Many years later when I was in medical school, my lessons from internal medicine uncovered that my spleen was still enlarged thanks to malaria. My curious friends studied the disease’s lasting effects on me by doing physical exams on my stomach.

  We began to hear sinister tales of the war. All the men able to carry arms on the steppe were called to join the fight. To us Poles, this news was a very plausible sign of the end of our exile. We stayed silent and kept our hope and happiness at this news inside of ourselves. We did not want to further upset the weeping wives and mothers who were saying their goodbyes to their husbands and sons. There weren’t any newspapers or radios so no one really knew what was exactly going on, but our minds clung to the hope of a return home.

  Our hope quickly became squashed with the appearance of trucks on the steppe. One could get around the steppe during the spring snowmelts only with these trucks, so their arrival immediately signified something terrible to us. And that’s how it was this time once again. The wheat, which was stored in the so-called “miners,” was emptied, transferred into the trucks, and transported in an unknown direction. We were left without anything to live off. This caused a widespread, real famine. All of the inhabitants starved, regardless of nationality or ethnicity. What was edible on the steppe was dug out or ripped out. We began eating grass, with our stools looking the same as a cow’s.

  All of the inhabitants became dejected, tired, and sometimes even aggressive. We didn’t have to wait long for the wave of diseases to arrive. I first fell ill with “tsinga,” or scurvy. My whole body was covered with bloody effusions and bruises. My gums bled and looked terrible. It was just in time for my change in teething. My teeth grew as they wanted. As a child I was unaware of the gravity of the situation and the severity of my condition. Abscesses appeared on my legs and face, forming large clusters that constantly reappeared in different places. Broadleaf plantain leaves were placed on them as medicine. The biggest nuisance, which appeared afterward, was the onset of dysentery. At first it seemed to be benign, but once the dysentery became bloody it caused much unrest among those afflicted. This caused everyone’s skin to turn yellow and green. I now know that it was jaundice.

  We had no medicine or food to consume or to nourish us. The starvation and malnutrition became so severe that we resorted to eating our own lice. Maybe this was some sort of vaccination or mere coincidence, but oddly enough, it helped sway the hunger to a degree. My abscesses, however, were quickly progressing and nothing helped. Once some of them finally healed, new ones immediately reappeared in their place. The only way to delay the development of the abscesses was by washing them with one’s own urine.

  Night blindness was the next symptom, which hit the elderly especially hard. I also got chicken pox. Disease had gripped my little body so much that I remember being unable to recognize other people.

  We were in Siberia for a year when the Soviet-German War erupted. It seemed, at least to us children, that the worst was behind us. In the meantime, the sinister trucks appeared on our road again, slashing our hope of something better on the horizon. They once again packed us into these trucks without any indication of our destination and transported us to cattle cars. These differed from the previous ones in that they had bunks covered with straw on both sides, with a furnace in the middle. These cattle cars were filled with only Polish people taken from the neighboring kolkhozes. We soon found out that the selection criteria for the women was physical prowess. They transported us to build an iron railroad called Akmolinsk–Kartaly, which was to connect the Kuzbas coal basin with the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The fast-moving Germans had cut off Donbas in Ukraine and deprived the entire European Russia region of any energy from the Doniesk basin. Polish women in exile were deemed useful resources in replenishing power for the Soviets.

  This is where the next stage of our Gehenna began. We were plucked from solid dugout dirt homes and forced to share cattle cars with multiple families. A few families lived in each cattle car, occupying each bunk covered in straw. The women, covered in straw, got up each morning and went to work. My mother, due to her build and youth, was selected as a “zven'evoi,” a position which involved being the lead of a brigade composed of eight to ten women. Their work required pouring dirt; laying the primers for rails; building “zveno,” structural base units for the rails; and placing embankments upon them, using wooden shovels to solidify the primers with the rails upon the embankments. Many times they looked like ants carrying branches that were bigger than they were.

  Our wagon would move along each finished section and that’s how the construction progressed. No one was paid for their work. The women were enslaved without any choice in where to live or how to work. Money wouldn’t have come in use since there wasn’t anything to buy anyway. Therefore, as the mothers worked tirelessly as forced laborers for the Soviet Army, their children’s responsibility was to look for food to survive. We soon realized that there was a kolkhoz nearby that harvested wheat and large “bakchi,” or a variety of melons. These fields weren’t very well guarded so we would steal whatever grew in these crops out of mere starvation. Occasionally a Kazakh farmer would appear on horseback with a huge baton and beat our legs until we bled as punishment for our theft, even for gathering a few blades of wheat.

  The children stuck together and went everywhere together. We would play games by placing bets on who would pass the most number of stools and whose would have the most blood in them. I remember and I will never forget my best friend from my bunk. She always ran behind us and would have a difficult time catching up to us because she was the smallest and most delicate out of all of us. She always won first place for number of stools and the amount of blood in them. One day, she was proudly exclaiming to us children that something was coming out of her while she was relieving herself. Now I know that it was her infected and bloody large intestine. Soon afterward Krysia, which was her name, wasn’t able to play with us anymore. She lay on the bunk and each child took turns giving her water and pieces of melon. I noticed then how beautiful and delicate she was. She was white, extremely pale. Her temples were lined with blue veins. Her eyelashes reached halfway down her cheekbones and her hands were almost see-through. Her enslaved mother would come back from work and have no medicine or anything else to give her strength. One night, my mother ordered me to scoot away from her and look at the wall. Together with Krysia’s mother, they helped her calmly fall asleep. They helped her pass in peace, as Krysia was dead in the morning. We didn’t have anything to bury her in but wanted to leave her body in dignity. The other women made a cross from the wooden shovels. They wrapped Krysia in some bedding, and her mother lovingly carried her precious daughter. I know she went straight to heaven where she is undoubtedly among the angels. Whenever I close my eyes, I see the lonely cross along the boundless steppe. The mark of her death has never left me.

  CHAPTER 5 A Glimmer of Hope

  By late 1941, the Soviet Union was under attack. After Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the code name for the German invasion, Stalin needed new allies—and that included the very Poles his regime had imprisoned and exiled. The Soviets issued a sweeping “amnesty” in August 1941, releasing thousands of Polish citizens from prisons, labor camps, and remote settlements across the USSR. This decree offered Poles the chance to leave backbreaking railroad project work and attempt to reunite with loved ones.

  This amnesty also allowed for the formation of Anders’ Army, a Polish military force composed of former prisoners and exiles. Led by General Władysław Anders, the army was meant to fight alongside the Allies. Its headquarters were established in Buzułuk, and many families of recruits set out for the south, hoping to meet their loved ones and eventually leave the USSR altogether. The ultimate goal for many was to reach Persia (modern-day Iran), a staging ground for Polish refugees en route to British-controlled territories like India or Palestine.

  Meanwhile, US aid, coordinated through the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), flowed mostly to Allied-designated populations—like Polish citizens. Ukrainians and Belarusians, seen by Soviet authorities as Soviet citizens rather than refugees, were excluded from this support. Starvation and illness remained rampant among them, even as others around them began to receive food, clothes, and medical supplies.

  DESPITE BEING SURROUNDED BY DEATH and riddled with disease and starvation, our will to survive was fierce. When it got cold it was necessary to find coal, which would be lit in the wagon furnace. Since coal trains would pass by and slow down along the newly built rails, our task was to jump onto the moving coal trains, climb up to the top of the wagons, and throw down coal. The next task was to jump down in time before the train sped up again, collect the coal thrown onto the ground, and bring it back to our boxcars. This train hopping produced mixed results; only God watched and kept vigil over our intentions. At night our furnace was glowing red with heat, and in the morning we would wake up covered in frost, as the freeze and snow encroached through the slits of the wagon.

  One beautiful morning Mama woke me up and I looked up to a shadow leaning over me. I was terrified to find a man. This was a tall, very thin person with trousers that barely went down to his ankles, slippers on his feet, and a tattered rag, which may have been a sport coat in another life, covering his bare chest. Shaved head. Black eyes, sagging, beaming an unhealthy shine. His face was covered with a black beard and he had black hair that poured over it. This man reached his hand out to me, but I scooted farther away from him, terrified.

  I heard Mama’s ecstatic voice: “Dadulka, say hello, this is your tata!” I couldn’t restrain myself from the fear and aversion to this person, who apparently was my father. Upon seeing the tears in his eyes, I sensed the familiar connection, resulting in me throwing my hands around his neck in pure elation at this miraculous reunion.

  Over the next few days we attempted to commission an improved wardrobe and well-being for my father. Despite the fact that lice were nothing new to us, and we lived alongside them in full symbiosis, the sight of his matted nits of hair, and any sort of hairiness on him, was frightening to me. Lice were everywhere, even in his eyebrows and under his armpits, and where there wasn’t any sort of hair, their abdomens were protruding. Mama sadly had to continue working because the guard didn’t recognize my father’s return as reason enough to have a few hours off work. “There is a war!” he heartlessly and dryly explained. “We need to defeat the fascists. We need the railroad and coal!”

  I remember my father lying covered on the bunk, with my little hands scraping his pants and tattered and filthy sport coat, so I could get the lice out and kill them. Next, I took care of my dad’s hairiness. I removed each nit from each strand of hair and suffocated the lice in various ways. The locals said that so much good blood was being wasted and that it was better to bite them to get the blood back. The lice were also on the intimate body parts. My father somehow managed with them in those areas. In the end we couldn’t eliminate all of the lice and we had to “get to like them.”

  During the evenings my father recounted his experience in the camp. They worked in the taiga, felling trees and logging. This was authentically backbreaking work, and what made it more difficult was that there wasn’t anything to eat beyond a watery fluid, which was called soup, that they received only once a day. They slept in unheated wooden barracks with a popular iron furnace in the middle. They were also forced to work in the middle of winter on the taiga, wading half naked in subzero temperatures into mountains of snow.

  The circumstances were so dire that the prisoners discovered that disease could be their ally. The camp hospital had beds instead of bare bunks, and it provided slightly better sustenance. Quite a few prisoners working with an ax had cut off their fingers or hands or had injured their feet in order to get to the hospital, just so they could have more bearable conditions to exist in. The camp was surrounded with barbed wire, but despite being in the middle of the woods, there wasn’t one blade of grass inside its boundaries. Each blade had been eaten by the prisoners. The grass and any sort of shrub around the boundary within arm's length had been thoroughly picked.

  After the amnesty announcement my father began searching for me and my mother. Thanks to information provided by the Red Cross and rides on cargo trains as a stowaway, he finally got to us. There were many prisoners like my father. They volunteered to join Anders’ Army, and, searching for their families, they traveled toward Buzułuk, where a Polish army was being organized. Poles finally stopped being treated like criminals.

  Now that the Soviet Army had a more lenient stance toward the Polish exiles on the steppe, my father took it upon himself to seize the opportunity of this more positive atmosphere. The primitive, derelict, and inhumane conditions of the boxcar were not a suitable place for anyone to live. He was therefore intent to arrange for us more civilized living conditions. He left alone to find something like this for everyone and decided to also establish a Polish school. He came back for me and Mama, and we were able to leave the forced labor hell we’d been subjected to. We arrived as a family at the Kazanbasy station, ending up in a village called Sofiewka.

  Soon after, we moved into a rented room at the home of Baba Kasalapicha, an elderly woman living in a typical earthen dugout. There we waited for word to leave for Buzułuk, where all soldiers and their families would leave to get to Krasnodar and to Persia via the Caspian Sea. To finally leave the hell of Siberia for good and fight our way back home to Poland.

  The time spent in the earthen dugout at Baba Kasalapicha’s with my parents as we awaited departure with Anders’ Army is the last happy period of my childhood. My parents worked at my dad’s Polish school, which he himself established, and I was their “assistant.” My responsibility was to burn hay in the furnace, keeping the classroom as warm as possible. My studies were reinforced by listening to what my parents taught, since I already knew everything by heart.

  I felt like a happy child. I spoke Russian fluently by this point. I slept alongside others on hay on the earthen dugout floor and I had many friends. My life in Dziewieniszki back in Poland began to fade in memory. I thought that’s what was supposed to happen. Not knowing any other reality after Dziewieniszki other than starvation, deportation, forced labor, and death—these times were splendid. The worst punishment for me was reading Pan Tadeusz, the only Polish book we had.15 Mama assigned me various snippets to read and asked me a series of questions about them. But I didn’t understand the poetic prose of the text, nor why I was being punished, and I felt unhappy.

  I had some profitable work, which thankfully saved my family from starvation. While people all around us, especially Ukrainians, died of starvation en masse, Mama and I had enough to share with others. Baba Kasalapicha was a well-known healer. People came to her from far and wide. Since treating people was officially forbidden, she did so at night. She looked like a downright witch: skinny, gray-haired, disheveled, with a stiff lower leg. She treated every disease, many times quite effectively. People believed in her. She also gave wise advice, especially in matters of the heart. She was happy with the faith people entrusted in her. She would “order” water under the moonlight. She gave it to the sick to drink for any of their ailments or to wash any painful spots on their bodies. She used roses and burned hemp wrapped in linen towels to treat pain caused by sore teeth and joints, abscesses, malaria, and other infectious diseases. Her medicines included wormwood, urine, and even her patient’s own lice. She also gave tarot card readings.

  I diligently observed her and sometimes even filled in for her, whispering comfort to the sick. I was best at tarot card readings. News went around about me. Surely I could be trusted, because a child doesn’t lie—and I was called a holy child: “sviatoe ditia.” Most often I had to say that a husband was alive (it was war, after all) and a letter would come soon. I thought of brilliant things to say. People paid for my services with food. They also gave it to Baba Kasalapicha. I would receive a cup of flour or some potatoes, pancakes called “pyshki,” pierogi, mare’s milk called “kumys,” or goat’s milk. I became the literal breadwinner of the family and I helped all of my friends, especially the Ukrainians. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the Ukrainians were condemned for utter carnage. Us Poles at least had the support of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.16 We received clothing: Every adult and child got a “battle dress” and different types of outfits, and sometimes we even got American-style ball gowns. We had powdered eggs and milk, canned Christmas gingerbread, and the beloved “svinia tushonka,” a Ukrainian pork stew. Above all else, we received quinine and other antimalarials and DDT powder, which was quite effective against insects. This assistance helped save the lives of thousands of people, who would never forget the American help.

  CHAPTER 6 Disaster at Seven Lakes

  In the fall of 1942, a wider wave of Polish civilians were released after Stalin signed the Sikorski–Mayski Agreement of 1941. The agreement, which had taken place following Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, granted amnesty to Polish citizens imprisoned or exiled deep in Soviet lands, allowing them to join the Polish army being formed under General Anders. But a combination of bureaucratic obstruction, Soviet distrust, logistical chaos, and political maneuvering had delayed the release of these civilians.

  Their journey took them south toward Buzułuk, the assembly point for Anders’ Army. Those who had the misfortune of being separated from the army’s caravan were left with no instructions and no train. Groups of Poles, traveling with Anders’ Army, would bring desperately needed supplies, including food and clothes, to isolated villages such as Semiaziorka.

 

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