The Ice Road - Softcover

Waydenfeld, Stefan W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1840186526 ISBN 13: 9781840186529

Publisher: Mainstream Publishing, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Mainstream Publishing
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1840186526
• ISBN 13: 9781840186529
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384