Irena Grudzinska-Gross and Jan Tomasz Gross, (ed.) War Through Children's Eyes. The Soviet Occupation of Poland and the Deportations by Mark Almond

Summary

For the average Western reader of the usual general histories of the Second World War, 17 September 1939 is not one of the memorable dates. 23 August is better known. Authors condemn the cynicism of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or the failure of the Western powers to cooperate with Stalin according to inclination. What went on to the east of the demarcation line between the Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence remains largely unknown. Indeed, little thought seems to have been spared by English-speaking authors for the idea that anything might have been happening there at all. Apart from a few memoirs by survivors (like Menachem Begin’ s White Nights: The Story of a Prisoner in Russia New York, 1979), the experience of those years remains almost as unmapped as it was fifty years ago when T.S. Eliot called the areas from which perhaps two and a half million souls were deported and the camps to which they were taken ‘the Dark Side of the Moom’.

Now Irena Grudzińska-Gross and Jan Gross have mapped perhaps the most traumatic and moving level of the experience of the Red Army's occupation. It is terrible to contemplate the fate of children in war, but rarely have they been allowed to describe their own understanding of what has happened to them. Often adults recall the terrible experiences of their early years, but always with an overlay of later reflection, the unwitting distortion of memory. How difficult it is at the best to times to remember without hindsight or embarrassment. The 120 compositions in this extraordinary book seem to achieve an almost perfect blend of naive observation and the memory of awful suffering. The lack of rancour is testimony enough to the honesty of the reports. It is also a mark of their trauma. As with so many survivors of the Holocaust, anger and the desire for punishment of those responsible is more easily expressed by those who can only experience their fate at second-hand.

The matter-of-fact tone of these accounts of ‘what happened to me in the USSR’ make their story of the destruction of their communities all the more moving.