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(More customer reviews)The teaching of history is often distorted by selective presentation of past events. Virtually everyone has heard of the 5-6 million Jews killed by the Germans. Few outside Polish circles have a clue about the fact that 2-3 million gentile Poles were also murdered by the Germans, and a few hundred thousand by the Soviets--first as Poland's sworn enemy and then as an "ally". While Churchill and Roosevelt were dilly-dallying with "Uncle Joe" Stalin, he was still murdering Poles and executing his plans to deprive "liberated" Poland from her rightful independence, freedom, and sovereignity. The western powers shamelessly disregarded the Atlantic Charter and betrayed the Poles--who all along had been fighting on their side on just about every front, and who had played a significant, if not decisive, role in preventing the Luftwaffe from achieving air supremacy over the English skies as a prelude to the planned German invasion (Operation Sea Lion).
This work provides an absorbing personal account of the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles by the Soviet Union following the German-Soviet conquest of Poland in 1939. Wes Adamczyk, then a boy of 7, was to lose his father in the infamous Katyn Massacre, and his entire family was uprooted and sent to a living death in Kazakhstan. He was one of the lucky few to be released and to eventually find his way to a new life in the United States. Decades later, he fulfilled his wish to visit the site of his father's murder near Smolensk, Russia.
The reader is exposed to the brutality of the Soviet police as they ransack the Adamczyk home, destroy objects related to Polish patriotism, and herd the family ("enemies of the people") into overcrowded trains for the fateful trip east. Every day becomes a battle for survival. They are near starvation. However, individual Kazakhs and Russians show friendship towards the Poles. The young Adamczyk befriends Mr. Petrovitch on a fishing boat. The moving account tells how the elderly Russian teaches the boy the truth about Communism. It is lies on top of lies on top of lies. In fact, the continued spying by the Soviet police on the captive Poles does not stem from the fact that they suspect that the Poles may escape or revolt. The spying comes from the fear that the locals may learn the truth about the outside world from the Poles--that the non-
Communist world is not rotten, and that the Soviet Union is no workers' paradise.
Nazi Germany turns against its erstwhile Soviet ally, creating a chance for the Poles, consigned to eventual death from starvation, overwork, and disease, to escape the Gulag. Negotiations "succeed" in securing the release of captive Poles. But the Soviets drag their feet, and only a fraction of still-living captive Poles end up being released. The Adamczyk family has to stage a near-escape adventure to reach Iran. The squalor of the just-freed Poles is indescribable. Thousands die right there, including Wes Adamczyk's mother--ironically just a short time after having finally left the clutches of the Soviet hell.
Tens of thousands of previously-captured Polish officers are found to be conspicuously and unexpectedly missing, and the Soviets say, "They all escaped to Manchuria". As time drags on, the Adamczyks realize the fate of their father and the remainder of the POWs. The Soviets don't admit responsibility for the Katyn Massacre until 1990. The long cover-up by western governments is little better than the decades-long Soviet one. The west needed a second coverup to cover its first coverup of the conspiracy of silence about this heinous Soviet crime.
The Adamczyks, like all surviving Poles, get a cruel blow when they learn that Roosevelt and Churchill have betrayed their faithful ally Poland by giving away eastern Poland to the Russians, and allowed a Communist puppet state to be forced on the rest of "liberated" Poland. In a sense, all of the Polish sufferings and sacrifices turn out to have been in vain. The Adamczyks, and millions of other Poles, have no home to return to. The only "happy ending" is a new life in America.
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