Sibiřská odyssea – Adamczyk Wiesław (2024)

A quiet yet brutal campaign waged by the Soviet Union against Polish citizens is often overlooked in the shadow of the Holocaust and other horrors of World War II. In his gripping memoir, Wesley Adamczyk gives voice to the hundreds of thousands of victims of Soviet barbarism. Wiesław Adamczyk was just a small boy when he, along with his mother and siblings, was deported from their comfortable home in then Polish Luck to Soviet Siberia in May 1940. His father, an officer in the Polish army, fell into Soviet captivity and ultimately became one of the victims of the Katyn massacre, during which tens of thousands of Polish officers and members of the intelligentsia were murdered by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. The family's separation and deportation in 1940 marked the beginning of a decade-long odyssey, during which Wiesław had to endure almost unbearable living conditions, a complete lack of food, and life-threatening epidemics. The book is a recollection of childhood spent in horrific conditions and not only sheds light on one of the darkest periods in European history but also traces the loss of innocence and the struggle against despair that threatened to engulf the young boy. It is an immediate and painful testimony to the trials one family had to endure during...