Wesley Adamczyk - When God Looked the Other Way: An Odyssey of War, Exile, and Redemption

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2004 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2004.
Paperback edition 2006
Printed in the United States of America

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 6 7 8 9

ISBN 978-0-226-34150-7 (e-book)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-00443-3 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 0-226-00443-0 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-00444-0 (paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-00444-9 (paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Adamczyk, Wesley, 1933

When God looked the other way : an odyssey of war, exile, and redemption / Wesley Adamczyk.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-226-0044 3-0 (alk. paper)

1. Adamczyk, Wesley, 1933 2. World War, 19391945Personal narratives, Polish. 3. World War, 19391945Prisoners and prisoners, Soviet. 4. World War, 19391945ChildrenPoland. 5. Prisoners of warPolandBiography. 6. Prisoners of warKazakhstanBiography. I. Title.

D805.S6SA33 2004

940.53'75845-dc22

2003022321

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

WESLEY ADAMCZYK

WHEN GOD LOOKED THE OTHER WAY

AN ODYSSEY OF WAR, EXILE, AND REDEMPTION

FOREWORD BY NORMAN DAVIES

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

FOR MOTHER AND FATHER,

who died so their children could live.

And for all the proud Polish people

who endured the Inhuman Land

with the hope that their children

might one day live in freedom.

CONTENTS

BY NORMAN DAVIES

FOREWORD

Generally speaking, most Britons and Americans are vaguely aware that the Second World War molded the world in which we live. It is a world where the United States is, for the present, the strongest state on earth, where freedom and democracy thrive, and where the totalitarian monsters who threatened us fifty and sixty years ago no longer exist. The Cold War, which may be seen as the unfinished business of 1945, succeeded in dominating the second half of the twentieth century. And it is only very recently, after September 11, 2001, that we have been forced to recognize new terrors and new challenges on the international scene.

Yet despite the passage of time, our memories of World War Two remain curiously stunted and selective. We remember the battlefields in which our own soldiers were involved; we watch films ranging from The Dam Busters and The Bridge on the River Kwai to Battle of the Bulge and Saving Private Ryan; and we continue to be left in no doubt concerning the undiluted evil of the enemies against whom we fought. Above all, we are constantly and rightly reminded of the Jewish Holocaustthe most extreme example of the crimes of our enemies.

Unfortunately, this conventional scenario does not present the full picture. It contains many blank spots, and it does not address the central moral dilemma that was created when, in order to defeat Nazi Germany, the Western powers joined forces with the Soviet Union. At the time, many people were led to believe that Joseph Stalin was a benevolent Uncle Joe. Blinded by the feelings of relief and admiration generated by the heroic sacrifices of the Red Army, they easily imagined that the Soviets shared our own goals, that Soviet Communism was fostering a different sort of democracy, or that the Red Army was liberating the nations it had overrun. We know that these wartime beliefs were fundamentally false. In reality, Stalins regime was responsible for mass murder on an unparalleled scale. Soviet-style Communism proved to be a dire disaster for all who embraced it. And in 1945, the same number of European nations were left enslaved as had been liberated. In other words, the Allied Victory for Freedom and Justice was strictly limited.

Wieslaw (Wesley) Adamczyk redresses this imbalance in the most convincing way. He recounts the story of his own wartime childhood with exemplary precision and immense emotional sensitivity, presenting the ordeal of one family with the clarity and insight of a skilled novelist. The ordeal begins in eastern Poland at a time when, in the western half of the country, the Nazis were building Auschwitz and creating the Warsaw Ghetto. It begins with the authors tearful farewell with his father, who would soon be murdered by Stalins police, and by the familys terrifying expulsion from their home. It proceeds through a three-week journey in crowded cattle cars, through the starvation and snowy deprivations of distant Siberia, through constant interrogations and humiliations to the darkest hour of all, when his mother dies from maltreatment on the threshold of liberty. The author ends the war as one of the 50,000 Polish orphans who had survived Siberian exile but who still faced years of bewilderment and loss before reaching a safe refuge, and a promising future, in America.

It is remarkable that Mr. Adamczyk kept his colorful memories to himself for more than fifty years. The floodgates of his suppressed recollections were not released until the 1990s, when President Mikhail Gorbachevs admission of Soviet guilt for the Katyn massacre solved for the author the mystery of his fathers fate and when survivors like himself were able to visit the inhuman land in person to pay their respects to their long lost relatives and compatriots. In the meantime, he has obviously conducted a great deal of historical research to ensure the accuracy of his narrative, and he has somewhere learned to order his thoughts, and to wield the pen, with great skill. In so doing, he has rendered a valuable service to all who wish to read about the triumph of the human spirit or to gain a deeper understanding of World War Two.

I have read many descriptions of the Siberian odyssey and other forgotten wartime episodes. But none of them is more informative, more moving, or more beautifully written than When God Looked the Other Way.

Norman Davies

PREFACE

When President Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union met in the Kremlin with President Wojciech Jaruzelski of Poland on April 13, 1990, it turned out to be a historic day. Millions of people in Poland and throughout the world had been awaiting such a day for decades. During this meeting, Gorbachev admitted that the Soviet NKVD (forerunner of the KGB) was responsible for the massacre at Katyn of fifteen thousand Polish POWs, more than half of whom were army officersincluding my fatherwho were taken prisoner by the Soviets shortly after the outbreak of World War II. Had Stalin made such an admission nearly fifty years earlier, when the Germans first discovered mass graves in the Katyn Forest, the course of European and world history might have been changed dramatically.

The belated admission of guilt revealed the secrets of the graves only gradually. Gorbachev, still determined to protect the fast-fading image of the Communist Party and the Soviet government, did not take responsibility for the murders of many thousands of other Polish citizens buried in mass graves in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, his revelation stunned the Soviet citizenry. It also further tarnished the reputation of many well-known government and military leaders in the West, most of whom were no longer alive.

A fifty-year chain of lies, deceit, and cover-ups had been broken. For all those years the Soviets had maintained a faade of innocence regarding the Katyn massacre, blaming the Germans for the one crime the Germans did not commit. At the same time, the American and British governments, knowing that the Soviets were guilty of the crime, officially remained silent about the truth of Katyn and prolonged the cover-up by going along with the Soviet version of the story. The Polish people, who had lost about half of their homelands intellectual and military leadership, were forced to live not only with the gruesome tragedy but also with anger and frustration regarding the continuing deception surrounding it.