Chapter 23 - 1963 A Borsuk Siberian Odyssey Story

Chapter 23 Version 2

1963

“I have come here to tell you the story of my family” said Jane Iskra to the milling crowd of cousins and their children. Jane was the daughter Sophie Borsuk Iskra who was Ludwig Borsuk’s sister. She and her family were living in Poland at the outbreak of World War II.

“After the Russians and Germans attacked to begin World War II, we in eastern Poland in the Lublin area were now part of Russia again” she said. Jane Iskra went on but as she looked around in the basement of her cousin Jane’s house in Easthampton, it was clear that nobody was listening. She turned to Jane and said she would tell her story later to anyone who was interested.

The resurrection of Poland as an independent country in 1919 was the last of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points to be included in the resolution of World War I. By reconstituting the Polish homeland, Germany was stripped of it’s western provinces and the port city of Gdansk, Austria lost its Galician province including the cities of Krakow and Lwow, and Russia of its industrial eastern province that included Warsaw. With the defeat of the Russian czar by the Bolshevik communists in 1919, the new communist government in Russia was eager to regain its lost Polish lands and push the

spread of communism into industrial Europe. The Poles were unhappy that that its new borders excluded Vilnius in Lithuania and Lwow in the Ukraine region where there were large numbers of Poles in the cities but fewer ethnic Poles in the countryside.

The result was the Polish-Russian War of 1919-1921. The Russians were initially successful reaching the outskirts of Warsaw. But with Russian supply lines depleted by their rapid advance, the Poles and Russian met in the Battle of Warsaw where the Russians were routed. Joseph Stalin who was in charge of the Russian army in the Ukraine did not follow orders to go to Warsaw before the battle and instead moved against the Poles in Lwow. The result was that the Poles regained much of their historical lands to the east including Lwow and Brest-Litvosk. With the Russians losing more territory to the new Polish country, there was a long term resolve by the Russians to eventually regain their Polish province. The Germans also lost lands now in the Poland in the north and east that contained large German ethnic populations that they eyed as historically German lands.

The opportunity to extract retribution from Poland came in September of 1939. Hitler and Stalin came to an agreement to simultaneously attack Poland in a final partition of Polish lands. There was doubt from other countries that fascist Germany and communist Russia could ever agree to cooperate. Hitler and Stalin did. The prospect of settling old scores with the Polish proved to be too enticing. The Germans attacked from the north and south. The Russians stayed on the border until it was clear that the Poles would be defeated before crossing over Poland’s eastern border suffering few casualties. The French and British did not open up a western front attack on Germany as their mutual defense pact with Poland called for.

With few natural defensive positions in the Polish north, the Polish plan was to withdraw to the rugged hills in the Lwow area where there had been stored large cashes of ammunition and supplies. The unanticipated Russian advance into the Polish Ukraine made this strategy untenable. The Polish army withdrew to still neutral Romania and 150,000 Polish troops evacuated by sea to fight in western Europe along with a large contingent of the Polish air force. Many Polish pilots flew for the English Royal Air Force (RAF) during the Battle of Britain.

Jane Iskra told this story after the party was over.

Sophie, her husband, and three children were arrested by the Russians for “political” reasons – probably because of their literacy and the books found in the house. After the Russians came, they confiscated farms and all officials and teachers were to be relocated to Russian Siberia. All of their books were burned. The Iskra family was sent to Siberia. Normally, the family members would be separated with children going to various camps scattered over large distances throughout Siberia. Sophie’s husband was ill so Sophie and her older daughter, Jane, were allowed to stay together to care for him. The toddler daughter was allowed to stay because they told the Russians the toddler was still nursing.

The eleven year old son was taken to a camp nearly 1,000 miles from the rest of the family. He promptly gathered some food and set out to return to his family. The first night out, the boy was robbed of all of his food and possessions. He never again trusted anyone, hiding by day and traveling by night. Getting his bearings by the stars as his father had taught him, he lived off the berries of the Siberian summer and stowed away on freight trains until he had made his way back to his family.

The reunited family was helped by the underground via train to Karachi, India (Pakistan). The toddler, smuggled out as laundry, was wrapped in a sheet and told to be quiet when crossing the border. From Karachi, the family made its way to London, England by ship rounding the southern tip of Africa. Sophie stayed in England after the war. Daughter Jane went on to teach school in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. On a separate visit to Massachusetts, Jane said that her mother Sophie asked her why she went to cold Canada after having all the cold they had in Siberia. Jane later moved to a warmer climate in South Africa.

“And I do want to thank you for the shoes you sent me during the war when I was in England. I needed those shoes to wear for my wedding and my younger sister also wore them at her wedding” said Jane Iskra on her trip to Easthampton.

In England, Jane Iskra wrote to her cousins in Easthampton and asked that they keep in touch with her and that they send her a pair of shoes. Enclosed was a photo from England of Jane in a luxurious fur coat but her shoes were not shown in the photo. She enclosed a piece of string that was the length of her foot so that the shoes would be the correct size. Jane Borsuk thought that her cousins had a particularly nice fur coat but she needs shoes? Jane Borsuk took the string and bought a new pair of shoes not knowing the correct width. In taking them to the post office she found that new shoes could not be sent but used shoes could. Jane took the shoes and wore them a bit to scuff up the soles before sending them to England.