Book review: Jan Stepek Part 1: Gulag to Glasgow

If your parent or parents went through the living hell of a Soviet deportation, then this book is something that you should not only read, but you should own. Your descendents need to have it as testimony of the harrowing experience that their gene pool had survived. For this book could have been about my mother and her sister Irena, or about any of the hundreds of thousands of Poles who managed to escape the USSR after their deportation thanks to General Anders and General Sikorski. Many of the mothers and fathers of my Polish friends with whom I grew up in postwar London had survived this hell too, and this book, written in English, spells out exactly what they had endured and survived.

Jan Stepek Part 1: Gulag to Glasgow is the biography of a remarkable man, written by his son Martin. It is the story of human resilience and innate determination in the face of the most barbaric of circumstances. The book's power is drawn from the detailed memories of Jan Stepek and his sisters Zosia and Danka, all of whom – miraculously – made it through their Siberian ordeal to the UK, where they managed to live into their 90s. Their story captures the unspeakable privations – the hunger and the cold and the disease that preyed on starved and frozen bodies. 

Arrested on 10 February 1940 (the same night as my mother's family and 220,000 other Polish men, women and children), they were deported in cattle-trucks to labour camps in the north of Russia and Siberia. Here, in inhuman conditions, they were made to work in forestry, felling trees and turning them into timber and furniture, exactly the same as my mother's family.

After the 'amnesty' of August 1941, Poles were free to leave their camps and make their way across the USSR, journeys of several thousand kilometres, to bases on Russia's borders with Kazakhstan where a newly formed Polish army was being assembled, ahead of a journey across the Caspian Sea to the Middle East and freedom. The journey, undertaken in the winter of 1941-42, took place at a time when the entire Soviet Union transport system was being mobilised to halt the German onslaught as it approached Moscow.

The book begins with a look at the families of Władysław Stepek and his wife Janina, who were born in a partitioned Poland. Władysław, from a modest farming family and Janina, from a wealthy family, married in 1921 and created a new life for themselves as osadnicy in the the eastern parts of the newly re-formed Polish state. As osadnicy – veterans in the struggles for independence – they were given land in exchange for building up new communities and a new Poland. Neither Władysław nor Janina were to survive WW2. Their three children (Jan, born in 1922, Zosia, born in 1925 and Danka in 1927) were all teenagers as their ordeal began, shortly after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland. They cheated death several times; death through dysentery, typhoid fever, exposure and exhaustion. Above all, this is a story of extreme endurance and the innate human will to survive.

Jan Stepek, aged 20 by the time he escaped the USSR, could encircle his leg with his fingers so that thumb and forefinger would touch. His sister Danka weighed four stone (25kg) as a 15-year old when she reached the Polish hospital in Pahlevi in Persia (today's Iran).

The hunger, and its effects on the human body, are described in such a way that it clicks with the reader. This is not like going on a diet for a week. It is a gnawing hunger with no end in sight. Husks of wheat were often all that they could find. Everyone – refugees and local populations – were in the same boat.

With the hunger came lice, ulcers, night blindness and gastric ailments. Sex – reproduction – was on no one's mind. Survival was all. People helped out as they could; small acts of kindness from unexpected sources here and there saved lives along the way. And yet thousands perished, their bodies buried by the side of the railway lines, outside tented encampments. So many died when salvation was in sight.

Jan made it to join the Polish navy; serving on the ORP Krakowiak and later the ORP Ślązak. His sisters made it to Palestine, where the Polish authorities had set up schools for Polish teenagers (smaller children were sent to camps in Africa or India administered by the British authorities). Zosia and Danka went to the same school as my mother in Palestine, Szkoła Młodszych Ochotniczek ('Younger Girl- Volunteers' School').

The horrors of life in the Soviet system is powerfully conveyed in this book. The greatest fear of deportees or refugees being transported by rail in locked cattle-trucks was that their train would end up in sidings as the locomotive would be redirected for more pressing war needs, such as moving troops to the front. Miles from the nearest settlement, the human cargo could end up being left there for weeks in winter – until everyone inside froze or starved to death. Jan Stepek recalls their labour camp in northern Russia; at least when they arrived they had barracks waiting for them. These were built by an earlier wave of deportees – from Ukraine – who had also been dumped at the same spot in winter but with no shelter other than tents. He says there was a hill on which a group of Ukrainians were made to sleep the night in tents; overnight they all froze to death; their tents were covered with snow; no one knew until the spring revealed that the snowy hill had been covering a mound of frozen corpses.

Whilst there have been many books published in Polish about the Soviet deportations of 1940 and 1941, books in English are few and far between. One that covers the same ground I reviewed in 2017 (Adventures of a Young Pole in Exile, by Ryszard Staniaszek). Both books begin with a description of the life of osadnicy families, life in Soviet labour camps, escape from the USSR with General Anders and his army, and the family's fate in the UK after WW2.

In the same way as the world must never forget the Holocaust, the world must never forget the barbarities of the USSR; the inhuman treatment of tens of millions on human beings on the orders of a tyrant, and the ideology that created him. It is crucial that the English-speaking world understands the nature of the Soviet system and the Russian mentality, which to this day still has little or no regard for human life, which it will grind down, be it Ukrainian civilians or Russian soldiers.

The book is available on Amazon. I encourage you to buy it.

This time last year:
August sunsets around Chynów

This time two years ago:
"Don't call me Czachówek - my name is Gabryelin"

This time three years ago:
Accounting for Coincidence

This time four years ago:
Działka food

This time five years ago:
Proper summer in Warsaw

This time six years ago:
Poland's trains failing in the heat

This time seven years ago:
"Learn from your mystics is my only advice"

This time eight years ago:
Out where the pines grow wild and tall

This time 11 years ago:
Behold and See (part V) - short story

This time 12 years ago:
Syrenki in Warsaw

This time 13 years ago:
What's the Polish for 'impostor'?

This time 14 years ago:
Running with the storm on the road to Mamrotowo

This time 16 years ago:
St Pancras Station - new gateway to London

This time 17 years ago:
Mountains or sea? North Wales has them both