Another group of women was tasked to prepare supper. Everyone gave what they had to eat for the good of the group. My mama and I contributed the rye bread and honey that had been gifted to us by a stranger. The most priceless item was Pani Szczygielska’s (I will never forget this woman’s last name) huge bag of lard provided by a recently killed hog. Amid the horror of our circumstances, the ripple effects of altruism created a cascade of sustenance for the harrowing evening. Nourished with hog lard, bread, and honey, I cuddled with my mother. Even though we bore witness to a blip of light and humanity, the inhumanity of the situation overtook us, and we began to weep. The brutality of being taken away at gunpoint without a clue as to where we were going, unaware of the whereabouts of my father, collapsed us into grief. Mama mourned the loss of her husband, home, and youth, while I missed my blue-colored bed. We had no bedding or anything to cover ourselves with, so we opted to use each other’s shoulders as pillows. I had the added benefit of using my rag doll for extra comfort. The monotonous clacking of the train’s wheels eventually lulled everyone who was crammed in the wagon to sleep.

  Out of nowhere, our slumber was unexpectedly interrupted when the train jerked and came to a sudden halt. Soldiers with machine guns began to open the boxcar doors that had previously been bolted shut. One of them yelled, “Vylazai po dva apravitsa!” (“Get out, by two, and get ready”). The train stood in an open field without a platform, making it difficult for the women and elderly to jump onto the ground. Once the first two people got off, we realized this was a bathroom break—the type where we had to relieve ourselves while crouched at the feet of a soldier who held us at gunpoint. We weren’t even allowed to hide behind the train’s wheels. No one recognized where we were or what direction we were going. The elderly attempted to ascertain the direction with the alignment of the stars, to no avail. We were in the middle of nowhere without a clue of where we were headed.

  At daybreak, our thirty-minute break was up, and we were once again packed into the wagon like sardines and carried off into the unknown. Soon afterward a wave of thirst began to set in. We didn’t have any fluids to drink. Throughout the wagon children desperately whispered, “Mama, pee-pee.” The women of the wagon began to organize containers that could fulfill the role of chamber pots. Finally, the train stopped. Whoever could reach the doors began to pound them with their fists and everyone began to cry in agony, “Water! Give us something to drink! Give us something to eat! We need to relieve ourselves!” The agonizing cries were dreadfully ignored. The train ended up staying in place for a whole day while desperate cries from women, children, and the elderly were met with silence from the soldiers. The thirst became unbearable, and children made it readily known how to drink one’s own urine.

  Once it got dark, the process of leaving two at a time to relieve oneself at gunpoint started again. When everyone was done, we were packed back into the wagon like sardines. The train moved off once again into the unknown, among a backdrop of vociferous prayers, cries, and songs. Two whole days later, women carrying buckets of boiling water, speaking among themselves in Russian, began to appear next to the train. They ended up never speaking to us, never answering any of our questions. They only glanced at us kindly, with empathy, never daring to utter a word.

  Shortly afterward, another train with cattle cars appeared on the platform, and we were ordered to transfer into it. This train differed from the other in that its cots were covered in straw, and the floor of the wagon contained a hole, serving as a toilet. The windows remained closed, and the doors were likewise bolted shut after we were transferred. I heard Mama nervously say under her breath that a few people, ignoring orders to halt, were killed as they blindly attempted to flee. The transfer into the next train ended up being necessary due to the different size of Russia’s train tracks from the rest of Europe’s. I didn’t understand then what it meant, but for everyone else in the boxcar, it was clear that we were certainly going into the interior of Russia. But how far and for how long? No one was able to answer those questions. And I felt the adults coming to understand the severity of the situation even more. It was like a heavy rock that traversed deeper into their souls.

  Despite the closed windows and dominating darkness, a ray of sunlight would sneak through a crack in the door, allowing us to see each other and get to know one another. Mama initiated conversation by introducing herself. Everyone described themselves in a few words: where they came from, what their name was. It turned out the adults in our boxcar were purely women except for one elderly man who had been forced in after soldiers dragged him out of a civilian passenger train, preventing him from ever arriving at his intended destination. He could no longer hear. Other than him, our boxcar had just women and children. The story of each woman was similar: After her husband’s arrest, she and the children had been taken from their home in the middle of the night and put into a cattle car!

  Only two middle-aged women differed significantly from the rest. They were very elegant—tall, thin—and very sad. They didn’t want to talk. It turned out they were the Lilpop sisters, the daughters of a well-known industrialist from Warsaw.8 They were in the boxcar by accident. They had been visiting their friend who ended up escaping deportation. They’d never assumed that whoever spent the night in a deportee’s home would be transported out in place of the home’s owner. There was also a pregnant woman with us as well as a few infants, whimpering quietly, constantly nursed by ever-shrinking breasts. The children were mostly my age, but there were also a few pubescent young girls and boys.

  By now the train only moved at night. It stood still during the day. The soldiers never allowed first aid into our boxcar except for the occasional woman with a bucket of boiling water and the twice-a-week ration of sliced bread with the taste and look of clay.

  On the morning of the first day of May, the train stopped at a station. We were surprised and delighted when the windows were opened and people were led a few at a time to a washroom located in a special wagon. We were on cloud nine, as after a few weeks’ travel no one had bathed, which had caused lice to appear. The train station was in a town called Penza. It was a large town and former czarist gubernatorial capital. We weren’t allowed into the city, but thanks to the newly opened windows, a barter market immediately blossomed. Russian women brought potato pancakes and local flavors of pierogi filled with meat. After a price agreement of a headscarf, pair of gloves, or shawl, the women placed the food into a bucket to which we tied belts and strings to haul the goods into the wagon. The feeding system was truly unique: Children ate first, the obese woman second, and the mothers ate the leftovers. We were soon left with nothing to exchange.

  At a certain moment in the day, I was sitting on a cot next to the window eating some spoiled hog lard. A typical Russian elderly man who was sweeping the platform suddenly dropped his broom to the ground, sunk to his knees, and begged, muttering, “Gospodi pomilui, dvadtsat' let sala ne vidal!” (“Lord have mercy, it’s been twenty years since I’ve seen lard!”). I involuntarily threw him an uneaten piece of lard. Then a miracle occurred. Women with bags swarmed the platform and offered us eggs, cheese, and even milk for the smaller children in exchange for that one small piece of lard. Seventy years have passed since that moment, and I will never forget the platform in Penza, our joy that we were able to bathe and have a feast.

  Once we got moving again, the children felt better; we could look out the window and observe the beautiful Russian landscape. Crossing the Volga River over a seemingly never-ending bridge was like going across an ocean. Mountains appeared along the horizon. People began to sob as the realization of the inevitable sank in even more. We passed a pole with a sign on one side saying Europe and the other side saying Asia.

  Years later I would visit the X pavilion in the Warsaw Citadel and relive once again the tragedy of the deported fighters of the January Uprising, still freshly alive in memory, as expressed on canvas by Alexander Sochaczewski.9 A painting titled Farewell Europe! impacted me the most, with its depiction of the same obelisk I saw in my childhood. Next to the pole, deportees with half-shaved heads were painted into the unending horizon.

  Back in the wagon, Mama hugged me tightly. What would happen to us? The climate and landscape changed from time to time. We were now headed north on a plain where the horizon coalesced with the sky. Winter once again prevailed. Pristine whiteness was marked with fiery reflections of the sun’s rays. The whiteness hurt the eyes. We arrived at the Pietruchowo station, signifying the end of our rail transport that had lasted six weeks.10

  CHAPTER 3 Life on the Steppe

  At this point, though snow blanketed the ground, it was still spring—not winter. Pietruchowo (Petukhovo) was likely a remote Soviet station used solely to deposit deportees. Many who lived there were descendants of people who were exiled during earlier waves of political repression.

  Deportees were stranded only to be absorbed into a diverse network of forced labor, with the fate of each deportee often depending on the specific wave of deportation and the region they were sent to. In Ida and Leokadia’s case at this time, they were meant to be absorbed into kolkhozes: state-run collective farms that functioned as engines of Soviet agricultural production. These were not voluntary cooperatives but forced collectivization projects managed by party officials. Deportees were expected to work in exchange for shelter and meager food, but their labor was often treated as unpaid servitude. The attitude was: Use them until their “luxuries” were exhausted.

  Though displaced and starving, young Ida was allowed to attend a Russian school—likely because she was one of the few children in the village, and schooling helped facilitate assimilation.

  Communication with the outside world was rare but not impossible. Letters, if they came, arrived slowly—passed between hands, trains, and checkpoints. Most exiles never knew whether their messages reached loved ones or if their names had already faded from memory. That a package or a letter at times would arrive was miraculous.

  PIETRUCHOWO WAS BARELY A TRAIN station. It was merely a railroad track placed in the middle of the steppe without a platform. A small wooden building stood next to the tracks and small houses loomed in the distance. Smoke rose from the chimneys. The air stood still with no sign of wind.

  We were ordered to get off the train. Once we got out, the sun rapidly rose to the middle of the sky, quickly and ruthlessly burning us. The train then sped off in a hurry, emptying the tracks and leaving us alone. Kidnapped and abandoned, we found ourselves on top of snow that began to melt at lightning speed, transforming into its quickly developing offspring, reminiscent of a giant lake. We were bewildered and horrified by this phenomenon. The water soon reached our knees, causing our possessions to sink. Mama and the other young women feverishly thought about what to do. The station building was closed. There wasn’t a living soul around. Around a thousand women with their children stood in freezing water. It got deathly silent; no one even cried. The situation seemed hopeless. Only singing larks hanging still and high above us gave any sort of hope and reassurance, reminding us of God’s existence and His mercy.

  In the meantime, a delegation of a handful of women, with my mother as the leader, made it to the houses that we saw in the distance and promptly returned with a group of locals hauling baskets of hard-boiled eggs, yeast cakes, and bread rolls. It turned out it was Easter for the Orthodox. Each child received an egg and bread roll in the freezing water. Next came boiled water and even milk. All of this help came from the kindness of their hearts, with nothing being asked in return.

  A deep freeze settled in at dusk and we were still stuck in this freezing water. Off in the horizon, we saw large trucks approaching us. This was our redemption since it would have been tragic if we were left to spend the night in the melting snow and water. We were told that the cars could only drive at night when the frost solidified on the ground. We did not know that even at that time of year, with a frozen, snowy winter long gone, there were still snow melts that lasted for days. Spring days were hot, yet nights still produced biting frost.

  We hurried into the trucks. We were soaking wet and freezing cold. Water dripped out of our things. There was nowhere to sit in the trucks and nothing to hold on to. Everyone was pressed against each other in the tarp-covered trucks. Once the sun went below the horizon and frost set in, the trucks swerved in various directions. Teeth chattering, we stood in the cold, unable to see the stars to attempt to estimate the direction we were headed. We rode the whole night along the prairie with no road. Between the cab and bed of the truck where people stood, there was a furnace with smoldering pieces of wood. This was a form of salvation for us, as the furnace emitted heat that allowed the people, in their soaked clothing, to survive the terrible journey.

  By dawn we were all at wit’s end. Exhausted, we learned that we were in northern Kazakhstan, in Siberia. We were unloaded at a plaza filled with kolkhoz storage units next to a closed Orthodox church. We were offered boiling water, thankfully warming us up from the outside, thawing out our frozen clothing. Soon afterward, the plaza filled up with villagers and workers from the “Krasny Komunist” kolkhoz. They chose families that were to live with them in their homes. A kolkhoz worker chose my mama and me and immediately wanted to place us on top of a ladder cart connected to two huge oxen, but Mama wanted to see our future lodging first. So she left without me. She found out that we were to sleep on top of a Russian furnace, which scared her stiff, and she decided to share that she preferred her own corner. Before Mama even managed to come back to the plaza, the villager ran through a shortcut back to town, approached the leader of the kolkhoz, and announced that Mama was part of the bourgeoisie. He refused to accommodate her and picked another family to house. The rest of our fellow deportees on the plaza eventually got paired with hosts, leaving my mama and me alone with our two small suitcases.

  At last, an older, hunched person approached my mama and asked, “Kak tebia zvat'?” (“What is your name?”). Mama’s name was too difficult to pronounce so the elderly person continued, “Alikad'ia, a otchestvo? Aha, Alikad'ia Boleslavovna. Beri doch' i edem k nam.” (“Leokadia, your father’s name? Aha, Leokadia Boleslavova. Take your daughter, we're going to our house.”) A problem arose at this point. A thin, lame ox pulled the man’s cart. Due to my crying, Mama and I had to walk behind it. I couldn’t bear the sight of this poor animal pulling us. The elderly man led us, not understanding what was going on. We walked behind the cart along the edge of a precarious-looking lake that had developed from the melting snow. The elderly man asked questions about my mother and told us a little about himself. Mama understood what the man said since we came from the Kresy region, where many spoke Belarusian “po prostemu,” or “simple language,” known as a local dialect at home, in addition to the nation’s language, which for us was Polish. It turned out that this elderly man with the surname of Kobiel was a descendant of Polish deportees from the January Uprising. His background made us feel connected, which left us with an immediate affinity toward him and allowed us to let down our guard.

  His home was a typical Siberian earthen dugout with small windows above the ground. One entered the home through a spacious pigsty where cows, sheep, and the emaciated ox stayed. There was also a small horse. The dugout homes were built this way to ensure easy access to basic necessities during huge snowstorms. This pigsty was called an “ambar,” which also tended to have a well. Our hosts didn’t have a well, which meant one had to walk a kilometer each way to the lake to fetch water during the summertime, and during the winter, one simply got water by melting snow.

  Our hostess greeted us at the dugout home. It turned out she was newly wed to the elderly Kobiel. She was educated, a teacher by profession, and previously the wife of an engineer from Moscow. Her husband had been arrested in 1935 for no reason and was sentenced to eight years in prison to be “reeducated.” Our hostess, along with her two daughters, shared the fate of many. Since she was of Ukrainian descent, she was sent off to Siberia like us. Like her previous husband, she gradually lost her sense of hearing, and her daughters were married off, so our hostess wed Dieda Kobiel, as it was common to call him.

  The crude dugout home was composed of two main parts: a spacious kitchen with a giant Russian furnace and a “gornitsa,” or living area. This gornitsa was used to store hearty grains of wheat from floor to ceiling, at times making the room impassable. The previous year had resulted in a plentiful harvest across Kazakhstan and the kolkhoz members had been generously rewarded.

  Our hosts pondered where to place us. Mama, wanting to help ease the burden on our hosts of accommodating us amid their own poverty, mentioned that we could sleep on top of the stove. The hostess unhappily remarked that they themselves slept on top of it since it was the best place to sleep.

  Kobiel, the penniless, elderly man, brought a large bag stuffed with straw and put it on the ground near the door to the grain storage room. This creative solution was to serve as our bed and living quarters instead of us remaining on the cold, barren floor. Once our corner was established, Mama opened the suitcases that had been packed back in Poland. Since we had been stuffed in the train wagons like sardines for months, there had been no way to open them prior to this moment. We were unaware of what we’d packed in the mad rush of our first eviction from our modest flat back in Dziewieniszki. It was deflating to find two bed covers and curtains from home in one suitcase and Mama’s blouses and a few pieces of her undergarments in the other. Any sort of hope to have something warm or useful for these extreme conditions was extinguished. Mama didn’t have anything to change me into. I had none of my things. Mama made do with what she’d brought, using one bedcover as a sheet to cover our straw bedding and another as a thin blanket. Covered in this sheet, our bodies, worn down from our journey, were exhausted. Yet we could not sleep. We wept, not understanding why this was happening or what would become of us. At the mercy of these poor souls whom we’d just met.

 

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