I was only sixteen when my family and I were pulled away from our home and country. My name is Alicja (Moskaluk) Edwards. I was born and raised in Poland and now am 77 years old. For the last 17 years I have been writing a story, or rather memoirs of my family’s imprisonment in the Soviet Union during World War II, in Stalin’s bloody era. We were forcibly taken from our home in the eastern part of Poland to the Asiatic state of Kazachstan, where we were condemned to slave labor in the year of 1940. Over the three agonizing years we faced mistreatment and degradation, sickness, hunger and death, till our release from bondage and fight to freedom across the Caspian Sea to Iran, where I met my husband, an American Army lieutenant. My story was originally meant to answer many questions posed by my family and friends, but somehow the explanation of what happened to me and the other forgotten war victims grew into enlarged vignettes of nonfiction events and history, unknown or forgotten by the rest of the world. (I say unknown or forgotten because I have yet to hear or read about any of the atrocities inflicted on Polish survivors imprisoned in Soviet Russia during World War II ---- could I be the only one alive?)

"REST IN PEACE- JAN ZABLOCKI-1914-1939"

Read the sign above, inscribed with huge letters into the brass plate, whose fellow mate, a sturdy oak cross glistening with sharp splinters where it cracked in the middle, lay helplessly over the grass covered hill, as if to offer itself in a final gesture of protection to the one who, ironically, could no longer rest in peace.

The bomb did not spare the cemetery. The raid was over, for hours maybe. I kept reading the sign over and over again, the letters staring at me with their black engraving -"rest in peace"... the significance of it seemed a ridiculous contradiction to the violence around us. From now on, there would be no more rest or peace – for either the dead or living.

September 1939 ... unforgettable! Under the blue skies death ran hand in hand with fear and destruction – bombs, machine guns, explosions – the endless nightmare that tormented our country from the first day of war, seemed to hang on like a prolonged and painful illness to the very end, so incongruous with the azure sky and golden autumn. The nightmare persisted while the sun shone on, shamelessly, watching the end of a tragic drama – the death of Poland. History was repeating itself and I, who, just a few months ago, had studied the subject in a classroom, became an eyewitness to a new chapter. This phase, I thought, would remain in my mind like an etched plaque in remembrance of the past and oncoming cataclysms in thousands of tomorrows. Yet, in the years to come, the detailed reports would be reduced to the essential facts only.

The screams of horror will be expressed only in novels and movie scripts for a second-grade imitation of a true-life tragedy. The painful memories will be recalled in poems and plays with well-suited words and phrases, but as for the naked truth of the feelings, you could not recapture it and associated events you would not dare to recreate. Thus, the human Gahanna of the 1939 war will fade into a legend, except for short paragraphs and brutally official and cold statements; history will move on, patiently recording events ... a loyal secretary to God.

Someday seemed like another planet. Yesterday meant everything because it happened already and you were a part of it, living through each moment, cherishing it as some secretly stolen prize. Now though the passing time left the imprints of rapid events like a bloody tattoo, hurting deeply, it was the sign that you were still alive and that was the most important thing.

If only one could shut off the past, yet strange, how the fall of a first bomb carved the moat around the bygone days of the past month and lifted them high as in a dream, where I could look upon and long for them, but never reach and touch them again.

Somehow I knew there would never be another year or day like those that remained behind me. The remembered peace and secure life made them seem like an imaginary fairyland I once walked through ... the carefree moments stood out in memory like dimensional pictures, inspiring the yearning for them to come back and creating a Shangri-La out of something that was the happy days of my childhood.