At 94, Jan Black has had a long and happy life in Britain​ since his heroic wartime service as an air force gunner. ​The hate now being shown his fellow Poles is saddening, he says

Last weekend’s assault on the social and cultural centre in Hammersmith was carried out with a can of paint, but cut through the west London Polish community like a rapier, until the tip reached Jan Black.

Black is 94 and does not always answer the phone. When he did on Sunday, to hear that an expletive had been daubed on the glass doors of the centre, known by its Polish-language acronym Posk, the news came as a powerful shock. Black was born Jan Stangryczuk in eastern Poland, only four years after the first world war. He still carries the name in his Polish passport, and his accent is still as thick as kiełbasa (Polish sausage). But he had lived 76 years in Britain without ever encountering such hatred.

“I have always had friendship and respect here, and there has been respect for my people, for as long as I’ve been here,” Black says.

That is a lot of history. He arrived in Belfast in 1940 on a freighter, the Highland Chieftain, carrying a cargo of meat from Buenos Aires and other provisions for a nation at war. Black’s father had emigrated to Argentina five years earlier and Jan had spent his early teenage years on a South American farm. But then war broke out in September 1939 with the Nazi invasion of his homeland.

“The English-language newspapers were carrying advertisements calling for volunteers to come and fight in Britain. I went down to Buenos Aires to sign up and there was a mix of people there from all over the place who wanted to fight,” Black says. He was given a medical exam, and three weeks later he received a letter at his farm, asking him to return to the capital and wait for his ship.

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The voyage in the Highland Chieftain took four weeks as it zigzagged across the Atlantic dodging German U-boats. The human cargo, an international mix of 180 volunteer fighters, were ordered to wear their “Mae West” lifejackets at all times, even asleep in their hammocks.

From Belfast, the recruits were ferried to an induction centre in Scotland and asked to choose an armed service to fight in. Like most of the young men, Black chose the air force – “it seemed the most noble” – and ended up in a training base in Blackpool with hundreds of other Poles who had found their way across occupied Europe at the outbreak of war and on to ships still sailing out of Portugal. Everyone wanted to be a pilot, far more than there were slots, so Black settled for his second choice, a gunner, learning to identify the night silhouettes of friendly and enemy planes in a darkened Blackpool cinema.

The Battle of Britain was over by then and the RAF’s counter-attack had begun against the Nazi industrial base in occupied Europe. But Black’s first sorties as a rear-gunner in a Wellington bomber, as part of an operational training unit, were dropping propaganda leaflets over occupied France.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jan Black (on right) during the war, with a Lancaster bomber in the background. Photograph: Jill Mead for the Guardian

On one of those missions, in November 1942, one of the plane’s engines seized up and it crash-landed a few miles from base in the English countryside. When Black regained consciousness, he made his way down the length of the plane and tried to free the pilot from his seat as flames began to engulf the fuselage. He held his left hand to his face as he did so and struggled with his right, until the Wellington broke apart and a way out appeared. Unable to extricate the pilot from his seat, Black escaped through the hole and staggered into the night just as the plane exploded. He was the only survivor.

Today, the left side of his face is undamaged, but the right, which had no hand to protect it, is shiny and smooth and the ear is shrivelled to a small triangular spur. He was one of the patients of a pioneering New Zealand plastic surgeon, Sir Archibald McIndoe, becoming one of his famous Guinea Pig Club at Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, where burned soldiers and airmen formed a powerful bond with each other and with the town.

“The people of East Grinstead embraced us. They didn’t look away when they saw us in the street. Even today, it is like a second home,” Black says. A few months earlier, going to London to see a Bing Crosby film in Leicester Square, he had met an English girl called Evelin Black, who worked at the Cafe Royal. He cut off communication after the crash, not wanting her to see him half-burned and mutilated. She tracked him down anyway and told him she could not care less. After recovering, and then flying 18 combat sorties, he married her and eventually took her name, for convenience’s sake. They were not able to have children because of a botched caesarean, and Evelin died 12 years ago. She is buried in Gunnersbury cemetery in west London, another anchor that would stop Jan living anywhere but here.

As we talk at the Posk centre, which has been cleaned of the graffiti daubed on it last week, journalists from around the world inspect the vases of flowers from local well-wishers and the memorials in the lobby to fallen Polish heroes from the second world war, during which 2,408 Polish airmen alone were killed.

The dissonance between that history and the painted slur over the weekend has left Black stunned and wistful. “I was so proud of what we did together, my countrymen and my British colleagues, and I don’t know why these sudden changes are happening with the referendum,” he says. “That makes me so sad, because I saw so many of my countrymen give their lives in order to change Europe for the better. I think what is happening now is very close to what emerged in certain countries before the second war. It is heading in almost same direction.”

He adds: “I think the problem is, people just don’t know their history.”