SILVER LINING
I went on 20-year hunt for buried WW2 treasure using my dad’s crude map – I nearly died but there’s an incredible ending
A GRANDSON found his family's buried hoard of silver after 80 years - using a crude treasure map drawn from memory.
The Glazewskis hid their valuables and fled their home in eastern Poland when they heard the Russians were invading at the start of the Second World War in September 1939.
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Only Adam, the head of the family, stayed to face the Red Army, who threw him off his land and almost executed him before his staff intervened.
Faced with life under Soviet rule, Adam's four sons never returned to their home near Lviv – today part of Ukraine.
Each son settled in a different corner of the world, but the legend of the family treasure survived.
Now more than 80 years on, the hoard has been rediscovered by Adam’s grandson, Jan, using a treasure map drawn by his father Gustaw.
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Jan, 69, said: “My father was getting old and I kind of nagged him, I said ‘please draw me a map – one day I might be able to go to the estate and look for it’.
“He gave me that map in 1989, accompanied by some instructions, and he drew it from memory 50 years after he had left.”
Jan added: “The last sentence of these instructions said 'you must find our silver and my hunting guns'.
“And when I read that, it was like a directive, and I got very emotional that I’ve got to fulfil this dream.”
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Gustaw, who had settled in South Africa after fighting for the Allies in the Second World War, died in 1991.
That same year Ukraine gained its independence, but it was another ten years before Jan made his first visit to the former family estate.
And it was only in 2019 that he began his treasure hunt.
He said it seemed an “almost impossible task” as the landscape had changed so much.
Jan, a retired professor of environmental law at the University of Cape Town, said: “It was a needle in a haystack situation.
“On this map he drew where the original manor house was – it was destroyed by the Russians, by the way, but we found the foundations.
“But then there was a dotted line going across a cultivated field.
"Today it’s just bush – it’s about 100 metres you had to walk, and then down a slope.
“And then his instructions said 'where the forest starts, you must dig for our silver.'
“And, of course, 80 years later, which is when I was there, one doesn’t know whether the forest has receded or come up the slope.”
There was also the possibility that the hoard had already been salvaged.
Jan said: “I thought ‘look, this is a bit of a wild goose chase’.
“The people who worked there would’ve seen that all of the silver was removed, they would have put two and two together.
“They would have gone down the slope and found it.”
Emotional finds
Assisted by his niece Layla and two Ukrainian metal detectorists, they beat the odds.
Jan instinctively felt that his father and uncles wouldn’t have gone too far down the slope, where it became steeper and more overgrown.
The metal detector proved he was right, coming to life over the treasure.
Jan recalled: “I was very, very emotional.”
Some of the items had been packed by his mother, who had fled alongside Gustaw but died when Jan was aged seven.
He said: “One of the things we pulled out was a jewellery box and inside were all kinds of trinkets.
“And my niece said ‘those were probably packed by your mother. That’s your mother’s jewellery.’
“So here I was, touching stuff that she had packed away 80 years previously. So it was a very emotional thing for me.”
There was even a Christening spoon engraved with his father’s name, and numerous artefacts bearing the initials of his grandmother, who died of Spanish Flu in 1918.
Jan has been told the hoard is worth thousands of pounds.
But to him it’s priceless – and he hopes some of the treasures will one day be exhibited in Ivano-Frankivsk, the closest town to the old family estate.
“It’s hugely meaningful,” he said.
“It’s a kind of fulfilment of a life dream, as a little boy, of finding the treasure.
“But more importantly, it’s fulfilling a directive from my father.
“And it’s given me a great sense of satisfaction; I walk taller, I’m more confident.”
Adam Glazewski never saw his four sons again, and died in Lviv in 1961.
The sons saw each other only once, reuniting in France in 1967.
Jan himself almost died before he could achieve his dream of finding the treasure.
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He was infected with HIV from contaminated blood products while being treated for haemophilia.
He has told his story in a book, called Blood And Silver: A True Story Of Survival And A Son’s Search For His Family Treasure.
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