Author Wesley Adamczyk’s Polish
language book, Kwiaty Polskie na Wygnaniu,
Rebis, Poland, 2015 (Polish “Flowers,” referring to children, in
Deportation) is a beautiful collection of children’s drawings, poems, letters
and remembrances of their homeland, Poland, right after their escape from the
Soviet Union’s slave labor camps and the Gulag from 1941/1942 and beyond. These sickly, malnourished, orphaned children
ranging from ages 5 or 6 and upward—younger ones mostly died during their
imprisonment and escape—could think only of the warmth and freedom of their
family life in their beloved Poland. It
was a freedom harshly disrupted by the Soviets when hundreds of thousands of Poles
were deported from Poland starting in 1940, like my mother and sister. The world needs to be reminded that it wasn’t
only the German Nazis who invaded Poland.
These children’s identity was clearly with Poland. Adamczyk himself was one of those children
who later lost his mother to illness in Tehran and …
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