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When will "Without A Roof: WAR" be published? Aleks, I just completed reading the US edition of Without Vodka. Thank you for a glimpse into a world I can hardly imagine. Will Without A Roof be published in the US also? If so has a date been set? I am anxious to read the next chapter of this engrossing biography. Chris McC. Fairfax, VA, USA __________________________________________________ I was just re-reading your book the other day. It’s a fantastic book and always leaves me wanting more... which is my next question: When is Without a Roof supposed to be released. I'm a member of the Cdn Forces and in the infantry corps, so your book about serving with the Polish Army interests me to no end. What I've read about speaks of the Middle east and Italy. I'm wondering if you served with the Polish Division, part of the 1st Canadian Army in NW Europe? Is that how you came to live in Canada? Anyhow, I was hoping you might let me know when your next book is due. I'm eagerly waiting the next chance to read your work. Marc M. C., Canadian Forces __________________________________________________ I loved your book! Any word when the rest of your story will be available? Thanks for many hours of education and entertainment. Clint L., Barrie, ON Canada _____________________________________ Thank you for such a vivid account of fortitude, valour and humour in the worst possible conditions. That's the greatest victory. I'm looking forward to reading your next book.Clara P, New York, NY _________________________________________ With extreme pleasure I just completed reading your book Without Vodka. I found it very engrossing and look forward to the sequel you are writing.When do you anticipate being finished? Aleksander A., US Air Force ________________________________________________ Aleks replies: Always glad to hear from readers who found my adventures under the Soviets a good read. For a while I worked at translating Without Vodka into Polish but found it tougher to do than I thought and have not gone beyond the fifth chapter. Now I am polishing my second book Without A Roof: WAR and occasionally making notes for my post-war memoirs Without A Penny (about my impecunious days in Britain). WAR recounts my years of service in Signals with the Polish Army as a somewhat unruly young cadet officer taking every opportunity to slip away between shifts to see the sights (and girls) near wherever we were stationed. Only my occasional indifference to the strict military rules preserved my sanity and enabled me to see much of Southern Italy. Perchance, you'll enjoy WAR as much as Without Vodka. Alas, I still have no idea when it will be published. | |
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What made you decide to write down your experiences? My wife and friends declared that my stories about Russia were fascinating. They kept telling me I should write a book. I finally began in earnest after I retired from my full-time job. My aim in writing Without Vodka was to educate not only those of Polish descent like my own children but others as well about the unfortunate things that happened to Poland and to so many Poles and Eastern Europeans around the time of the Second World War. But I didn't want to turn people off with horror stories and axe grinding. Who wants to read political diatribes (except those who are fellow believers)? I just told what I saw and did. Readers can fill in for themselves how they would react in such circumstances. . . . WW II is now some 60 years behind us and before long will be gone from living memory – in 2003 I turned 80. On a broadcast not long ago someone remarked that a university student, no less, referred to it as "World War Eleven"! | |
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How can you remember so much from so long ago? I often wonder that myself. Those were exciting and interesting times for me and so made a deep impression. For the first time in my life I found myself accepted into adult conversation. But I still looked up to the professors, doctors, officers, and other experienced fellows older than me, even the thieves. To me they were important people, men of the world. I think that is why I found it easy to remember their names. All my life I have loved studying maps and planning possible journeys. Collecting stamps and learning national flags as a child whetted my interest in other places. While a prisoner, I dreamt of escaping from the USSR through Afghanistan and so, whenever I could, I studied the maps and train routes that could get me there. Constant sketching made me aware of my surroundings. Over the years I have often reminisced about my Great Adventure and have found it great fodder for tales to intrigue my friends. All these things have helped to keep my memories alive and vivid. My memories of those adventure-packed times come easily. I could never remember in such detail my happy years of routine working and family life in the Ottawa area.. But eventful and crucial happenings in one’s life burn themselves into one’s memory. They stay there unless they are so painful that one buries them. | |
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What was it in your background, your childhood, that enabled you to go through what you did in Russia and emerge without bitterness? I think it was because from an early age I devoured books. By the age of ten I was a devoted newspaper reader, following closely world events such as the Italo-Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war. Even as a preteen I understood and enjoyed the political cartoons. Cinema, the military, travel and exploration all fascinated me. But at school I wasn’t interested in anything except languages. Reading made me want to see the world and experience it for myself. And reading about the hardships of others prepared me for my own. I looked on it as a Great Adventure: Instead of dwelling on my sordid surroundings, in my mind’s eye I lived in an idealized past and a romantic future. If I hadn’t, I doubt if I would have survived. My religious faith also helped me. I went through the Soviet system when I was young and resilient and had no one to look after but myself. How much more difficult it must have been for those who saw family members and friends dying of starvation and disease while they lacked the means to save them. | |
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What part of Poland are you from? I was born in Naklo, in northwestern Poland where my father, who was born in Galicia, was the head master of a high school.. We soon moved to Pruzana in the Pripet Marshes in Eastern Poland (now part of Belarus). When I was about seven, my father retired as director of the teachers training college there. We stayed briefly with my maternal grandmother, who owned a pharmacy in Lezajsk in Central Poland, and then moved to Horodenka in southeastern Poland near the Romanian border (now in the Ukraine). I lived there until I was arrested by the Soviets at age 16. |
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What happened to you after you left the Soviet Union? I became a Cadet Officer and helped to guard the Baku oil fields in Northern Iraq. After completing high school at Camp Barbara in Palestine, I wound up in the Italian campaign as a Superintendent triaging "traffic" (messages) in the Signals Office of the Polish 2nd Corps HQ, British 8th Army, doing my bit to liberate Italy. I remained on active duty with Signals until the end of the war in Europe. This story will be told in the sequel I am now completing --Without A Roof: WAR, so called because most of that time we were living in tents. | |
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What other books about those times do you recommend? I've been trying to conger up books in English to recommend. Naturally, much more has been written about these happenings in Polish than in English . I'm not a researcher or academic. I'm a retired architect. I wrote my own story without doing much research. A basic and readable short book -- fiction but a classic-- written by a Russian who went through the camps is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. It is an accurate description of daily life in the Gulag written by the Nobel prize winner, Solzhenitsyn. There are two other older books I can recommend. The first is Hope Against Hope, the memoirs of Nadezhde Mandelstam, a Russian. Like her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam who died in a Soviet prison, she is an excellent and vivid writer, albeit emotional. At the other end of the spectrum is Soviet Terror by Robert Conquest. It is detailed, factual and well researched although a bit dry. More readable are the books written about Poland by the acclaimed British historian, Norman Davies. eg God's Playground and his most recent book about the Warsaw Uprising – Rising ‘44. An enjoyable book about Poland's people over the ages is The Polish Way by Adam Zamoyski. The role of Polish Airmen in the Battle of Britain is vividly described in a new book, A Question of Honor: The Kosciuszko Squadron, Forgotten Heroes Of World War II by Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud. (British title: For Your Freedom and Ours). A recent and thorough book about Soviet labour camps is Gulag: A History by Washington Post journalist Anne Applebaum which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Her website is: http://www.anneapplebaum.com. Two new books published in 2004 that are getting good comments are The Polish Deportees of World War II: Recollections of Removal to the Soviet Union and > Dispersal Throughout the World (Edited by Tadeusz Piotrowski) ISBN 0-7864-1847-8 http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?isbn=0-7864-1847-8 and "Gulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration Camps" by Tomasz Kizny ISBN: 1552979644 which contains 550 black-and-white photographs of life in the Soviet Gulag and the camps as they look today, plus descriptions by former prisoners. http://www.fireflybooks.com/advance/bookdetail.asp?id=7553 There are now more memoirs by Poles coming out in English. A good read is Stefan Waydenfeld’s The Ice Road. He noticed many of the same things as I did in the USSR. Other books that people seem to like include Straws in the Wind, the memoirs of Eugene Krajewski, and The Brief Sun, a fictionalized account by Robert Ambros based on true experiences. I could go on and on. There is an excellent bibliography on the research website www.AForgottenOdyssey.com/books with a full range of history books and first person accounts like mine. Some of the titles on the list have mini-reviews to give you more of an idea of what they are about. The site gets its name from a moving video documentary produced recently telling what happened to over a million Polish citizens forced from their homes in Eastern Poland into exile in harsh conditions in outlying undeveloped regions of Stalin’s USSR. | |
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Where can I find personal information about family members from Poland who were exiled to Siberia and other parts of the USSR in the 1940's? If they were civilians who managed to leave the Soviet Union as adults or children you may find a record of them in the archives of the Hoover Institute at Stanford University in California. They have copies of what some Poles leaving the USSR wrote about themselves. Thousands of Polish children, some of them orphans, wound up in Polish schools in India, Africa and Mexico. If he or she served with Polish forces – they were under the British– write to the British Ministry of Defence for a copy of their service records, The Public Record Offices usually only release details to the veteran or their family members. Mail a letter to Polish Army in Exile Records-British Ministry of Defense Phone: (44) 0208-833860 Give them ALL the information you have about your relative's life and service including-- if you have the details-- birthplace and date of birth (approx if you don't have the exact date), parents' names, etc. Also explain your relationship to that person. For example, if you want your father’s records, attach a photocopy of your own birth certificate showing his full name and yours. Many people of Polish and East European descent are trying to learn more about what their parents and grandparents went through in wartime USSR. You can find more information, web links, etc. and good research sources on the research site www.AForgottenOdyssey.com or through the helpful chat group at http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/Kresy-Siberia. By tapping these internet sources you can get in touch with groups sharing information about what happened to Poles who went through Russia. |
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What do you think of "The Long Walk" by Slawomir Rawicz? I just started reading your memoir [Without Vodka]. It's a delight. Your memory is astounding. I particularly like the updates you give on people throughout the course of the book -- e.g. the former waiter you encountered in London . I look forward to your next book. I would like your opinion on Slawomir Rawicz's book "The Long Walk". He lived in England after the war -- did you ever run across him or hear of him? I read commentary that questions the truth of his story. Lech L., Calgary, Alberta, Canada __________________________________________ Aleks responds Readers ask me for my opinion of Rawicz's riveting book describing how he escaped from a northern Siberian work camp during the winter and walked south until he came to India. Shortly after Rawicz published his book (c. 1950), he met the Press in London to promote it. I happened to be there and then later to hear him address a gathering at the Polish Hearth Club (Ognisko Polskie), a London social club for Poles. Like me, some other people in those audiences had first hand knowledge of conditions in Soviet prisons and camps. His descriptions of conditions in the prisons sound true enough. However, at both meetings Rawicz was evasive when pinned down on certain factual statements in his book. His memoirs were ghost-written for him by an English journalist (his landlord) who met him soon after the war. At the meetings I attended, Rawicz’s English was still halting. My personal opinion is that his story was embellished by his ghost-writer. For example. the book tells about being hand-cuffed or chained in the USSR. Yet the Soviets were anxious to distance themselves from such tsarist practices and so fetters and chains were a no-no for them. Similarly, tsarist prisoners in transit were distinguished from the general population by, among other things, having shaven heads and often no hats. To emphasize how well prisoners were now being treated under the Soviets, our guards would never take us outside prisons or march us in public view without first making sure that we all were wearing some kind of head gear. Some readers have tried to check Rawicz’s story against the records but so far have found nothing to verify his long walk. Apparently all they found in the Polish Army records was that he came from the USSR and served in Palestine (and, I presume, elsewhere). A check of the British Hospital records for India and elsewhere shows no record of his hospitalization. Now that NKVD records are opening up to the public– for a price – maybe something has or will turn up to verify his story, or at least his incarceration in a Siberian mining Gulag. There was quite a bit of controversy in the British Press when The Long Walk was published as to whether such a long trek was possible. If my memory serves me well, the discussion carried on for a while in the Letters to the Editor columns of English newspapers. However, I don’t remember Rawicz ever writing in reply. One Brit, who had traveled in Central Asia, claimed that Rawicz could not have walked across the Gobi Desert as he said without noticing the telephone line which crosses it. That provoked letters from others who pointed out a possible route that missed it. Even now, some people (including a few who’ve heard what happened to me) find it hard to believe that the conditions we faced in the USSR at that time were really that bad. The controversy over some of the facts in Rawicz’s story does not detract from the book’s literary value. Like Robinson Crusoe, his book remains a great read. It continues to attract new fans caught up by his story who want to know more about the man. |
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