When God Looked the Other Way - Wesley Adamczyk

When God Looked the Other Way
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Autor: Wesley Adamczyk

 Wydawnictwo: Chicago University Press
ISBN: 0226004430
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Format: ...
Oprawa: twarda
Stron: 288
Data wydania: 2004-01-01
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In May of 1940, 25,000 Polish Army officers were led into the Katyn Forest in eastern Poland by their Red Army captors and executed. Adamczyk's father was one of them. In this finely wrought memoir of loss and survival, Adamczyk tells his family's story against the backdrop of a little known chapter of WWII-the forced exile of thousands of Poles by the Soviet government in the opening weeks of the war. Adamczyk's upper-middle-class family was taken at gunpoint and sent on a harrowing 3,000-mile journey to the barren wastes of Kazakhstan. Life in Stalin's U.S.S.R. was a horror-there was little food, clothing or shelter for the downtrodden natives, let alone for the refugees flooding the area. The family survived through the sheer will and constant ingenuity of the author's mother, who guided the family in an escape from the U.S.S.R. to British-occupied Iran and, exhausted from her efforts, died. Adamczyk's language is earthy, intense and moving. In addition to the strong portraits of his family, Adamczyk fills the book with unforgettable characters from their odyssey-brutal Red Army soldiers; desperately impoverished yet generous Kazakhs; and the clean, well-dressed Americans. With this work, Adamczyk has brought illumination and honor to the families of the thousands who suffered the same terrible fate. (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

I can think of no other European country, with an ancient history, whose inhabitants have been so victimized by its neighbors as Poland. Probably the worst of those neighbors was Russia, then ruled by Catherine the Great. Between 1772 and 1795, the entire territory of the Kingdom of Poland was divided among Prussia, Austria and Russia.


Only during the short period when Napoleon ruled central Europe was Poland restored, though only as the Duchy of Warsaw, dependent on Napoleon himself. The 'duchy' consisted of the territories which Prussia and Austria had annexed in 1793-5.


In the aftermath of World War I, the three empires -- Austrian, German and Russian -- that had once partitioned this tragic land were wiped out and thus the Republic of Poland was born, free at last. But the freedom had a short lifespan, some 10 years. A new, even bloodier partition was on the way.


With the opening of World War II, Poland was once more in the eye of the hurricane. The country was invaded from the west by Nazi Germany and from the east for the second time by the Soviet Union (the first time having been in 1920, by V.I. Lenin). The two dictatorships then divided Poland and each began to persecute its inhabitants.


The Nazis murdered about 90 percent of Polish Jews and more than 1 million Catholic Poles. The Soviets murdered a comparable number of Poles; many others were gulaged to Siberia. Joseph Stalin, like Russian monarchs before him, hated the Poles far more than he hated the Germans.


At the end of World War II, new boundaries were designed for central Europe by Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was at Yalta that, with a shrug of the shoulders, FDR and Churchill gave away to Stalin a third of Poland's pre-WWII territory.


And then they gave away Poland itself. So what? In 1939, Britain's Neville Chamberlain gave away Czechoslovakia to a ravenous Adolf Hitler.


This memoir by Wesley Adamczyk ('Wesley' being an Anglicized version of the Polish 'Wieslau') is a personal story of the horrors that Poles lived through during World War II. 'When God Looked the Other Way,' above all else, explains why there is still a Poland. Or in the words of the national anthem: 'Poland has not yet perished/ As long as we live . . .'


Mr. Adamczyk's story is one of the most remarkable World War II sagas I have ever read. It is history with a human face, the dramatic tale of a remarkable woman: the invincible Anna, Mr. Adamczyk's mother and the wife of a Polish officer. Her husband, 47 years

Książka "When God Looked the Other Way"
Wesley Adamczyk