List: Polish Air Force (Krzystek List)

Personnel of the Polish Air Force in Great Britain in the Years 1940-1947″ (Krzystek’s List“)

The Historical Commission of the Polish Air Force Association in Great Britain decided to prepare a complete list of the personnel of the Polish Air Force in Great Britain, with the British Ministry of Defence Records Office (RAF) in Hayes providing census roll books of all ranks of Polish personnel recorded in RAF service number order. Anna Krzystek entered the more than 17,000 names on the computer from the handwritten records, often difficult to read, over almost four years. With the help of Mrs. J. Hawran, the director of the Polish section of the MoD in Hayes, and the commitment of her Polish staff, Anna was able to enter missing data: Polish and English ranks and trades of individual airmen.

Tadeusz Krzystek printed the list in 2003 and brought several copies with him to Warsaw for the World Convention of Polish Airmen, where it aroused great interest among the participants. It was decided to expand the List by adding information about the place or country in which the airman settled after 1947, as well as the date of death and place of burial, if they were known. Retired in Penrhos, North Wales, Tadeusz Krzystek passionately devoted all his spare time to updating the List, often late into the night, searching through books. He finished his work “Personnel of the Polish Air Force in Great Britain in the Years 1940-1947” in 2012. After his death in 2013, the work of updating the List was taken on by PiotrHodyra of the “Fundacja Historyczna Lotnictwa Polskiego” in Warsaw.

Although the work of Anna and Tadeusz Krzystek is known among historians and aviation enthusiasts as the “Krzystek’s List”, really it is a work of many people. Invaluable contributions were made particularly by Mrs. Danuta Sławińska from the Polish Air Force Association in Great Britain and Mrs. Małgorzata Goddard and Mrs. Barbara Kroll from the Polish section of the Ministry of Defence archives.

As at March 2016, the List contains about 16,923 names (the original document was supplemented with soldiers who served in the PAF, for example, in the Inspectorate, but who were never formally admitted to the RAF. Place of birth was established for 7,132 (42%) of the PAF members.

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