- Paperback: 384 pages
- Publisher: Mainstream Publishing (22 Aug 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1840186526
- ISBN-13: 978-1840186529
- Product Dimensions: 23 x 15.6 x 3.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,361,909 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
The plight of the one-and-a-half million Poles deported as "enemies of the state" to the labour camps of the frozen Soviet Union has often been forgotten. Stefan Waydenfeld lived in the town of Otwock, 30 kilometres south of Warsaw, with his father, his mother and his older brother Jurek. Their idyll was broken in September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and Stefan, aged 14, was forced to flee with his parents to safer territory. Unfortunately to the east were the Russians, casting a colder shadow under Stalin than the so-called "civilised" Nazis from whom they were fleeing. Overcrowded trains, hard physical labour, squalid living quarters, perpetual hunger and for nine months of the year the bitter Soviet winter, sought to crush a spirit within them that somehow remained resolute.
1941 and the German attack on the USSR brought a "liberation" of sorts, but they were still herded like cattle across the Soviet Union, deemed "unreliable" and kept subjugated by deliberate starvation. Eventually, and only with a sadistic reluctance, the authorities allowed them to leave, but the awful ordeal still had consequences it would bring to bear. Stefan Waydenfeld settled in London, where he followed in his father's footsteps and became a GP. Now retired, in this, his first book, he renders the narrative with an emotional stoicism in stark relief to the misery he is often describing and while he never allows it to be forgotten that it is also the story of a boy's, of his, adolescence, the panoramic sympathy he brings to bear is indicative of the man who emerged from it all. Shot through with a love and incorrigible comradeship that Stalin's communism idealised but could never realise, The Ice Road's grim twist is that given what happened to those who stayed in their region of Poland, the interminable journeying they endured probably saved their lives. --David Vincent --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
One and a half million Poles - designated by Stalin as "enemies of the people" - were deported during the World War II to labour camps in the forests and steppes of the Soviet Union. "The Ice Road" charts the shocking story of the hardship and misery faced by 15-year-old Stefan and his family. Stefan describes the idiosyncrasies of his family and friends, their drastically changed circumstances and their indomitable will to survive. The squalid living conditions, the inadequate food, the hard physical work and the nine-month-long winters that he and his fellow Poles had to suffer are all graphically brought to life. In 1941, the German attack on the Soviet Union and the changed political alliance liberates Stefan and his family, but they are released into a country still embroiled in war. Although technically free, they are kept with the other prisoners and herded like animals from the far north of the USSR to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. They are deliberately starved to keep them submissive. Eventually Stefan and his family manage to leave the "accursed country" with the help of the Polish army - but not before some difficult obstacles and last-minute hitches are overcome.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
From Ice To Life,
By
This review is from: The Ice Road (Hardcover)
This book tells the story of the life of a teenage boy between (mostly) 1939 and 1944, though the book is topped and tailed in terms of the writer's life.
The writer does not exactly specify his background, but it seems from circumstantial facts given in the text that his father was an "assimilated" Jew, a former Polish Army officer during the First World War and a medical doctor. The writer's mother seems to have been ethnically Polish. One of the (for some reason untranslated from Russian) Soviet documents reproduced in the photographic plates gives the author's "Nationality" [Natsionalnost] as "Jew" [Yevrey]). The family lived comfortably during the 1930's in what looks like a fairly spacious bourgeois residence in a small town called Otwosc, some 20 miles south of Warsaw. When the German and Soviet forces invaded from East and West, the family ended up staying in the Belorussian town of Pinsk (now, I think, Belorus), occupied by the Red Army. After some time,, they were deported as "unreliable elements", along with a motley crowd of other mostly Jewish and Polish families and individuals in a cattle truck. Their unpleasant long journey ended in a tiny settlement called Kvasha, hundreds of miles from the nearest railhead in the far North of European Russia (the writer refers to it, speaking in terms of lifestyle rather than geography, as "Siberia"). There was already a primitive kind of settlement existing there, built by other, earlier Russian, so-called "free exiles" (i.e. people administratively restricted in residence to a specific town, region, oblast or republic). Kvasha's economy was entirely based on logging, the logs being floated down the nearby river, which is a tributary of the Northern Dvina (which reaches the sea within the Arctic Circle at Archangelsk). Kvasha was 300 miles south of the Arctic Circle and 500 miles west of the Urals. Kvasha was so remote that even the German attack on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 seemed remote from everyday life. The writer grew to like Kvasha, surprisingly. In 1942, the non-Russian "free exiles" were then given the chance (by reason of diplomatic deals done between Stalin, Churchill and the de jure "Polish Government in Exile" in London, to leave the Soviet Union. They jump at it but to be allowed to leave they have to somehow reach the Caspian Sea, thousands of miles to the south. This involved floating on home-made rafts for hundreds of milles, then picking up steamers and trains at larger towns and cities, all the time avoiding unwelcome attentions from the NKVD. The Soviet authorities were no more than half-hearted in allowing their caged Poles and others to leave. The route taken by this writer and his family encompassed the Dvina, the Volga, Saratov, Astrakhan, Tashkent (Uzbekistan), Chimkent (Kazakhstan) etc and finally a rusting overcorded ship to the then Pahlavi (Persia) and freedom from Sovietism. The slices of Soviet life under Stalin in the exceptional conditions of the time are interestingly drawn. I knew a lady who took the latter part of the same route our of the Soviet Union, at the same time, even ending up in the same Persian town at about the same time. Small world. I recognized some of the ubiquitous sayings and aspects of Soviet life she told me in this book. She was, in fact, offered a considerable sum of money for the rights to her story by the famous Jewish director Otto Preminger. That would have been around 1960. She had to refuse when she refused to alter her story to make it appear as if she was fleeing "Nazi-ism" as well as Stalinism... The books ends with an Epilogue by the wife the writer married and who had been through a similar experience. They met in that same small Persian port. The writer had spent most of his postwar life as a medical doctor in the UK. Others mentioned in the text became business people, doctors, dentists etc in the USA, West Germany and South Africa. I liked the book and it kept the attention. The author seems to have been a decent person and wrote the book as an individual or member of a family, rather than as a member of any larger group.
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5.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Experiences of a Polish Jew Deported into the Interior of the USSR,
By Jan Peczkis "Scholar and Thinker" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Ice Road (Paperback)
This review is based on the 2010 Aquila Polonica edition. The author of this book grew up in pre-WWII Poland. He came from a well-to-do, assimilated Jewish family, who had Polonized their name (from Weidenfeld to Wajdenfeld (p. 357); subsequently Anglicized to Waydenfeld.) In common with many assimilated Polish Jews, the Waydenfelds were atheists. (p. 404, 406). [This recounts Cardinal Hlond's much-maligned 1936 "Jews are freethinkers" statement.]
Waydenfeld describes the Polish preparations of war and the savagery of the 1939 German attack. In common with many other authors, he describes a personal experience in which he was part of a fleeing mass of Polish civilians subject to systematic terror bombing and strafing by the Luftwaffe. (pp. 26-27). After the attack, he witnessed many people and farm animals wounded and dead. The Soviets conquered eastern Poland. Jewish-Soviet collaboration followed. Waydenfeld describes Jews as forming the majority of a local-town crowd cheering the arriving Red Army (p. 36), as well as the fact that 2 of 3 of the NKVD officers later interrogating him were Jewish. (p. 69). In 1940, Waydenfeld's family was among those deported into the interior of the USSR. He describes the deportation train as consisting of 40 wagons that each held 40 people. (p. 83). Not mentioned is the fact that the 40-per-wagon figure supports the traditionally-cited number of well over a million Poles deported into the USSR in 1939-1941, not the few hundred thousand cited by revisionists. Waydenfeld ended up in northern Russia, near the Dvina River. He provides details of the grueling life there, notably the bitter winters. After the "amnesty" of Poles in the wake of the unexpected Nazi German attack on its erstwhile Soviet Communist ally, Waydenfeld traveled south. The mortality rate of the Poles remained high. The author comments: "In 1942, before the advent of antibiotics, the mortality rate for typhus was between fifty and sixty percent." (p. 327). The author realizes that the "amnesty" left as many as a million Polish deportees still within the USSR. (p. 353). For the dead, there was no amnesty. Among the victims at Katyn, for example, was Waydenfeld's Uncle Adam. (p. 176). The Soviets wanted the Polish citizens of Jewish, Byelorussian, and Ukrainian nationality to remain behind as Soviet citizens. (p. 358). Not mentioned is the fact that this was a telltale sign of the permanence of the imperial Soviet claim to Poland's Kresy (eastern half), a claim that became fully realized after the 1943 Teheran betrayal of Poland. Waydenfeld found himself in Yangi-Yul (p. 353), a gathering point for the "amnestied" Poles. [My mother, aunt, and grandmother were also there.] In this southern part of the USSR, the locals were descendants of the Tatars, not Slavs. They understood Poles only as citizens of Lekhistan (the ancient Tatar and Turkish name for Poland, which alluded to Lech, the legendary founder of Poland.). (p. 300). This work has many aids for the reader who is not familiar with the events described here. A map shows all the peregrinations of the author, who ended up in England. A short history of the relevant time period is provided in the back of the book. The author clarifies some issues in a published interview at the end of the book. There are also photos of the released Poles. WARNING: The pictures show emaciated humans and animals, often with thin legs and with ribs plainly showing. This may be upsetting to sensitive readers.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Survival Story,
By Ray F "Avid reader" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Ice Road (Paperback)
I rated it 5 stars becauce the author was able to bring me into his world..A detailed descripton as a 14 year old with his parents being shipped from Poland to Russia in 40&8 rail cars,working in Siberia and learning how to survive...a great read...Ray F
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