DJAMENT o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-11-20 published
DROBOT,
Jan
Engineer, diplomat, traveller, storyteller. Born August 7, 1913,
in Krakow, Poland. Wore out in Toronto on November 14, aged 94.
By Eve DROBOT,
Page L6
The plane circled JFK after an aborted flight to Frankfurt.
My mother grew more frantic with each loop. Her husband slept.
"Jan, Jan, wake up! We're going to crash!" He cracked one eye
open. "Why do you care?" he asked. "It's not your plane."
He survived the trip. He survived Hitler, Stalin, Indira Gandhi
and the Polish government, which issued his death warrant.
He began life as Jakub
DJAMENT, fifth and youngest
son of a timber
merchant in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied at the university
in Lwow and at the German Polytechnic in Brno, in then-Czechoslovakia.
He scrambled to survive in Russian-occupied Poland in 1939, then
made the life-saving decision to volunteer for the Soviet Union.
He built power stations and fixed clocks for villagers in exchange
for vodka, honey and caviar.
He returned to a devastated Poland as Jan
DROBOT to discover
one brother had been shot and his mother and another brother
- with his wife and twin six-year-old daughters - had been slaughtered.
Nonetheless, he threw himself into building communism in Poland
as director of the national power plant company. When the grimness
of communist Poland took hold in the 1950s, and the Iron Curtain
sealed off Eastern Europe, he joined the trade ministry and travelled
all over Western Europe to sell Poland's wares.
He was sent as commercial counsellor to New Delhi, where he befriended
the second secretary at the U.S. embassy - a CIA agent -
and arranged to defect.
For the next few years he was stateless, crossing the Atlantic
back and forth until he decided he belonged in New York, where
he worked for Westinghouse International. When their man in New
Delhi retired he agreed to hold the fort temporarily, and stayed
on as vice-president for India, Burma, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
That life ended when Indira Gandhi decided to privatize American
firms in India. He was one of several hostages Gandhi used to
leverage her position, and spent the night in a prison cell.
He led an adventurer's life, kayaking through the lakes of Finland
to the Arctic Circle and driving the Khyber Pass.
He also lived the life of a lover, adoring the beautiful Wanda.
He filled their house with 50 red roses to celebrate their 50 years
of marriage shortly before her death.
"I'm never going to die," he often said. "You're going to have
to hire someone to kill me." Time beat me to it.
Eve DROBOT is Jan
DROBOT's daughter.
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DJATSCHENKO o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-10-01 published
DJATSCHENKO,
Viktor
Born April 10, 1957. Died suddenly on September 28, 2007. His
untimely loss is mourned by his mother Vera and his father Feodor,
by his sister Ludy, his brother-in-law Ron
CARTER, and their
children Veronica, Tim, Emily and Stephanie, to whom he was a
devoted uncle, and by his extended circle of family and Friends.
Funeral service on Tuesday, October 2nd at 10: 30 a.m., at Holy
Trinity Russian Orthodox Church, 23 Henry Street, Toronto. If
you'd like to make a donation in his memory, he would have liked
them to go to the Heart and Stroke Foundation or your local Humane
Society. We will miss you terribly, Viktor. Keep an eye on us
from up there.
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