The Ice Road: An Epic Journey from the Stalinist Labor Camps to Freedom
By Tricia AmbroseWhile browsing the stacks of new nonfiction at Euclid Library last week, I happened uponThe Ice Roadby Stefan Waydenfeld.SubtitledAn Epic Journey from the Stalinist Labor Camps to Freedom,it fit right into my desire to expand my knowledge of past conflicts. Plus, the title is a grabber, isn't it?Waydenfeld's account of his Polish family's nomadic years during World War II is a real eye-opener.I cannot imagine packing everything I own into suitcases at gunpoint, forced to leave my home, sent off to an unknown future. And the Waydenfelds did it more than once!Waydenfeld doesn't mince words and his book is surprisingly unsentimental. There is no woe-is-me - and he sure had reason! - at all.His family went from middle class existence (his father was a doctor; his mother a bacteriologist) to working the most brutal of jobs in the most brutal of conditions in a Siberian labor camp.Reading his account of logging in Siberia and in particular of the night work on the ice road, I vow to never complain about the cold again.In such circumstances, it'd be easy to lose hope. Yet he keeps focused on the future and a return to his education.Among the items Waydenfeld lugged from place to place were school books. How many of us can say we would have done the same?I'm not sure I would have had the fortitude to endure half of what he did, let alone with so little complaint and hatred for those who essentially robbed him of so much. --The News-Herald, Ohio, June 14, 2010By Michael J. BonafieldThe Ice Road: An Epic Journey From the Stalinist Labor Camps to Freedomis an extraordinary memoir. On one level, it is the story of a 14-year-old Polish lad from a comfortable middle-class family whose idyllic life is suddenly shattered by the German invasion in 1939. Beyond that, however, it is testament to the resiliency of the human spirit in the midst of a nation's death throes.When author Stefan Waydenfeld's father, a physician, is called up by the army, his mother, a bacteriologist, is left to hold the little family together. With German bombs raining everywhere, Stefan sets out to find his dad. He heads east -- into the maw of the advancing Red Army, which Stalin, in alliance with Hitler, has unleashed on Poland.Miraculously, the family is reunited, but as detainees in the Soviet zone, they are first, "undesirables," then "enemies of the people" awaiting the dreaded knock on the door. When it comes, they are packed into cattle cars and shipped West, or so they are told, to the Nazi zone. But Stefan realizes that "the sun is on the wrong side" of the train, and that the family actually is heading east -- to Siberia.Dumped into a logging camp, where the order "He who does not work does not eat" is rigorously enforced, the family barely keeps life and limb together in subzero temperatures. In a herculean effort, they build a log raft and escape, traveling by any means, mostly foot, to join fellow Poles in Soviet Central Asia. There, the Allies attempted to raise an army to fight the Germans from among displaced Poles, many in Stalin's slave-labor camps.Like all stories of exceptional heroism and grit, this one is textured with fascinating personalities and subplots. Waydenfeld relates events with equanimity and grace, content to let the story speak for itself. It is a facet of World War II that has largely gone unnoticed in the West -- until now. --Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 22, 2010By Edwin BurgessIt seems that mankind's second favorite occupation is war--whether engaging in it or writing about it. These titles show us that while much about war's roots, conditions, and results remains the same over the years, memoirists, analysts, journalists, and historians can reveal the many individual stories of change along the way.MemoirWaydenfeld, Stefan. The Ice Road: An Epic Journey from the Stalinist Labor Camps to Freedom. Aquila Polonica 2010. c.405p. illus. maps.The author was 14 when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union divided Poland between them. Many Poles, including Waydenfeld's family, were swiftly deported to Siberian labor camps.Only about half survived. Released in 1941, Waydenfeld and his parents endured a desperate journey across a hostile county and eventually reached the West. A remarkable tale. --Library Journal, April 1, 2010By Irene TomaszewskiCarl Jung once said that man will get used to anything, if only he reaches an appropriate degree of submission.Stefan Waydenfeld's memoir,The Ice Road,is a gripping story about a family suddenly thrust into a country where a population had been cowed to such a degree of submission that no matter what their state dictated, their response was to "get used to it."With this dystopia as a background, the book reads like a novel, even an adventure, with a plot that includes war, arrests, families lost and found, and constant danger. The horror of it, however, is that the story is not fiction, and the country is real. The Waydenfelds were deported along with thousands of other Poles to the Gulag during the Red Army's occupation of Poland during the Second World War. The Ice Road is the story of their two harrowing years in the Soviet Union, first in one of the Gulag's slave labor camps, and then their long and desperate flight to freedom.Prior to the outbreak of WWII, the Waydenfelds, an affluent family of secular Jewish background, lived in the town of Otwock, Poland, a health resort where the author's father was a well-known specialist in lung disease, his mother a bacteriologist. They lived a comfortable, culturally rich life.In 1939, there was much talk of war but most people preferred to think it would remain just talk or, at worst, the war would not last long. But war did come, and Poland, situated between the Soviet Union and Germany, was the crucible of combat. For almost two years the two totalitarian regimes collaborated in their destruction of Poland; then Hitler's forces turned against the Soviet Union in a murderous campaign across eastern Poland and into Russia until, their fortunes reversed, the Red Army once again stormed into devastated Poland to defeat the Germans, and to install its own regime.Caught in this vortex of horror, the Waydenfelds fled from the Germans only to discover the Soviet terror. Attempting to return to the German side, they were caught in a trap when the train they thought was to take them to Warsaw instead headed east.The Waydenfelds were taken to a labour camp where enslavement was "re-education." There, men and women, young and old, were expected to fell trees, and if they did not, they would not eat. Winter came, the work continued, whether or not the prisoners were clothed for it. Waydenfeld's described people encrusted with an armor of ice that actually sheltered their bodies from wind and kept their bodies dry. Newspapers wrapped around feet, held together by rags, served as boots. And the work went on.When Hitler attacked the USSR, Polish prisoners suddenly found themselves free. Given that only those who worked were entitled to food, freedom came with a price and, given the isolation of the camps, leaving was not a simple matter. The logging camps were located deep in the forest but on rivers so, with fantastic ingenuity, the liberated Polish prisoners constructed rafts to take them out of the wilderness.Later, bartering, trading, bribing somehow enabled them to board trains, barges and trucks as they traveled thousands of kilometers across the immense country until, at last, they joined up with the newly formed Polish army that was being evacuated to the Middle East.The family survived, though photographs of Waydenfeld's father, one taken in 1939 and the other in 1941, reveal the ravages of hard labor on his health. He would not live long after the war. His mother frequently lapsed into severe depression, and the teenage Stefan at times wondered whether his hopes for an education and a career in medicine would forever remain unfulfilled.At the start of the war, Waydenfeld, then only fourteen, wanted to enlist in the Polish army in defense of his country. In 1942, at age 17, he joined the Polish II Corps and went on to fight at Monte Cassino. Despite that, he and the rest of the Polish soldiers who fought with the allies had no free country to return to. Demobilized in England, he completed his education and went on to become a family physician.Waydenfeld wrote his book because he felt compelled to address an injustice, a double injustice: first, the suffering and loss of life brought upon the Polish nation by the Soviet Union, and second, the indifference to, and even conscious suppression of that history by Poland's allies.The Ice Roadis an important personal testament and the work of a truly gifted writer. --The Cosmopolitan Review, Spring 2010