I have finished reading this well-researched, well-written, and very readable book. And I want to recommend it to everyone.
It tells how the Stepek children's childhood - so many childhoods - ended when Stalin and Hitler in coalition invaded Poland, thus starting the second world war, and bringing misery to millions. I am glad to see the Nazi-Soviet Pact mentioned as it has pretty much been sent down the Memory Hole. The Movers and Shakers, who decide these things, seem to love Stalin. Don't ask me why. Both he and Hitler killed millions in the service of their mad "isms".
And so a few hours later, as Christmas Eve gave way to the 25th December 1938 the Stepeks of Maczkowce brought in Christmas together. They were never to do so again.
It is not long before Stalin's secret police, the NKVD, arrive. They take Janina, the mother, away for some days. When she returns "her hair had turned grey and she was clearly a broken woman". She never really recovered from those few days. I don't know that any of us would.
Then the local people - and thousands of others - are taken to Siberia via a nightmarish journey by boxcar. Those who survive then face another nightmare.
I very much admire the fair way in which Martin Stepek tells his story - inciting no further hatreds. Because it would be so easy to tell it in a different way, and increase the division and hatred in the world. We see that everyone is suffering in the cause of these cruel "isms", even the guards in the Siberian gulags.
He also answers a question I have had for some time. Were there rescuers from the terrors of Communism?
Martin Stepek records that prior to Stalin's secret police turning up to arrest and murder Jan Stepek, two friends, one Jewish, one Ukrainian, take the risk of warning him so he can get away just in time.
Again and again, the author records the way people of all kinds helped each other through this. It is one of the things that makes the book so readable. It shows that we can - if we wish - relate what happened to our families without inciting more hatred, or "untering" others. And it is so important to do so. Doesn't our Creator, Jehovah, love the peacemakers, the ones who try to heal the divisions?
Towards the end of the book, the survivors of the family arrive in Iran, or Persia, as it was then, and there they found such kindness.
"They were beautiful people, said Danka referring to the Persian people. "In Pahlevi they were always bringing food Food and more food for us. I don't think they had ever seen people in as bad a state as we were.""
Martin Stepek also notes this: "Several thousand Poles who had somehow survived the odyssey from their places of captivity in the Soviet Union to this land of freedom had fallen just at their moment of freedom. Their graves would be tended by generations of Poles and Iranians in the decades that followed."
I am so glad he has thanked the kind people of Iran/Persia in this book. He has managed to make something positive, something hopeful out of this, without softening in the least the horrors of communism, fascism and war.
Martin's father, like mine, and so many others, had to start again, traumatised strangers in a strange land. And they did. So I am very much looking forward to Part 2 of his father's story.
And I will end this with a poem I wrote about my father, who hated the cruelty of some of the Victorian nursery rhymes.
BEDTIME STORIES
by meThe floor is thick with snipped-off thumbs
The dreaded Scissor Man has struck
Look out children! Here he comes!
Oh, how Danny loves this book.
Matilda tells her horrid lies
Until her house goes up in smoke
No-one will listen to her cries.
Oh, how Danny loves this book.
Oyster children plead and flutter
As Walrus and Carpenter run amok
Eat them up with bread and butter.
Oh, how Danny loves this book.
Pobbles are born without their toes
Men hunt the Snark with baited hook
Kill Jabberwock, chase Slithey Toves.
Oh, how Danny loves this book.
The air is thick with blown-off limbs
The dreaded Luftwaffe has struck
Memories of these, and other things...
Oh, how Grandpa hates this book.
I wrote this a long time ago. The little lad who stars in it now has children of his own, and he reads them bedtime stories.
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