When God Looked the Other Way, by Wesley Adamczyk

Retrieved from: The library
(0226004430)

Interesting. Having read The Endless Steppe eons ago, this makes a good bookend to the history of Poles being exiled to the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II. Like Esther's family, the author of this book was put on a train with his family because his father was "bourgeois" (a Polish Army officer) and shipped out of Poland. They ended up in Soviet Central Asia, in Kazakhstan, in the summer of 1940. Eventually, after being a refugee in more than 7 countries, he ends up arriving in Chicago on Thanksgiving Day, 1949, to live with his father's sister's family.

It's a terrible story. It's heartbreaking. He details the day-to-day scenes explicitly--the petty cruelties, the amazing things the human body does when it is stressed/ill/diseased, the moral quandary the "good" Allies faced after the war in dealing with Soviet atrocities. He estimates that during the socialist years, it's possible up to 80 million people were killed, either outright or by starvation and disease. 8 0 m i l l i o n . It's unimaginable, but three generations of Russians (and the people whose countries they ran) had to imagine it to survive. It's something that we shouldn't lose sight of: the worldview of most Russians is not the same as the worldview of most middle-class Americans.

The book exposes the U.S. complicity in the coverup of the Katyn murders. He is not an immigrant who came to the country thinking we were heaven. But he has lived in Chicago for the past fifty years and made his peace, both with God and with the U.S. And in 1998, he was able to make his peace with his father, murdered in the woods near Kharkov (Ukraine) at about the same time his family was being deported.

It's a terribly sad story. And it brings home that atrocities are atrocities no matter who commits them and no matter who the victims are. The repercussions live on for decades, in a widening pool of victims.

And, though he doesn't address it directly, he was one of the very luckiest ones.