From Ukraine to Shropshire: Couple's massive photograph collection tells a life's story
She was a young Shropshire woman. He was one of the huge numbers of East Europeans whose destiny was shaped by the maelstrom of the Second World War.
Sylvia Szwajkun died 18 months ago at the age of 95. Husband Marian was exiled from his native Ukraine for 48 years but was to live to see the country fight to gain its freedom from the Soviet Union, making an emotional return to his birthplace in 1991 shortly before his death at the age of 72.
One of the legacies of their story for son Steve Szwajkun, from Telford, is a massive collection of photographs, the fruits of his parents' passion for photography, some of which he has now shared with the Star.
"There must be five to six thousands photographs, social and landscape views of around here and anywhere they visited. They photographed everything in the same way people use their mobile phones today," he said.
"Every time they went out my dad had a camera in his pocket and it was click, click, click all the time. He even had photographs of his war days and early days of the sugar beet factory at Allscott."
It was at that Allscott factory that his parents had met, although his mum, who was Sylvia Jones before marriage, had previously worked at the Co-operative Wholesale Society at Roden, where the CWS had a big operation growing its own produce. Some of Sylvia's photos capture workers there around the late 1940s or early 1950s.
