The Baby in the Snow

The Baby in the Snow
Poland to India

The Soviets invaded Poland from the east and the Nazis from the north, west and south in 1939, having agreed in advance how to split it between them.

My family lived in the part which was invaded by the Soviets.
When the Soviet planes were bombing and strafing our parents used to tell the children to run for the woods on our farm. Attacked from every side by hugely superior numbers and technology, it was only a matter of time before Poland was overrun. The Nazis alone had 14 times as many tanks and 5 times as many planes as the Poles.
People who have lived under both Nazis and Soviets often say the Soviets were worse.
They shipped out millions of people, only a fraction of whom survived.
They came at 2am in February 1940. Eventually my family finished up in a labour camp not far from Archangelsk, near the Arctic circle. They were moved mainly by train and barge. Barges were often used as transport.
My mother`s youngest child died on such a barge while they were being transported. My mother bribed the captain with her wedding ring to pull over to the bank so the baby could be buried. The ground was frozen, so she, the baby Teresa, had to be buried in a snow bank.

Jews were also taken. There had been tensions between the Jews and the Poles, due to the huge increase in the number of Jews in Poland, the disproportionate Jewish ownership of businesses etc., and some peoples` belief that the Jews played a large part in the establishment of the Soviet empire (Poland had been at war with this empire barely 20 years before, the Poles winning that one). But all were victims now and there were no problems, just pity as the Jews were less well prepared for the rigours of their new imposed existence than the Poles, so they tended to die more quickly.

Many people died in the camp. The old and the young didn`t last long. My mother`s next youngest child, 5 year old Marian, died next, followed by 6 year old Danuta. My sister Zofia, 8 at the time, knew she was next. She prayed she could have a piece of bread before she died, not with anything on it, just a plain piece of bread.
The distress of parents at seeing their children die one by one in this fashion can only be imagined.
Half of the people forcibly shipped out of Poland by the communists were dead within a year.

In June 1941, 20 months after their joint dismemberment of Poland, the Nazis turned on their Soviet friends and invaded the USSR (Operation Barbarossa).
The Poles in captivity were now told that the Soviets were their friends after all, they would be set free, they should let bygones be bygones, should fight the Nazis beside them.
What was left of my family, along with thousands of other survivors, with what was left of their families, began another long journey. This one was southwards, towards Persia.
Buzuluk, Tashkent, Samarkand, Bokhara, the names stir not thoughts of fine carpets and the Silk Road but of hunger and death.
Eventually they stayed for a while in a `Kolhoz` in Krasnovodsk, on the eastern side of the Caspian Sea. Father left to join the Polish army being formed by General Anders in that part of the world (Anders was a Polish officer who had been incarcerated and tortured in the infamous Lubianka prison by the Soviets before being released to lead this Polish Army).
Extreme cold and hunger were still my mother`s and remaining sister`s companions. My mother would sometimes find and try to cook cattle cake with whatever scraps of vegetable she could find, but my sister couldn`t keep it down. My mother had to give her up to an orphanage for a while because it was the only way to get my sister food.
Many more Poles and Jews died. There were bodies in the streets.

More famous names - Tehran and Isfahan in Persia, as Iran was called then. My mother became a Military Policewoman for a while in Persia.
Things got better as Anders` Polish Army organised. Half-starved and in rags, they still shared their rations with the refugees in the area. Anders` army joined up with the British army in Persia as the Polish II Corps, and went on to fight a series of successful campaigns against the Nazis in the Middle East, North Africa, Italy and elsewhere. Their families were quartered in India and elsewhere. My mother and sister were in a camp near Kolhapur, in India, which is where I was born. I was still a baby when we came to England in 1947.
I and my sister are still here. There was no question of moving to Poland as it was in the grip of the communists, the same people who had been responsible for the enormous hardships I`ve partially described here.

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All in all, the percentage of the Polish popuation who were casualties of WWII was 20 times higher than Great Britain`s, and twice as high as that of Germany and the Soviets.
Poland, despite being on the Allies` side throughout, was the big loser in World War II.
Her armies fought in the west for the west after Poland was overrun, her navy fought the Nazis on the seas, her pilots ensured the winning of the Battle of Britain, which may well have been lost without them. Yet the Poles were not even allowed to take part in the victory parade after the war.
They remained under the hated yoke of the Soviets for 50 years before they finally broke it, fatally wounding the Soviet empire as they did so.

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