The Polish Widow: Exile to Siberia

By John Pounder

Having its roots in the Soviet invasion of Poland and its aftermath, this is the story of Kazia, who as a child was forced into prostitution to survive in a Siberian labour camp. A refugee in post-war England, struggling to satisfy a consuming ambition to be a success as a fashion designer, she tries to make herself whole again by marrying, but quickly finds she cannot escape the legacy of her past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amolibros
• Release date: Jun 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781912335282

John Pounder

After grammar school in Wiltshire the author trained as a draughtsman before entering Southampton University to study engineering. This led to a career in the City in intellectual property law and a second university entrance to study law. Retiring early, he embarked upon period property restoration. Always interested in writing, his debut novel was Amaryllis Iden, loosely based on ‘Amaryllis At The Fair’ by the celebrated Victorian country essayist Richard Jefferies. A second novel, Dancing With Rita, inspired by the true story of an East-End girl who takes up an ill-fated land army posting in the Wiltshire countryside, deals with the social mores and constraints of ordinary working-class people in post-war Britain.Married with two children, the author now resides in West Sussex.

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About This Book

Having its roots in the Soviet invasion of Poland and its aftermath, this is the story of Kazia, who as a child was forced into prostitution to survive in a Siberian labour camp. A refugee in post-war England, struggling to satisfy a consuming ambition to be a success as a fashion designer, she tries to make herself whole again by marrying, but quickly finds she cannot escape the legacy of her past.

About The Author

After grammar school in Wiltshire the author trained as a draughtsman before entering Southampton University to study engineering. This led to a career in the City in intellectual property law and a second university entrance to study law. Retiring early, he embarked upon period property restoration. Always interested in writing, his debut novel was Amaryllis Iden, loosely based on ‘Amaryllis At The Fair’ by the celebrated Victorian country essayist Richard Jefferies. A second novel, Dancing With Rita, inspired by the true story of an East-End girl who takes up an ill-fated land army posting in the Wiltshire countryside, deals with the social mores and constraints of ordinary working-class people in post-war Britain.

Married with two children, the author now resides in West Sussex.

Notices

Copyright © John Pounder 2021

First published in 2021 by Paramour Press, Grayswood, Common Hill, West Chiltington, West Sussex RH202NR

First published as an ebook by Amolibros 2021 | www.amolibros.com

The right of John Pounder to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted herein in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Cover illustration, ‘Cracks in the Baikal ice’, Anastasiia Starikova. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Although this novel is inspired by the actual experiences of a woman now deceased, all the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is purely imaginary

This book production has been managed by Amolibros | www.amolibros.com

Foreword

Though what happened following the invasion of Poland by Hitler’s Germany is well documented, it is an often-overlooked fact of history that of Poland’s six million or so dead, at least half were non-Jews. Despite being accused of no crime, an estimated one and a half million were deported by Stalin’s invading Red Army to Siberia in what has become referred to as Poland’s ‘Forgotten Holocaust’. Those who survived to be eventually liberated ended up scattered all over the world, with many settling in England, their history remaining largely unknown in the West.

This novel was inspired by the account of one such survivor (since deceased), though her harrowing story of exile and escape from Siberia was echoed by the many others I have spoken to. Most have never returned to Poland – long since a foreign country to them. All feel themselves overlooked victims of a forgotten episode of history and are desperate for their story to be made known to the world at large before it is too late.

Chapter One

January 1941

In northern Siberia there is no colour, just an all-pervasive drabness – that and a deafening silence. This was especially true around camp 573, located in a forested region somewhere north of Kotlas, in the province of Archangel. Stretching from the Ural Mountains in the east to beyond the Northern Dvina river to the west and the White Sea to the north, Archangel had for centuries been used by Russia as a place of internal exile from which return was unlikely. If it had come to represent the closest thing to hell on earth, then Kotlas was its gateway.

The camp itself had an administration block taking up three sides of a square yard, a stable, and a scattering of around fifty huts, together with a barracks block housing exiled Poles like Kazia and her mother, who were there, they had been told, to be taught the virtues of hard work and sacrifice to the greater good of society. Winter wheat, potatoes, and a variety of sugar beet was grown on a kolkhoz, a farm collective some distance away, but timber was the main product. Though the barracks lay in a compound enclosed by barbed wire fencing with watch towers at each corner, it should be noted that camp 573 was not a prison: after all, the towers had no guards and the gates were only locked at night. No doubt the place had served such a purpose once – unless, as Kazia had once suggested to Tolik, the intention of the barbed wire fencing was to keep people out – but no one seemed to know when and why. Even Tolik didn’t know, his father had never said. Of course, Tolik was a local Russian boy whose father was an officer in the NKVD – the political police – and they were by necessity a rather secretive bunch.

No, Camp 573 was not a prison. A gulag was a prison: you had to be a criminal to go to one of those. Kazia and her mother were never put on trial for anything, therefore they were not criminals as such – second-class citizens of course, deeply misguided people in need of re-education, but not criminals – and the camp was definitely not a prison. It was, quite simply, a work collective, one of the countless number of similar settlements that made up the workers’ paradise that was the Soviet Union. It was true that they couldn’t leave: who in all reasonableness could legitimately expect to up at a whim and take themselves off to another place without so much as a by your leave? Where would a perfectly planned socialist society be if such a thing were to be allowed? There was, of course, the question of Kazia and her mother being rounded up at gunpoint and forced into converted cattle trucks, and the unsettling fact that half of those who had started out with them from their homes in eastern Poland – mostly the old and very young – had died before even arriving at the place. But then, as Tolik never tired of pointing out, there was a war on: not everything could be carried out exactly as their great leader Stalin would have wished or planned it. Anyway, some things were best not talked about. What was the point?

Kazia sat warming herself by a crackling wood fire, already exhausted from hours of cutting branches from felled trees with a hatchet. School was now a distant memory; since turning fifteen she had been required to work. Her friend Elka had now joined her. Though their rations had been increased, the demands of hard labour were such that their bodies needed much more. The worst of it was that they had nothing left to barter with, and working all the daylight hours left little opportunity to look for other sources of food. Apart from that, she had been caught taking from the fields once, beaten and locked up in the dreaded tin hut for days with only water and morsels of food Elka was able to push under the door. She could never stand that again. Anyway, everything was frozen metal-hard.

There came the call of a distant wolf, and then,

Kazzie!

They turned to see the lean figure of Tolik at a distance along the track waving a bag.

Recently they’d been forced to work even on their rest day, so that Kazia had lost track of the days. It must be a Sunday. Though of course Tolik had been able to stay on at school, he wouldn’t be there today.

Knowing that Tolik couldn’t be seen to mix with a work gang, Kazia walked to him, feeling a stab of pleasure as the features of his handsome Russian face and that dark wavy hair at last became clearly visible.

Elka, who was already examining the contents of Tolik’s bag, had come with her. Have you brought anything for us? she asked.

How did you get here? Kazia jumped in, embarrassed at Elka admitting their shared obsession with food.

Got a lift on one of those sleigh things they move the logs with. So saying Tolik handed Kazia a sizeable piece of bread.

Buttered – it was actually buttered! She tore it in half and gave a portion to Elka, who immediately started to devour it.

Though Kazia wanted so much to do the same, she couldn’t, not in front of Tolik. It’s very good of you, but I don’t want you to do this, she lied. This must have been part of your yesterday’s school lunch.

It was left over. Tolik looked to be less comfortable with his lie. How’s the work? he asked, changing the subject.

How do you think? said Elka.

I expect you’ll get used to it.

Yeah, that’s what they all say, that or die, said Elka over her shoulder as she walked off back towards the fire with the remains of her bread.

I’m sorry, Kazzie. Tolik came closer and touched her gloved hand. If only I could do something for you.

I haven’t got long, said Kazia. Break’s nearly over. She knew Tolik wanted to kiss her like he always did. Then she would let him fondle her breasts. Once she had enjoyed this, but not now, not since... If Tolik knew he wouldn’t want to touch her, no man would. Gregor Morozov was now trying to visit her every day. Mostly he didn’t succeed, but sometimes he did. And who could she tell? She was expendable, worthless. Her father and brother couldn’t protect her. They were far away and anyway in all probability already dead.

She remained perfectly still as Tolik continued his fumbling. Her breasts were barely existent, and anyway, thickly covered as they were, what was the point? Men, even this beautiful boy, were unfathomable. She thought back to their first kiss. Though taken by surprise and their lips had near frozen together, still a delicious warmth had spread through her. Tolik had now lifted her skirt. She could sense his excitement. Russian women were always naked underneath their many thick skirts and so would normally never permit such a thing. As it was he had exposed nothing but further layers, a complex barrier impenetrable to all but herself.

Kazia was made fully aware of Tolik’s urgency, even through all the clothes. She felt dirty, inside and out. Quite apart from the attentions of Gregor Morozov she hadn’t been able to wash her clothes for months. Having traded all their possessions there was no possibility of soap, other than a tiny piece she’d taken from Tolik’s house and used for her body. Anyway, clothes couldn’t be washed in the barrack in winter. It was too cold and they would never dry. For most of them any attempt at personal hygiene had been all but abandoned. Lice the size of thumbnails crawled everywhere.

I love you, Tolik gasped. I’m going to take you away from here, you wait.

Kazia wanted desperately to eat the piece of bread in her pocket. Almost without thinking, for the first time she allowed Tolik to guide her hand onto his trousers. It ensured that he was quickly finished. I really have to go now. She did up her coat buttons.

I’ll see you again as soon as I can. Tolik was catching his breath.

All right. Kazia had already turned to walk back along the tracks made by the sleigh that had carried the tools out to their spot in the forest early that morning.

Chapter Two

September 1st 1939

Another perfect day of a perfect summer. Feeling the warm sun full in her face Kazia strayed a little from the path to feel the lush grass brush her ankles. She couldn’t remember ever feeling as happy. It was her fourteenth birthday and she was on her way to her grandmother’s to collect the present she knew would be waiting along with the inevitable cake.

Kazia had never really understood why Granny Leysa, whom she loved almost as much as her own mother, couldn’t come to their house, or why her father’s family never spoke of her. She just accepted this as a fact of life, just as she accepted the fact of Granny Leysa speaking Ukrainian, dressing in a different way from that of her mother, and living in a simple wooden house behind a fence.

In the kitchen she passed the familiar millstone for making flour – two round concentric stones with one off-centre and a stick fixed to the ceiling for turning it within the other. On the huge clay oven was the usual tray of fresh baking decorated with swirls and spirals, together with her birthday cake. Above was the ledge where Granny Leysa always slept in winter. On very cold nights Kazia would think of her grandmother lying there, snug and warm.

There was only one other room in the house. It contained the loom. Spinning and weaving linen filled the long winter nights, when other women, dressed just like Granny Leysa with long skirts and scarves tied under their chins, would collect together and sing and tell stories. Whilst Kazia’s mother frequently took her shopping in Lvov for all manner of things, especially clothes, these village women bought only sugar, salt, oil and cinnamon from a single crude shop that had no paper bags – everything else they grew or bartered for.

One of them was with Granny Leysa now. Kazia could hear their conversation.

I’m telling you they’d better clear out if they know what’s good for them. I know they’re your family, but they don’t belong here. Our Ukrainian boys with their blue and white flags are going to take our country back from the Poles, you’ll see.

*

What did that lady mean, Granny?

Granny Leysa always walked most of the way back with Kazia. Though now more than sixty, she had the strength of one much younger, frequently carrying huge bundles over long distances. Turning her weather-beaten face to a house they were passing, she looked up at the thatch. See that old cartwheel on the roof? That’s put there for storks to make a nest on. She loved to school Kazia on the local customs. Storks bring good luck. A stork will pluck a burning ember from the thatch to save its own young in the nest.

Kazia hardly had time to reflect on this when a sudden distant drone filled the air. The noise came closer and closer, got louder and louder, until a screaming whistle threatened to burst her eardrums.

The next moment she was face down on the ground with her grandmother on top of her.

All around were terrifying explosions.

Germans! They must be bombing the railway, gasped Granny Lisa.

When daring to look up Kazia saw that it was worse than that. The planes were flying low over the fields shooting at the peasants working there.

She now understood the significance of all the concerned political talk that had gone on all around, and especially between her parents.

*

In the coming days people who could were frantically stocking up on essentials like candles, matches and kerosene for the lamps. Kazia knew full well that in this part of Europe, with its long history of terrible conflict, a time of uncertainty was a time for hoarding. As well as sugar and salt, any food that would keep: dried peas, smoked sausage, jars, tins, were quickly in short supply. She watched in alarm as people started digging bomb shelters, and became alert to everything said by adults. Rumour was everywhere. One got around that Polish government officials were fleeing in limousines; some claimed that their president Ignac Moscicki himself had been seen amongst them.

The bombardment continued on and off for two weeks – then silence. Days passed, still no German soldiers arrived. News came that they had come as far as Lvov, then stopped. At last everyone knew why. A deal had been struck between Stalin and a man called Adolf Hitler – a name Kazia had barely heard of until recently. Columns of soldiers arrived in ill-fitting brown uniforms. The Red Army had crossed the eastern border. Their beloved country was to be divided between the Soviets and the Nazis.

Poland was to be thrown to the dogs, literally torn apart.

And then the Terror. Though Kazia’s parents had tried to keep it from her she had overheard their quivering voices talking about reports of Ukrainian militia killing Poles at will. Until recently she had regarded these people as harmless-enough peasants, compliant to her father’s wishes and next to invisible to herself. Now they had thrown their lot in with the Soviets and were roaming in gangs with their red armbands – murderous, unfathomable, frightening beyond belief. Nothing in Kazia’s life had prepared her for this, and there was worse to come. One evening, just as they were sitting down to eat, there came a dull thud on the door before it was flung open and her father’s name was shouted through. Three men in scruffy bluish-grey uniforms strode in without invitation – an unheard of intrusion. Two were local peasants Kazia vaguely recognised, the other had a thick Yiddish accent. All wore a cap with a blue band and had improvised red stripes down their trousers, identifying them as members of the National Committee of State Security, or NKVD as it was known. Her father’s name was coarsely shouted again then, You must come with us immediately.

The men refused to answer questions as to why her father was being arrested, where he was to be taken and when he might be expected back. They merely pointed threateningly with their rifles telling him to get a move on with his coat and boots or he would have to face the cold as he was. All the while they were looking around, as if appraising the household possessions.

Kazia’s mother told her that all they could do now was wait, and every day that her father did not return intensified their feeling of dread. For some reason she could not comprehend, her family had become labelled as neblagonady ohnyyez – political unreliables, lepers, enemies of the revolution. At a stroke they had become hated, friendless, and very alone. She could only be thankful that her brother Mandek was away at school.

Chapter Three

March 1940

Czarovski!

Kazia was surprised and frightened to hear her family name shouted through the open carriage door. Her mother immediately started scrabbling to bundle their things together.

"Czarovski! – Don’t make me have to shout it again or it’ll be the worse for you."

They made their way towards the door as quickly as was possible across a floor covered in a mixture of straw and human filth. Few people stood in their path. Almost all had now been offloaded at earlier stops. It meant that they were near the end of the railway, as far north, perhaps, as the great Soviet Union extended. Kazia was gripped by a foreboding. On a few occasions, whilst the train crawled at its usual snail’s pace through the many stations with their signs in Cyrillic letters, locals had collected to hold out food baskets, only to be beaten back by the NKVD with rifle butts. Since the officials must have known that the train never stopped at such places, this had been completely unnecessary, and if this was how the Soviets treated their own people...

Outside, they stood huddled with a number of others. The air was unbelievably cold. Kazia felt that her breath was being sucked from her mouth. Her eyelids were sticking together. Invisible icy tentacles seemed to have gripped her face, striking her dumb and expressionless.

What shall we do now? Her distraught mother could barely get the words through lips already white with ice.

One of the guards sniggered. You can kill the kid, for a start, he spat out coarsely. Do it now before the wolves get her.

Kazia was thankful that her mother could not understand Russian that well.

The guard pointed. Keep going that way.

But where to? someone asked. There’s no road. Everywhere’s covered in snow.

You’ll see. Follow the telegraph poles. The guard had already slammed and locked the carriage door and was walking away.

Kazia thought that three weeks had passed by during the journey, but it might have been four; she had lost all sense of time. Cattle trucks travelled slowly, and they had spent hours upon end in sidings in the middle of nowhere waiting for a replacement driver and his mate, or more usually, for no discernible reason at all if not just to prolong their suffering. For the first two days whilst the train was waiting at the station, and then for a further day of travel until they reached Kiev they had been given nothing to eat. After that it was the occasional watery cabbage soup and a piece of bread.

Each day the sky had become darker, more frightening.

Kazia felt so weak. They were in the middle of nowhere. There was no station, nothing to be seen up to the horizon. They would all die, she was certain of it.

Her mother had begun sorting through their possessions, throwing anything heavy away. They had been taken to the station on a cart, and could never carry on foot all the things hurriedly thrown together. Kazia retrieved a small pan and some other kitchen utensils her mother had discarded and that were now lying in the snow, stuffing them into her coat best she could.

She and her mother walked separated from the rest of the group for several hours. They were too numb with the cold to speak, and anyway her mother had long since seemed to have nothing to say to her. Already Kazia felt with great sadness that the bond of mother love had been loosened. At first on the train her mother had held her close, comforting her, pressing on her the little food they had been able to pack. Even though she was no longer a child her mother had been protective, burying Kazia’s face into the folds of her coat to shield her eyes from the sight of people relieving themselves over the crude hole in the floor, or worse, of death, and the removal of corpses. But as the weeks went by and hunger together with the loss of all human dignity took their toll, her mother had slowly become silent and unconcerned. In the end, staring out with a fixed expression, she had ceased to bother even to look away from such things herself.

Walking on in a state of silent exhaustion, Kazia thought of her father. Where had they taken him? Was he in prison? Perhaps they had let him go and he was home again. Her brother Mandek, he had been away at school when they were taken, what would happen to him? She felt sick with anxiety.

Her mother broke the silence. We’re being sent to live like cattle – like Gypsies, she mumbled, almost as if to herself. Betrayed by our own neighbours – my own family, for all I know.

Not Granny Leysa, said Kazia, referring to the only member of her mother’s family she was aware of. Our neighbours were all very nice. I’m sure they’ll speak out and get us back.

What do you know? You’re just a silly girl who trusts everybody because you don’t know any better. You’ll learn what people are like quickly enough. Out here they’re not really human at all. This is where the Russians have always sent people they don’t like. The Tsars used to do it before the Soviets. Once here people are just forgotten about for ever.

After some further hours the scenery was beginning to change. There were more and more trees. The telegraph poles they had been told to follow seemed now to mark a route through what was becoming forest, a resumption of the same dismal puszcza they had passed through for weeks.

Kazia wondered what time it was. The little light there was seemed to have been fading, or at least she thought so, it was difficult to say. They were so far north that for the last week it had been dark almost all of the time.

At last, just when she thought she could go no further, the forest gradually became less dense. We must be there, someone shouted from ahead, as one by one a scattering of huts came into view. Very soon the odd person was to be seen. Kazia tried to speak, but they seemed not to understand.

They’re the locals, said her mother.

They don’t seem to be interested in us, said Kazia, after not one of her several attempts at a greeting in Russian had met with a response.

They’re Soviets, said her mother. "They treat all strangers with suspicion. Don’t expect anything in the way of kindness or manners. All that is discouraged as belonging to a world they’ve been forced to give up. They call it bourgeois."

Kazia had never heard of the word. She didn’t care if her home in Poland was now in the Soviet Union, she would never become one of these Soviet people.

In the end someone did notice them. A large intimidating man in an ill-fitting blue NKVD uniform with the usual red armband strode up. "Zdes zhit budete" – you are to live here. The implication in his tone seemed to be that it would be for the rest of their lives. He dealt with each family group in turn, directing them off somewhere. When their turn came he looked Kazia over smilelessly before demanding to know their family name, holding out his hand for their papers. At least he spoke in Polish of a sort. Kazia’s mother explained that they were issued with no papers, but that she had some identifying documents. The man snatched them up and gave them a cursory glance before thrusting them into his pocket.

Come!

They were led to a mud hut raised above the ground, presumably so that the entrance would be clear of snow. Inside was a dirt floor with no furniture, just a few tree stumps. In the corner was a crude stove of clay and stones.

The official peered in after them. You used to lice and bed bugs, yes? If no, you will be by morning. He smiled briefly for the first time, then stared at Kazia. You. Come out.

Kazia stood before the soldier. He must have been joking about the bugs. Surely it was far too cold for anything like that?

How old? He was staring into her face, kneading her frozen cheek between a giant thumb and finger.

Fourteen.

You nice, yes?

Yes, said Kazia, uncomfortably.

The man’s eyes slipped down her body. No grown-up had ever looked at her like that before. She had a sense of being no longer a child, no longer protected...

*

The atmosphere of the camp was reflected in the people, who, to Kazia’s dismay, passed by without making eye contact. The day after their arrival they had been issued with papers and taken to join some other exiles in the barracks, a log cabin with a stove, by which lived huge cockroaches with white underbellies. There was no furniture, just rough bunks to sleep on. The walls were of logs plugged with moss that had become infested with fleas. The man who had met them, Gregor Morozov, who said he was the camp under-commandant, had not been joking about that, or about the bed bugs, which were everywhere, biting mercilessly throughout the night. Her mother had to start work right away, going off every day at six in the morning and returning ten hours later. She stripped branches from the felled trees, but was never allowed to bring any back as fuel for the stove. Returning exhausted, she just crawled onto her shelf bunk without speaking. Being just recently turned fourteen Kazia was spared work and had to attend a school, but as a consequence was given half rations These were for the most part just like on the train, watery soup and a piece of bread.

How can anyone be expected to do hard work all day and endure this cold with such little food? said her mother. They don’t intend us to survive the winter. Might as well give up now, just kill ourselves and get it over with.

At school Kazia was taught only the Russian language and the duties expected of a good citizen in the new Soviet paradise. By the door was a thermometer ranging from minus fifty degrees to plus forty. She could not imagine what she had been told, that not only the winter, but the summer scale too would be well-probed by the column. Beatings were frequent, but she was a quick learner and had so far managed to avoid them.

Along with her childhood, all the colour had now gone from Kazia’s life. She missed music, dancing, the bustle and motor cars of Lvov. During a stay in Warsaw with her father she’d been taken to all the main theatres on the electric tram. She remembered the names: the Weilki, Maly, Letnz, and of course the famous Alibaba music hall.

More than all this Kazia missed her home – especially the gardens and orchards. But they would let her go one day, and when they did she was determined to have a beautiful garden, always...

Chapter Four

Late February, 1940

Kazia shifted her body restlessly, trying to find a comfortable spot on the hard wooden ledge. Two weeks had passed and she had eaten almost nothing. She had always been thin, but now each new position seemed to press against a sore place. She worried that when asleep her hair would become frozen to the carriage wall; it had already happened to her mother. In her dreams she would relive what she had seen – the woman shot in the back by a Soviet soldier as she tried to run away with a baby in her arms, bodies lying in the snow where they had been placed at the side of the track without burial, marking at intervals their never-ending journey north.

In the distance she could hear the howl of wolves, a constant reminder of the snarling Alsatians at the station where they were forced onto the crudely converted cattle trucks.

It was so very, very cold. At home in Poland the winters were at times bitter to the point that she had never imagined anything could be worse. Now, with the train stopped for them to be handed a bucket of frozen-over drinking water, the icy blast of Siberian air that had instantly banished any accumulated warmth from their crowded bodies reminded her how very wrong she had been.

Sleep would come, it always did in the end. Those who had died had mostly done so in their sleep.

The double doors at the centre slammed shut again with a loud clang, then came the scraping of metal as the outside lock was thrown.

*

March 1957

As the double doors at the centre of the compartment glided silently together, Kazia awoke with a start. Sitting back reassured, she closed her eyes again. Soothed by the subdued lighting and the gentle rocking motion of