Crater's Edge A Family's Epic Journey Through Wartime Russia by Michal Giedroyc
978190307124 Benefactum Publishing
'Grass-shoots struggli ng on the edge of a crater' is how the writer Melchior Wańkowicz described life in wartime. The image has a particular resonance for Michał Giedroyć. In September 1939, as a ten-year-old boy, he watched the Russian security police seize his home in eastern Poland. His father was imprisoned, and Michał, with his mother and two sisters, were transported in cattle trucks to the wastes of Soviet Siberia, with hundreds of thousands of other deportees. 'Here, by the will of the rulers of the Soviet Empire, we were to toil and die.'
More than two years of penury and hunger on a collective farm brought them to the brink of extinction. However, exhausted, half starved and ill, Michał's mother and her children set off on a second gruelling journey that would take them across Central Asia to Persia, the Middle East, and finally England.
The author’s experiences were shared by many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of other displaced people, but few have had an opportunity to tell their story and to tell it so well.
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