’
“I was really, really emotional,” Jan said. Some of the items were packed by his mother, who passed away when he was just 7 years old and ran away with Gustaw.
“One of the things we took was a jewelry box, and my niece said, ‘These were probably packed away by your mother; they’re your mother’s jewelry.’ So here I was, touching things that she had kept 80 years earlier. It was a very exciting thing for me.”