Midnight Train to Siberia

By Alicja Hartley

One freezing February night in 1940, fifteen-year-old Alicja Goral, her parents and younger sister and brother were dragged from their home and forced to board a cattle train to be transported over a thousand miles to the wastes of Siberia. They were just one of many thousands of Polish families sent to labour camps by Stalin and his NKVD after the Soviets seized their country at the outbreak of World War II. They became ‘non-persons’, forced to work from dawn to dusk in freezing conditions on the most meagre rations. Ultimately the Gorals and the Radomskis were among the lucky ones – they managed to survive their ordeal, return to Europe and find new homes in post-war England, where Alicia and the family found peace and security. Alicja, now 89, has finally told her shocking, heart-rending story with the help of her daughter Teresa.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mereo Books
• Release date: Sep 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781909544772

Book preview

Teresa Radomska

Based on the personal recollections of Alicja Goral

MIDNIGHT TRAIN TO SIBERIA

A Polish family’s courage in surviving the wartime hell created by Stalin

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2014 by Teresa Radomska

Teresa Hartley has asserted their right under the Copyright Designs and Patents

Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

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ISBN: 978-1-909544-77-2

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements and sources

Introduction

Chapter 1 A peaceful childhood

Chapter 2 Poland’s troubled history

Chapter 3 Invasion

Chapter 4 Journey into hell

Chapter 5 Hopeless and homeless

Chapter 6 Sanctuary on the Caspian Sea

Chapter 7 Marriage in Lebanon

Chapter 8 Thoughts of a survivor

Chapter 9 A new home in England

Chapter 10 The family reunited

Chapter 11 Those who stayed behind

My mother Alicja Hartley, née Goral, lived and continues to live the story related in these pages. I hope I have been able to give enough insight into her early life to enable her grandchildren and future generations to understand her and her remarkable family.

In memory of

Teresa Radomska 2013

Acknowledgements and sources

I gratefully acknowledge a number of other people’s efforts, and am indebted to the writers of the many books I read whilst researching this period in Poland’s history.

Stolen Childhood – Lucjan Krolikowski

Stalin’s Ethnic Cleansing in Eastern Poland – Association of the Families of the Borderland Settlers

Forgotten Polish Deportees – William Chodkiewicz

The General Langfitt Story Polish Deportees in The Soviet Union – Michael Hope

The History of Poland, The Second World War – M Kasprzyk My Life in Exile – Danuta Gradosielska (A Friend of the Family)

God’s Playground, A History of Poland – Norman Davies

My thanks to the many members of my extended family who provided such a wonderful archive of photos and personal recollections.

I also gratefully acknowledge the permission granted by Ryszard Grzybowski of the Association of the Families of the Eastern Borderlands to use artwork and poems reproduced in this book.

Alec Dyki

Anita de Haan

Janina Misik

Marek, Ania and Ewa Skoczylas

Kazia and Adam Goral

Alicja Goral Hartley

INTRODUCTION

On 1st September 1939 1.8 million German troops invaded Poland on three fronts, East Prussia in the north, Germany in the west and Slovakia in the south. They had 2600 tanks against the Polish 180, and over 2000 aircraft against the Poles’ 420. On 29th September Poland was partitioned according to the Soviet-Nazi ‘non aggressive’ pact. The two nations each specified their territorial claims, which divided Poland along the Ribbentrop-Molotov Line. Eastern Poland was given to the Soviet Union and the whole of the western and central territories to Germany.

On 17th September Russia invaded from the East on the pretext of helping Poland against the Germans. Instead, one of Stalin’s first moves was to deport the military families, priests, lawyers, professors, the society élite of Poland, to Siberia. These included the families of the eastern Borderlands.

On 10th February 1940 the Russians began a deportation programme, sending Poles to Siberian labour camps in four phases up to 1941. In June 1941 Germany attacked Russia, which was no longer her ally. Hitler was getting greedy and when Russia became an ally of Britain, an amnesty was decreed (on Churchill’s orders) for all Poles on Russian soil. The subsequent Polish-Russian pact, signed by General Sikorsky and the Soviet Ambassador, Iwan Maisky, in the presence of Churchill and Eden, provided for the creation of a Polish Army and an amnesty for all Polish citizens in Russia, and discharge of the Poles from the labour camps. There was no help from the Russians by way of transport or food; in fact they went out of their way to disrupt the programme.

This is the story of the travels and endurance of one of the families who were deported to Russia: my mother Alicja, her sister Jasia, her brother Janusz and her parents Kazia and Adam, together with Kazia’s brother Walery and his family. It tells how they were awakened in the early hours of the bitterly cold Friday of 10th February 1940 by soldiers of the Russian NKVD, the precursor to the KGB, carrying guns, and taken to assembly points in Rowne. From there they were transported in cattle trucks across the deep snows of Russia and Siberia to Sharya, where the rail tracks came to an end, and they had to walk through deep snow to the labour camps of Poldniewica, later to Duraszewo and finally to Derewalka. Their only crime was being Polish.

They were expected to work for their communist masters, clearing forests to lay tracks for a railway from dawn to dusk on meagre rations. Many perished through malnutrition, disease and the cold. A deportee was a ‘non-person’, a slave of the Soviet penal system. Upon arrival at the prison, labour camp or penal colony they were told by the Commandant: ‘Here you will live and here you will die, niechevo, hairs will grow on my palms before you are free.’

By the middle of 1940 some one and a half million surviving Polish citizens had been imprisoned in subhuman conditions throughout Russia, from the Caucasus to the White Sea, in steppe, tundra and taiga, from the Urals to the mountains of Russian Asia. At the same time 222,000 Polish servicemen were imprisoned in Siberian Gulags. Once the amnesty was declared in 1941 and they had received discharge papers and been given their freedom, they were faced with yet another journey, this time through Siberia to Uzbekistan and then Persia (modern Iran) and onto the Lebanon in the Middle East. Like many Poles freed from imprisonment in Russia, they were determined to join the Polish Army gathering in Tashkent.

Another struggle for survival began. They had very little food to sustain them, were often ill with dysentery and typhus and my grandmother suffered a severe heart condition. They were separated from each other at times, but with great determination they journeyed on. In Uzbekistan, where they were reunited, my mother, aunt and uncle joined the Polish cadets, while my grandfather joined the Polish army in Iraq. They now had time to rest, recuperate and eventually find work.

My mother somehow found time to fall in love with and marry an Englishman serving in the RAF, which precipitated yet another journey, from Lebanon to England. My parents disembarked from the Durban Castle on 9th November 1945 to begin a new life. For my mother, it was freedom at last. The remainder of the family were reunited in England some time later.

The end of the war had brought about the complete sellout of Poland to Russian oppression, an unexpected blow to the many Poles dispersed throughout the world. The matter of returning home suddenly ceased to be taken for granted. How could one return to a communist Poland, a dictatorship? Unless you were a communist there was no future in Poland.

My mother made another long journey recently, this time through her memories, to put all that happened into a story so that her grandchildren will know just how far she travelled and why. This is her story, with additional material added from research to paint the picture as vividly as possible. It is dedicated to my mother and to the memory of my grandparents and Great Uncle Walery and his family. Their courage in defying immeasurable human suffering is hugely significant and must be acknowledged. Stalin deported at least 1.8 million Poles to Siberia and other bleak outposts of Russia, but not many Western history books record this episode. No politicians honour the victims in speeches commemorating World War II. Yet accounts of the war are incomplete without this neglected historical tragedy.

I am conscious of my roots as a daughter of the eastern Borderland survivors, settlers who were the Red Army’s first target on entering Poland. Their aim was to crush these military families in an act of revenge and retaliation, and there was no place for this ‘clique’ in the Soviet order. Stalin had not forgotten the defeat in the 1920 Polish- Bolshevik war.

I hope my contribution to these memoirs has done justice to the memory of my beloved grandparents, Kazia and Adam and the other members of the family, Walery, Ziuta and family, all linked to the names of Radomski and Goral.

The story continues with the combined thoughts, memories and research of mother and daughter: Alicja Hartley, formerly Goral, and myself.

Teresa Radomska, 2013

CHAPTER ONE

A peaceful childhood

This is a story of the deportation of Polish citizens, including my family, by the Russians, and the partitioning of my country into the hands of the Soviet Union and Germany, yet another example of German and Soviet greed for Polish territories.

The Nazi terror unleashed in Europe from 1939 to 1945 was based on a primitive pseudo-scientific theory of race, and was unprecedented in the history of Poland and indeed the world. Our people were essentially in