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JOURNEYS INTO EXILE

Journeys across the WORLD

For many of these women and men, their deportation began a story of movement across the world, in addition to the endless crossing of the Soviet Union to where they were resettled or imprisoned. The he violence of Nazis and Stalinists was, for some of them, the starting point for journeys across the world after being released from relegation. These journeys across the world need to be represented on two maps, with different scales and projections.

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« Ice children »

The ‘ice children’ crisscrossed the Soviet Union from North to South, East to West. While still children, they were sent on endless journeys by train, lorry and barge to the farthest points of Soviet territory. The children’s journeys had two legs, first deportation to the Altai, and then north of the Arctic Circle.

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Departure but not return

Some of the resettlers neither returned to their homeland nor set out for distant places. They decided voluntarily or under pressure to stay: they were firmly established in their resettlement location, had found a spouse or a position of responsibility, failed to settle back home, had money problems, etc. They were a minority (hard even to estimate), but they were to be found in Siberia and Central Asia.

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Prisons, camps and ressetlment

Many of these deported women and men spent time in the Gulag. Their journeys were a succession of imprisonments, long distances covered by train or on foot, alternating between camps and special resettlement villages, in harsh natural environments. Some would travel from the terrible cold of the Russian Far North to the searing heat of the steppes of Central Asia.

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« Ice children »

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Deportation trains

The first stage in deportation was the arrival of NKVD internal troops and local auxiliaries to snatch the future exiles from their homes, put them on lorries or wagons to a station and then into goods carriages. A given train comprised people who lived close to each other and often knew each other. After a lengthy journey, the families were taken further by road or river to places that might be close together or far apart.

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« Journeys across the World» :

Henry Welch fled with his mother to the Soviet Union, after the Nazi armies pushed across Poland, and was deported by the Soviet authorities. Then began a long journey. He was resettled to the Arkhangelsk region in the Russian Far North. Once released from his status as a ‘special displaced person’ (deportee) after an agreement between the Soviet government and the Polish government-in-exile in London, he set out for Central Asia, from one kolkhoz or sovkhoz collective farm to another. He returned to Poland in 1945, but as anti-Semitism persisted and most of his family had been exterminated by the Nazis, he began an odyssey that took him to South America (where his father lived) and the United States (where he went to university) and then back to Europe.

Zofie Daniszewska’s journey began like Henry Welch’s. Then she left the Soviet Union with Anders’ Army and went to Iran, and the British colonies of India and Kenya, since the Polish government-in-exile had fled to Britain. She returned to Poland via Lebanon, where she found her family, which had long been dispersed [Maps currently in preparation, not yet available].