Stefan Waydenfeld - The ice road : an epic journey from the Stalinist labor camps to freedom

Stefan Waydenfeld, 1945

Following the end of the war, Waydenfeld studied medicine at the University of Bologna, Italy; the University of Paris, France; and graduated from the Royal College of Surgeons, Dublin, Ireland. He decided to settle in England. A member of the British Medical Association, Waydenfeld is now retired from his general medical practice and lives in London.

Fluent in Polish, Russian and English, and with a working knowledge of French, Italian and Latin, Waydenfeld has over forty years experience in the translation of both medical and non-medical texts.

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THE ICE ROAD

An Epic Journey from the Stalinist Labor Camps to Freedom

by Stefan Waydenfeld

AQUILA POLONICA (U.S.) LTD.

10850 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 300, Los Angeles, California 90024, U.S.A.

www.AquilaPolonica.com

Copyright 1999 Stefan Waydenfeld 2005, 2010 Alice Faintich

Historical Horizon and Reading Group Guide, Copyright 2010 Aquila Polonica Ltd.

All rights reserved. The moral right of the author has been asserted.

First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Mainstream Publishing Company (Edinburgh) Ltd.

Aquila Polonica Edition first published in hardcover in 2010, and in trade paperback in 2011. eBook edition published 2014.

ISBN (Aquila Polonica Edition, cloth): 978-1-60772-002-7

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 101 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

ISBN (Aquila Polonica Edition, trade paperback): 978-1-60772-003-4

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-60772-017-1

Library of Congress Control Number 2009908366

eBook Conversion: Sellbox.com

Acknowledgements:

Cover design and maps in this Aquila Polonica Edition are by Stefan Mucha. Main cover photograph by Wojtek Wolaski, and is reproduced with permission. All Waydenfeld family photographs and illustrations are from the collection of Stefan Waydenfeld and are reproduced with permission. Photographs credited to BP are from the Biblioteka Polska w Londynie (The Polish Library in London), and are reproduced with permission. Photographs credited to HI are from the Hoover Institution, and are reproduced with permission. Photographs credited to SPP-PUMST are from the Studium Polski Podziemnej (The Polish Underground Movement 1939-1945 Study Trust), and are reproduced with permission. Photographs credited to SM are from the collection of Stefan Mucha, and are reproduced with permission. Photograph credited to CF is from the collection of Christine Fisher, and is reproduced with permission. Photographs credited to USNARA are from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, and are in the public domain.

Translations to English provided for various illustrations are by Jarek Garliski.

Publishers Note:

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a magazine, newspaper, broadcast, website, blog or other outlet.

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

For Alice, Alexander and Ian.
With infinite love and gratitude to Danuta in the year of our Golden Wedding Anniversary.

The authors journey

Contents

Acknowledgements

I wish to express gratitude to my wife, Danuta, for her great patience in reading, re-reading and correcting the manuscript, as well as for her devoted help and encouragement, without which the book would never have been completed.

I am also indebted to relatives, some of whom could have told a similar tale, and to friends for their comments, to June Evans for her assistance with some maps and her drawings and to Anthony Masters for his helpful words and his faith in me. Last but not least I wish to acknowledge with thanks the invaluable help and advice I have received from Sonia Ribeiro of the Hampstead Garden Suburb Institute and to the Polonia Aid Foundation Trust for their generous financial donation.

Foreword

MOST PEOPLE in Britain and America cherish a simple view of the Second World War in Europe. They remember a struggle of Good against Evil, where the Allied powers gained a famous victory over the malign forces of fascism. Stories of survivors and heroic adventurers are all concerned with people who pitted their wits against the fascist enemy. Such, after all, was the Western experience. Yet it is a view of the war which ignores events in the larger, eastern half of Europe. There, in the East, the scale of the fighting was much larger and the ideological struggle more ruthless. Individuals did not count. Millions of Europeans were faced not with one totalitarian enemy, but with two. They saw their homelands invaded and destroyed by Stalins communists as well as by Hitlers Nazis. In the case of the Poles, they saw their country overrun first by Hitler and Stalin acting in unison, then by Hitlers legions triumphant over Stalin and finally by a resurgent Red Army victorious over the Nazis. To survive in the successive waves of that maelstrom required rather more complicated strategies than anything encountered in Western Europe.