Dear All,

Something truly amazing happened a few weeks ago which, being intensely personal, I was hesitant to post about generally but would like to share with you.

I have a half brother from my father's first marriage whom I had never met or had any contact with at all. All I knew was that he had fled Poland as a young adult and now lived "somewhere in the US". At 20 years my senior for all I knew he might have passed away already.

Then a few weeks ago I got an Email from a Stanley Siedlecki entitled, "Looking for my Brother" In it he stated how his father had migrated to Australia and died there years ago and other personal details which put it beyond any doubt that he was my long lost brother. Apparently he had been trying to locate me for a number of years now and even enlisted the help of the Australian Embassy. As I am almost certainly the only Ludwik Siedlecki in Australia and probably have less than a dozen namesakes worldwide I don't imagine they tried too hard to find me though.

Actually he finally located me via the article, published on this site, that I wrote about David's Sling, and joined specifically to contact me. So we now have a member, StanleySiedlecki, who has zero posts, zero PM's and has probably not been on the site since joining and has virtually no interest in slinging. But I have the expectation of soon seeing my brother whom I never expected to meet in this life. He and his wife intend visiting Australia in the near future.

He has now moved back to Poland but his business interests keep him criss-crossing the Atlantic repeatedly. His Polish is of course flawless. His English, even after half a century of living in the US, is foreign influenced southern accent, just occassionally slightly unusualy constructed betraying his Polish origins. (My Polish is pretty good esp. for someone who has never lived there.) Strong family resemblance, though he certainly doesn't look 20 years older, ie. I'm decaying faster.

Thought I'd share that with you. Funny how things work out. Also the EM address he wrote to is one I seldom use or even check and the message was less than two days old when I read it.

Regards,

Aussie.
Back to top