Email
In a prelude to the 1939 Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland, Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians inside the USSR were killed as part of Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror.
With the partition, the Soviets occupied eastern Poland and the Nazis took over the western half before overrunning the whole country. By the end of World War II, more than 5 1/2 million Poles, including Polish Jews, were killed or died.
 |
||
|
“Far from My Home, Never to Return – A Polish Child’s WWII Memoir” by Nadia Seluga Martin Sisters Publishing, $18.95, 211 pp. |
|
|
Nadia Seluga was a child living with her family in Lunin in eastern Poland when the Russians ordered villagers deported. Trains took them to a European Russian settlement south of the Arctic Circle. There the family lived on pieces of bread and something called kipyatok (soup, tea or coffee, depending on the ingredients), covered themselves in raggedy clothes even when temperatures sometimes dropped well below freezing and managed to survive life-threatening disease.
Stalin considered Poles the enemy; they were capitalists, not communists; they were Catholic, not Orthodox; and they hadn’t endorsed the Bolshevik Revolution.
Seluga – her maiden name was Bogdaniec – writes a compelling memoir that puts a human face on the little-known hardships deported Poles endured at the hands of the Soviets. She amazingly and vividly recalls details of the tribulations her family experienced during and after the war.
When Germany turned against the USSR, Stalin did a 180-degree flip, welcoming the Polish army as an ally against the Nazis.
That political embrace loosened the Soviets’ grip on Polish deportees inside Russia, including the Selugas. The family boarded trains that took them to Uzbekistan SSR. Then by train and ships, her family fled to Iran, then India, Uganda and finally England.
Seluga is an Albuquerque resident. Her memoir is a second edition. The first edition was titled “Winds of Change.”
