Description

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On September 17, 1939, two weeks after the German invasion of Poland, Soviet troops occupied the eastern half of Poland and swiftly imposed a new political and economic order. Following a plebiscite, in early November the area was annexed to the Ukraine and Belorussia. Beginning in the winter of 1939–40, Soviet authorities deported over one million Poles, many of them children, to various provinces of the Soviet Union. After the German attack on the USSR in summer 1941, the Polish government in exile in London received permission from its new-found ally to organize military units among the Polish deportees and later to transfer Polish civilians to camps in the British-controlled Middle East. There the children were able to attend Polish-run schools.

The 120 essays translated here were selected from compositions written by the students of these schools. What makes these documents unique is the perception of these witnesses: a child’s eye view of events no adult would consider worth mentioning. In simple language, filled with misspellings and grammatical errors, the children recorded their experiences, and sometimes their surprisingly mature understanding, of the invasion and the Societ occupation, the deportations eastward, and life in the work camps and kolkhozes. The horrors of life in the USSR were vivid memories; privation, hunger, disease, and death had been so frequent that they became accepted commonplaces. Moreover, as the editors point out in their introductory study, these Polish children were not alone in their suffering. All the nationalities that came under Soviet rule shared their fate.

About the Author

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Irena Grudzinska-Gross is a professor at the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences and a 2018 Fellow at the Guggenheim Foundation. Her books include Milosz and the Long Shadow of War (Pogranicze, 2020) and Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets (Yale University Press, 2009).

Jan Tomasz Gross is the Norman B. Tomlinson '16 and '48 Professor of War and Society, emeritus, at Princeton University. After growing up in Poland and attending Warsaw University, he immigrated to the United States in 1969 and earned a PhD in sociology from Yale University (1975). His book Neighbors (2001) was a finalist for the National Book Award. He previously taught at New York University, Emory, and Yale, and at universities in Paris, Vienna, and Krakow.