And God Was Our Witness

The compelling World War II memoirs of a young Polish girl forced into slave labor in Russian along with her family and thousands of other Poles; while the rest of the world sat idly by as Poland disappeared and turned away from the resulting displaced refugees without a country.

I was born in a small town of Eastern Poland. My vivid recollections are of being raised in a comfortable atmosphere of tranquility and culture rich in art, theater and music. The war brought unforeseen changes and the end of an peaceful era. When destruction from German bombs had ceased, the people in the east of Poland faced another danger, the occupation of the Soviet troops. Our father was arrested immediately as an enemy of the "red regime" and few months later we followed his fate. I was only sixteen when my family and I, were pulled away from our home and country. We were forcibly taken and sent away to the Asiatic state of Kazakhstan in the year of 1940, where we were condemned to a slave labor for the next three years, facing mistreatment, sickness, hunger and death till our release from bondage and a flight to freedom across the Caspian Sea to Iran where I met my husband, an American army Lieutenant. Before meeting my husband, my family and I, lived in the refugee camps in Teheran, later after the death of my mother, I was married in 1945. At that time we lived in the southern Iran, in Khorromshahr at Persian Gulf till my husband was shipped back to U.S. leaving me to wait for a permit to enter U.S. which came very much later in 1946, letting me arrive in New York. Barely acquainted with a new way of living in the great U.S. I was back on the trail, following my husband to Japan, where my son Chris was born. We spent four glorious years in the land of Rising Sun, then headed back to U.S. to circulate in several army posts finally settling in Washington D.C. where my daughter Tina was born. Next came Germany, a short stint and back to Wisconsin for a while then a long stretch of four years in a vacation land, a seaside adventure in La Baule, France. - In 1960 we were back in States and time of retirement from the army but still in touch with a government. Our son Chris had volunteered for Vietnam and my hus