As we wept, our hostess slaughtered a hen and busied herself around the kitchen. Once the chicken soup was ready, the hostess invited us to sit at the table. There was one bowl with the whole hen cooked in its own broth and another bowl with cooked potatoes. One had to first take a potato and then dip it in the broth. This is how everyone ate from the same bowl with wooden spoons. My hunger was stronger than my aversion to eating the hen. I swallowed hot potatoes and broth mixed with my own tears and bit off pieces of meat.

  Mama encountered a terrible problem. How and where were we to bathe? How were we to wash the clothes that we’d worn for a whole month? What to do about my long hair, which was infested with insects? We didn’t have soap, towels, a hairbrush, or a sewing kit. We found out that we had to make lye from ash, and the best thing to accompany it was wormwood. One had to scratch out the lice. The hostess enjoyed doing this and promised to teach us. We had no money to buy wormwood, but money wasn’t needed since the nearest store was 200 kilometers away and the Pietruchowo train station was 250 kilometers away. Our hostess promised to specially prepare a bath for us. A hot meal and the promise of a bath lifted our spirits as we dressed ourselves in Mama’s blouses and fell asleep on our straw bedding, with our hosts on the furnace.

  After a meeting with a kolkhoz chairperson, Mama announced that we wouldn’t get employment in the kolkhoz for at least a year due to the declaration that, “Poles must first use up all of their luxurious items.” The problem was that we didn’t have anything. Other families were in a similar situation. Mama sold her beautiful curtains to a homemaker for twenty puds of wheat. One pud was around sixteen kilograms (35 pounds). She also got two kilograms (4 pounds) of butter.

  Without any glimmer of possibility to return home, we resigned ourselves to staying in the place we were. Given the unknown timeline of our stay, our hostess employed us as house servants. One of Mama’s responsibilities was to light the Russian furnace early each morning. Dried cow dung collected from the prairie was used as tinder. The biggest problem with lighting the fire was the lack of matches. On top of that, Mama could barely manage a flint. Without matches, one made a fire by rubbing together two rocks; a spark would fall onto the kindling, which was primarily twisted pieces of cloth, and then one would blow and quickly transfer the fire onto some straw. It was easier to watch for smoke from neighboring chimneys and use borrowed embers as fuel. This method, however, didn’t satisfy our hosts, since they were in a hurry each morning to work in the kolkhoz. Mama cleaned, peeled potatoes for dinner, milked the cow, led the cow and two sheep over to pasture, and took care of the whole property.

  My duty was to grind the wheat grains into flour. This was grueling work for me. I spent whole days just milling. Tending to the garden was also beyond my physical capabilities. I guarded the cow (at times from wild animals) and protected hens and their chicks from being captured by hawks. These were gripping and nerve-racking tasks for me to do alone. After it was all said and done, I had my hands full at such a tender age. I worked eagerly in exchange for some food. In the mornings, our hostess would pinch the hens to see how many eggs they’d laid. The hens, lacking any discipline, laid their eggs wherever and whenever they wanted, and I had to keep count. In exchange for my work, I received a glass of milk and a pierogi filled with cheese or potato. Our hosts didn’t even have bread for themselves. I was seven years old, growing fast and always hungry.

  Over time, the invitations to eat meals at the table dwindled and the dynamic with our hosts deteriorated. Unable to continue feeding us on their own, our hosts made Mama and me earn our food within our living quarters through our indentured servitude. We supplemented our diets outside of the home through what we acquired from the barter market. However, this wasn’t enough sustenance. Desperate for more food, I watched our hosts eat their meals from the ground next to them. They threw bones at me as if feeding a dog leftover scraps. I ravenously grasped the scraps and voraciously devoured them. We went from guests to beggars.

  Northern Kazakhstan had a typical continental climate. After the springtime melts, summer came in at full swing. Daytime temperatures reached beyond 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). It almost never rained. At night, temperatures dipped to negative 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit). Establishing a garden was vital to our survival, and the method of creating a vegetable patch amid the extreme swings in temperature was a testament to creative problem-solving. The first step was to place piles of straw fifty centimeters high. Next, one had to make a hollow pocket and fill it with soil. The soil was incredibly fertile. It was called “chernozem,” and it turned into black goo whenever it rained. In times of drought, the ground cracked, creating irregular patterns. Half a kilometer away, these patterns formed orifices in the lake, each one able to fill a bucket of water. Next came the planting. Our hostess produced the seeds. Together with Mama we planted tomatoes, cucumbers, parsley, carrots, and onions. The garden had to be watered twice a day. If the garden was left neglected just one time, the sun utterly burned it. Once it got to evening time, we covered the vegetable patch with a thick layer of straw to protect the plants from the frost.

  I was in charge of watering the garden. I trod a trail to the lake. During the summer droughts the lake shrunk, distancing itself farther away from the garden, causing my walk to increase by two whole kilometers. In order to complete my task faster, I would carry three buckets at a time: two on each end of a stick that I placed on my shoulders and one in my hand. The buckets were made of wood and too heavy for a small, starving girl who was in additional pain from the buckets hitting her ankles. My determination for food to quench some of my hunger drove me through the pain.

  The garden was a salvation for us. Our hostess couldn’t keep count of the carrots, cucumbers, or tomatoes. Due to this, Mama secretly fed me. My vitamin intake replenished in hiding. But Mama worried about me, seeing the bloody palms of my hands and my bruised legs.

  During the spring, the grassland flowed in the wind like a green sea. The grasses were so tall that even as a rather big seven-year-old child, I was able to hide in them and not be seen. The steppe was ever changing. By late spring the grasses blossomed, turning into each shade of nature’s colors. By summertime the steppe turned bronze. The steppe animals matched the colors of their fur coats to each color change in the grasses that surrounded them. Springtime produced innumerable amounts of small lakes. The majority of them dried up, some leaving strains of white chunks of salt, which looked like snowflakes. We quickly learned that the steppe was our only true, steady, unconditional friend. It provided us with firewood for the winter, straw and soil for additional kindling, animal dung for tinder, building material for the dugout homes, salt, and eggs. It also had a wide variety of vegetables and even fruits. During the springtime, the small, shallow lakes teemed with wild birds, mainly peewits and ducks, whose nests full of eggs we could easily spot. We would gather the eggs in the flaps of our skirts and, provided that they contained undeveloped embryos, eat them a dozen at a time. Once the lakes dried up, one had to make excursions out for salt. But the salt lakes were far away. Mama, along with other women, made overnight expeditions into the grassland, making us children who were left behind quite envious. When they came back from the trips, the women would tell us about their experiences with prairie wolves whose fur mimicked the colors of the dried grasses, of the many varieties of rodents, and of other marvels seen on the steppe. Tall grasses grew along the lakeshores. Cut with a sickle or scythe and subsequently tied into sheaves, the grasses served as good mediums of exchange. We quickly learned to distinguish the grasses and the wild vegetables: garlic, with a strong aromatic smell; wild onions; and other edible grasses. Everything was gathered and dried to serve as food during the long winter months. There were also wild, bitter black cherries that grew on the plain. The gathering of this fruit required an excursion of twenty-five kilometers, a trip that belonged to the children. I remember heading out at dawn and returning late at night, with the aurora borealis accompanying us. We came back utterly tired but proud of collecting handfuls of the bitter fruit.

  Once the grasses took the form of dark brown hues, the wind suddenly blustered, and balls of grass scurried along the steppe with the gale—we knew this was the tundra’s precursor to the end of summer. With fall lurking in the trees, we were painfully aware of a terror close by: the Siberian winter. I had to prepare the tinder for the winter, which meant I had to collect dried animal dung from the grassland.

  Mama, despite mass indignation from the other Polish deportees, sent me to attend second grade at a Russian school. It was difficult for me at first since I didn’t know the language, but I soon began to speak like the locals.

  The winter started unexpectedly in October. The temperature fell to negative twenty to negative forty degrees Celsius (negative four to negative forty degrees Fahrenheit). Snowstorms, called “buriany,” were wild. Our dugout home got completely covered in a white blanket. The days got shorter and at times it seemed like it was still night. In our dark, gloomy room, the dried dung burned, delicately emanating light from the furnace. We managed to get outside by climbing up the wide chimney of the Russian furnace and consequently dug an entrance to the dugout house. Dieda Kobiel, our host, gifted us with “pimy,” which were warm ankle-length woolen boots. This allowed me to continue attending school. Along with Russian children, we played a spitting game on our way to school, to see how fast our spit would freeze midair and fall to the ground as solid ice.

  The holidays were approaching, and so was our first Siberian Christmas. Mama baked bread made of wild millet. I ground a glassful of wheat into a gruel called “parzenica,” which was delicious. For dessert we prepared ground oats, based in gelatin. In addition, we made wild black cherry compote sweetened with a root from the steppe oftentimes used in place of sugar. I don’t remember the name of this lovely root. Christmas Eve supper was totally prepared well ahead of time.

  The long-awaited day finally arrived. Mama got up earlier that day and started to light the furnace. It was too late when she realized that our hostess had placed the woolen boots into it to dry and everything burst into flames. Enraged with the loss of a critical part of surviving the brutal winter, our beloved Dieda Kobiel was so overcome with grief that he ordered us to leave. We were to be gone before our hosts got back home from work that day. Our pleading and apologies fell on deaf ears, and the fact that it was Christmas Eve made no difference to him. Devastated, we had no shoes to walk in to find shelter. My mother and I knelt and prayed to the Holy Mother of Ostrabrama, drowning in tears and sorrow.11 Being so far away from home in an unknown land for reasons that didn’t make sense to us in deadly conditions forced us to make the most out of our time. Displaced and penniless, collecting enough for Christmas Eve dinner with loving intention had boosted our morale. It gave us a semblance of familiarity of home. Being forced to leave at such a time was too much to bear.

  Suddenly, a knock at the door resounded. A mailman, covered in frost, stumbled into the kitchen, carrying a considerably-sized round package wrapped in gray linen and sewn shut with thick threaded material. Our address was visibly written into the linen with a chemical pencil, in perfect handwriting that could be none other than my grandfather’s, the father of my mother. We unwrapped the package and found a shiny aluminum pot with intricately cut pork fat, a letter, and “opłatek,” or wafer.12 Our hosts came back home to the table set for Christmas Eve dinner, with the pork fat acting as the centerpiece. The appearance of pork fat nearly knocked our hosts off their feet. The drama of the morning was quickly forgiven. We all shared the wafer and sang Polish Christmas carols for our hosts in the glow of lit resinous wood.

  Getting ready for sleep on our straw bed, teeth chattering like usual, we heard Dieda Kobiel’s voice from his bedding on the furnace call out, “Alikad'ia, beri rebenka i idi spat' na pechku.” (“Alikad'ia, take the child and go sleep on top of the furnace.”) He then scooted over and made room for us next to him. Lying on top of the warm furnace, I thanked the Holy Mother of Ostrabrama and little Jesus, truly believing that their Providence saved us once again.

  CHAPTER 4 Railroad Construction

  By 1941, a year after their initial deportation, Ida and her mother remained trapped in exile. In June of that year, Nazi Germany broke its pact with the Soviet Union and launched a massive invasion eastward. This meant that Poles—once deemed enemies of the Soviet state—were suddenly potential allies. Whispers of “amnesty” began to ripple through the steppe, giving Polish families a fragile hope that their long nightmare might soon end.

  However, the machinery of Soviet exploitation continued—eerily echoing the strategy used during the Holodomor.13 The trucks that arrived to haul away the kolkhoz’s wheat weren’t delivering food—they were commandeered by the state to redirect resources to the front. Just as in Ukraine a decade earlier, the land was stripped bare while its people starved. For the deportees, near-starvation became the norm once again.

  While the promise of freedom loomed in the distance, what came next was another chapter of backbreaking survival—where trains meant not escape but more work, more movement, and more uncertainty. Deportees were forcibly uprooted again to work on massive Soviet infrastructure projects, such as the Akmolinsk–Kartaly railroad. Ida, now seven years old, and her mother were transported hundreds of kilometers by train to a mobile labor site. There, they lived in repurposed cattle cars alongside other deportees for many months, enduring long days of forced labor under brutal conditions.

  MY MOTHER AND I WERE naive to believe that we were well prepared for Siberian winters. Sheepskin coats, woolen boots, and scarves were downright useless. We were constantly freezing, with frostbitten palms, ears, feet, and cheeks. The snowfalls covered the earthen dugout in its entirety, leaving us in constant night inside without any sense of time or day.

  The blackness of the interior of the earthen dugout gave way to flickers of light that descended from a meager fire burning in the furnace. We tried our hardest to ensure the fire stayed lit. We soon came to realize that we wouldn’t have enough kindling to last the winter. We needed to head out to the steppe on a sleigh harnessed by horned oxen to find straw. My mother, along with her friends, organized these endeavors. They came back exasperated, barely making it back alive after being attacked by hungry herds of wolves. The wolves became emboldened, especially after the Soviet-German War began.14 At night they sat around the huts and howled sharply. In the blink of an eye, they once tore apart our host’s dog, Szarik, devouring him. Sometimes, by sheer luck, they would dig their way to the sheep’s pens. The kolkhoz would take a moment to celebrate this savagery, as the wolves would just choke the sheep instead of eating them, leaving their bodies intact for us to eat. We wouldn’t dare butcher the sheep without Soviet permission, as doing so could result in severe punishment. The meat of these poor sheep would be stored in the kolkhoz warehouse. These sheep attacks occurred much too rarely for us, only around once or twice during the winter.

  Our source of water was melted snow. But to get to it, one had to climb out of the earthen dugout’s chimney and try to shovel in some snow from the outside. The snow was so hard and dense that a running horse harnessed to a sleigh wouldn’t even crack it. With the help of shovels, one had to trim entire blocks of snow, which would be turned onto their sides to form tunnels connecting huts to each other.

  Other than darkness, the earthen dugout was most characterized by bleak starvation. The food supply quickly ran out, with the end of winter nowhere in sight. The Russian furnace was a place of privilege. It was quite large but it was too tight for all of us to fit around. The host slept along its edge, then his large wife, then my mother and me along the wall. At night the furnace was very hot. It was difficult to bear this heat, but in the early morning hours we would all nestle around each other to get warm again.

  Judging from the way everyone constantly scratched, there must have been swarms of lice of every species. Every two weeks we would go to the baths, which would be our salvation. Only then the lice didn’t eat us to death. Since it was so dark inside the dugout, they weren’t visible, so it was easier to bear their presumed presence. The furnace’s chimney had a wide set of doors and when opened, we could see the sky. After everything was finished burning in the furnace, and sometimes even when it was still lit, one had to climb out onto the roof for snow. The big pot leftover from the pig fat turned out to be quite useful. Mama used the linen that covered the pot to sew me a beautiful “sarafan” dress with blue cornflowers woven in the front.

  Living on the furnace was the only way we could stay alive at this point—a way of life that seemed to have no end. But right when it seemed like we couldn’t bear the dark night of the indoor dugout anymore, the sun came out. Bit by bit, it would thaw the frosts, turning the snow into water, which soon streamed into a lake which inched dangerously close to the village. Many new seasonal lakes like these appeared on the steppe. Birds began singing again and the grasses started to blossom.

  Mosquitoes are one more part of the nightmare which is Siberian reality. That spring was cumbersome in particular. Once the melts commenced, giant swarms of mosquitoes appeared, choking us as they ended up in every orifice: Our throats, eyes, ears, and noses would be full of them, making it difficult to breathe. The stings were painful, but it was only a few months afterward that we realized how dangerous they were. Everyone became ill with malaria. Malaria outbreaks took place every two or three days. The disease was so widespread that one was bewildered if they found out someone wasn’t sick with it. Typical symptoms included morning chills, followed by what seemed to mimic epileptic seizures, and then a fever reaching forty to forty-one degrees Celsius (104–105 degrees Fahrenheit) that would last around two hours. One would come back to normal health by the afternoon. My mother and I would get bouts of this disease off and on throughout our exile.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9