It turned out that the families of the members of the Kościuszko Polish Army could return by a special transport to Ukraine, where there were supposedly better living standards. When the train came, no one checked whose family was from which army. Mama and I luckily pushed ourselves to a wagon and once again rode day and night, hungry in the cold, to Charków (Kharkiv) in Ukraine. That was the glimmer of hope toward the end of our exile. We lived in Ukraine for an additional two years. But this story isn’t about that, and with that I close the door of my childhood memories from Siberia.

  I wanted to finally add how human memory is far under researched, especially that of a child. This was seventy years ago. I thought I had forgotten everything. It wasn’t until I started to write that more events emerged from my memory. Eternal fate has resulted in me not being able to ask anyone, anywhere else in the world, about this. These are my memories as a child, honest, without any tint of emotions. These memories may seem unbelievable, but everything I wrote here really did happen.

  Afterword

  by Isabella Skrypczak

  EVERYTHING YOU JUST READ is the true account of what my grandmother endured as a child after being deported to a Siberian gulag. But it’s not the end of her story. When I first began translating Babcia Dada’s memoir, I did it to give voice to the terrified six-year-old girl who survived exile. But what I discovered was something far greater—how one child’s endurance became a legacy of love, healing, and impact across generations.

  As Ida’s granddaughter, it would be downright unfair of me to leave out the rest of Babcia Dada’s story, from her time in Ukraine to today. What transpired in Ukraine, and the way my grandmother took this experience and alchemized it into greatness for decades afterward, is the best part. Telling this story did not come without resistance and hesitancy on Babcia’s part. In fact, upon completing my translation of her words, I asked my grandmother what had occurred during those two years in Charków (Kharkiv) in Ukraine. She responded despondently: “I have bad memories from there.” After everything she wrote down on paper, it was as if the worst part of her experience remained untold. However, I knew that her experience in Ukraine would bring me clarity about the sheer magnitude of the miracles that kept her alive, and the ripple effect thereafter.

  I dug. I poked. And I prodded. It wasn’t easy seeing an elderly woman triggered by painful memories. At some points it felt cruel of me to be so insistent. But I knew that if she opened up and told me the rest of what happened, she would set a part of herself free and find answers to why her soul had endured so much in the first place. Eventually, I got her to share. Evidently, this was an extremely painful part of her experience, given that it took so much for her to tell me what happened. With her bleeding heart beating in the palm of her hand, she finally told me.

  A decade prior to Ida and Leokadia’s arrival to Ukraine in 1945, Stalin had caused a massive famine called the Holodomor, which killed millions. When Ida and her mother arrived, the brutally orchestrated hunger remained widely pervasive. Unfortunately, there was also widespread hatred of Poles, which my grandmother experienced firsthand, especially when she went to the local Ukrainian school.

  While most of Western Europe was off colonizing other lands throughout the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries, Poland was one of the few European countries that didn’t venture into conquest in the New World. While the Spanish, English, French, and Portuguese crowns sailed to what is now the Americas, Africa, and Southeast Asia, Poland looked east. Due to this, many Poles settled in areas that are now part of Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania—and based on the areas they settled in, the people within those borders would at times consider Poles to be colonizers. This was not limited to the Ukrainian people. The question of who colonized the land is widely debated among Poles and Ukrainians to this day, but the fact remains that the national narrative for many Ukrainians for years was that the Poles were the colonizers.

  Poles by and large vehemently disagree with this notion (though it is being transformed today, along with Ukrainian and Polish relations as a whole). But this narrative was weaponized during World War II by foreign invaders such as the Nazis, who pinned one oppressed people against another to fuel the desperate pursuit of Ukrainian national sovereignty. There are accounts of massive crimes against humanity in the 1940s, in which Ukrainians gathered up to one hundred thousand Poles from villages and killed them in forests, the most notorious atrocities occurring in Wołyń (Volhynia) and Eastern Galicia. My grandfather from Lwów (Lviv) told me about how the Ukrainian friends he grew up with were endearing and kind until the Germans arrived, and then they tried to kill him multiple times just for the crime of being Polish. Twisting and spinning the desperate plight of starved and impoverished Ukrainians against people like the Poles, who are more similar to Ukrainians than different, was the perfect, tragic way to incorrectly direct generations of pain and trauma and keep people from facing the actual origin of their poverty. If the Jews weren't to blame, the Poles were. But only because they didn’t have a way to fight back against the true masterminds behind the savagery: the Soviets and Nazis (and the German and Prussian powers before that).

  Under this dark shadow of widely projected hatred, my grandmother and her mother were thrust into another genocidal famine, this time in Ukraine. The location might have been different, but the crime was the same. They survived this hunger by gathering grass, twigs, straw … the best meal being a fistful of flour mixed with water. Whenever it was warm, Babcia Dada would venture out to the woods to pick berries and herbs. She ended up doing this well into my childhood, whenever I spent time with her in the Polish countryside. This has always been a cultural tradition, but now I know her habit of going into the woods to pick food was ingrained in her out of the mere need to survive.

  My grandmother also survived by milking cows in exchange for a glass of what her hard labor had produced toward the end of the day. She and her mother lived at a local Ukrainian farm, where they worked as domestic servants.

  Given this harrowing experience, my great-grandmother was intent on going back to Poland. The only way to go back was to sign up for the Communist party, which she was terribly against doing. After all, this was the party that ruined her life in the first place. Why would she ever register with them, even to go back home? It was almost unthinkable.

  However, as time went on in Ukraine, Leokadia ran into a man named Abek Orzeł, a Polish Jewish friend from her youth in Lida (the city of Leokadia’s birth, which is known to many Jews as a place of pain as well, as it was the site of a terrible pogrom). Orzeł convinced her to formally sign up for the Związek Polskich Patriotów (Society of Polish Patriots). This was a Communist group, so signing up still felt unthinkable. How could she possibly join a group of traitors? But after speaking to another friend of hers, Wanda Wasilewska, my great-grandmother realized that it was the only way to get back to Poland after the war ended. Otherwise, she and her daughter would be stuck forever in the cycle of famine, disease, and strife.

  It was a painful process to sign up for the Communist party. But after a year of waiting, Babcia Dada and her mother once again sat on a cargo train full of people, this time to go back home. They didn’t really know what home would look like at that point. They were fed only by the Good Samaritans at the train stops. Whatever the locals gave the travelers from the kindness of their hearts, the travelers ate. They rode during the entire month of May and were locked up in the wagons at night. Once they stopped being locked in at night, they knew they had crossed the border into what was now a different Poland than they’d known before.

  The first stop in Poland was in a city that had been in Germany before the war: Opole. It became apparent that the borders had been redesigned once again, but this time with a twist: People were also being forced to go to these newly drawn places on a map. This part of Europe was known as the borderlands. For centuries, the lines on the map designating one country or another kingdom had been erased, redrawn, and squiggled again. Most of the time, the people stayed in the same place despite the redrawing of the lines. But this time, Stalin had the specific goal of moving vast swaths of people into these redrawn areas of land. By and large, Poles had to be moved to the newly redrawn lines of Poland. The same concept was applied to every other nationality. Lithuanians go there. Belarusians go here. Ukrainians to this area. Germans and Prussians to that area. What had been a multiethnic, multilingual, multireligious, and multinational mosaic of peoples for generations was now erased with the forced relocation of millions across Central and Eastern Europe.

  Confronted with this massive and disingenuous change, my grandmother and great-grandmother were required to register at PóR, or the Association for Repatriation.18 They gave their names and family information and were miraculously able to locate Leokadia’s sister, Zuzanna, and her mother and father, Felicja and Bolesław, who were all in a new city where none of their predecessors had lived before: Białystok. Their original home in Dziewieniszki was no longer in Poland; it was now part of the Soviet Republic of Lithuania. Their home, school, and everything else were lost forever. With nothing else to hang onto, Babcia Dada started going to school in Białystok, still not knowing what had happened to her father.

  Torn from her ancestral home. Starved in the tundra. Separated from her father. More questions than answers hung like ghosts in the air—but all the survivors could do was to continue on with life in a new city, in a newly defined country with new borders, and with a totally new system. An oppressive system at that.

  As it turns out, this is where the story gets quite interesting. When Babcia Dada had to leave the Anders’ Army train due to typhoid fever, her father continued on with the rest of the soldiers, not knowing until much later that his wife and daughter had left the train. They passed through Persia and continued on to the British mandate of Palestine, where General Anders allowed Jews to stay if they so desired, without considering them deserters. (Notably, a young soldier within my great-grandfather’s unit named Menachem Begin was one of the Jews who decided to stay. He would later become one of the founders of present-day Israel.) Ida’s father, Włodzimierz, continued across Africa with other Polish soldiers. An agreement with Stalin enabled General Anders in 1941 to fight against the Nazis; their most famous battle was heroically fought at Monte Cassino in 1944. While Ida’s father did not fight there, he did eventually reach the shores of Great Britain with other Polish soldiers who were previously in General Anders’ Army.

  Włodzimierz crossed the channel and was injured on Juno Beach in Normandy, France. He was transported to a London hospital to recover from his injury, where an English teacher learning Polish, Barbara, took quite a liking to him. She ended up falling madly in love with him. According to my babcia, Włodzimierz was continuously told that his wife and daughter were both dead. Still, he kept searching for them, but to no avail: Once the war ended, he was not allowed to go back to Poland. In a sick twist of fate, he was now considered a national traitor, and was forced to stay in England. After years, he gave up his search and married the English teacher, Barbara. They had a daughter, Anna.

  In the meantime, having spent ages six to fourteen in Siberia and Ukraine during the war, my grandmother was extremely behind in her schooling. She had even forgotten how to speak Polish. She ended up making up six entire school year grades in just one summer in Białystok. The vast majority of this city’s population prior to the war had been Jewish. Tragically, most of the Jewish residents were killed in the Holocaust. My grandmother and her mother settled in this town, which was brutally emptied of its prior inhabitants. Exhausted and destroyed, away from their homeland, they restarted their lives. Life kept moving on, leading the way forward. My grandmother ended up going to medical school and becoming an endocrinologist. As it had been a target of bombs and air raids, much of the Białystok Medical University remained in ruins. My grandmother and her classmates sat on burned stumps in a classroom with no ceiling. They helped rebuild parts of the university between classes.

  The few years after the end of the war were marked by chaos and disorganization. Even though bombs were not falling from 1946 to 1948, the scale of the reshuffling of the social, intellectual, political, and cultural fabric of Poland was acutely felt. With so much death and destruction, cities such as Białystok had to restart their entire civic infrastructure from scratch. As Babcia was catching up on her schooling lost during the war, her mother, Leokadia, took on the role of chair of the city council. This was her contribution toward adding structure to a chaotic time. However, she didn’t last long in the role. As Babcia bluntly put it, “She didn’t ever fit into a political role—she was giving all of the funding away to the needy.” That’s one of the reasons why you won’t find the role listed alongside her name in any archive; she simply was not a fit for it. Around 1948, she left the city council and set up a foster care program for the thousands of children orphaned by the war. She continued the legacy of being a mother for other children in Białystok, just like she’d been while on the steppe. By 1958, Ida was married with a two-year-old daughter (my mother, Gosia) and was determined to find her own father. Every month, she wrote to the Red Cross inquiring about him—never believing that he was dead. Her intuition led her to an unbelievable discovery. Many years after the war, after writing dozens of letters to the Red Cross and being constantly told that her father was not locatable, Ida miraculously found him in England. Against all odds, it turned out he was alive! She obtained his address and they exchanged letters. Her father arranged a reunion in England with the daughter he had not seen for seventeen years. My grandmother didn’t have a clue that he had already started another family in England. It was only after she disembarked from the train and embraced her father on the platform that he blurted out, “I’m married and I have a child.”

  My grandmother told me she fell to her knees in disbelief. I can’t imagine the shock myself, but that’s how we have English relatives. As awkward as it was for my great-grandmother to realize her husband was now with another woman and had another child, today this English family is just as close as the Polish one. For we all carry the same DNA.

  Babcia Dada had two more children (twins, Maciek and Michał) and graduated with honors in 1959. She kept in touch with her father, who supported her financially throughout his life and was able to arrange trips to England (practically unheard of for citizens of the People’s Republic of Poland). As much as my babcia wanted her family to be physically reunited, the tragic fact was that it was now impossible due to the absurdity of war and politics.

  Despite her harrowing experience during the war and the many years she spent out of school, Ida made great strides in academics and medicine while raising a young family. She once lived off grass, twigs, and the kindness of strangers handing pork fat through train slats. Decades later, she would travel the world, teaching others how to care for the human body with the same diligence and reverence she’d learned in exile.

  Once Communism ended in Poland, the markets opened to the Western world and the country adopted capitalism. Taking advantage of this new system, Ida opened an endocrinology clinic and traveled the world giving hundreds of symposiums and lectures on diabetes, dedicating her research to finding a cure. She went on to become one of Poland’s most respected and accomplished figures in the fields of endocrinology, diabetology, and internal medicine. In 1980, she founded and led the Clinic of Endocrinology, Diabetology, and Internal Medicine in Białystok, where she would shape the future of Polish medicine for decades.

  She developed into a trailblazing researcher, authoring more than four hundred scientific articles published in leading international journals, including Diabetes, Diabetes Care, Diabetologia, and the Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism. Her work was cited over two hundred times in the academic space, contributing significantly to global advances in the understanding and treatment of diabetes and metabolic disorders. She also edited five medical textbooks and supervised more than thirty doctoral dissertations, mentoring future leaders in medical science.

  Ida led research in Poland which revealed the endocrinological aftereffects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, sharing key data with the Western world and the wider whistleblowing effort on the extent of the meltdown's consequences on people's health. Her fluency in several languages and international collaborations enabled her to work closely with research institutions across Europe, the United States, and beyond.

  She held prominent leadership positions in numerous professional organizations, including serving as vice president of the Polish Society of Endocrinology, and was appointed to national academic committees, such as the Commission for the Awards of the Prime Minister. Among her many honors, she received the Order Odrodzenia Polski, Poland's second-highest civilian state award in the order of precedence, behind Order of the White Eagle, and was awarded two Honoris Causae for her lifetime of contributions—making her the only Polish woman to receive this rare distinction twice.

 

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