IRENA

A Surprising Response to the Horror of War in Eastern Europe

This is the last photo of my mother Irena, age 16, in 1939 taken in her homeland (present day Ukraine), shortly before the Russians marched into her country and locked her and thousands of others in a cattle train to Siberia.

Twenty five years later, my mother and I (age 18) were at a cocktail party near London, talking to two Russian men. “Have you ever been to Russia?” they asked my mother.

“Yes, I have,” she replied.

“How did you travel there?” they inquired.

“By train.”

“And did you like the countryside?”

“Yes,” my mother replied, “it was beautiful.”

As soon as the Russian men had moved on to speak with others, I spoke to my mother with all the pent-up anger I had with Russia for having taken my mother prisoner all those years ago: “Why didn’t you tell those two Russians men that you couldn’t see the countryside, because for 13 days you were imprisoned in a cattle car that had no windows?”

“Richard,” she said, looking me in the eye, “those two men did not lock me in that cattle car.”

“Those two men did not lock me in that cattle car.”

When I recently told this story, I received a wonderful response from people who felt inspired by Irena’s lack of bitterness and blame. Some also asked:

Should my mother have told the truth to those two Russian men? Shouldn’t people know the truth of what really happened, they said, so that people can be held accountable?

In response, this is Part 2 of the story:

Irena certainly believed in the truth being imparted. My parents figured that the Russian men would be more likely to listen in a private setting rather than in a cocktail party. After the cocktail party, my father David invited these same two Russians to Brunel University where he worked, and talked to them about my mother’s experience. The men, however, did not believe my mother’s history, nor did they believe that Stalin and Hitler had made a pact in 1939 to divide Poland between them, thereby starting the second world war.

David told them that after the second world war, Stalin (who then had control over Eastern Europe) had effectively forced the move of Poland some 200 km westwards so that my mother’s birthplace in what was then eastern Poland became the most westerly Ukrainish part of the USSR. By this shifting of a country, the USSR gained 179,00 sq. km. (69,000 square miles) of land.

The two men could not believe this shift had happened. My father was prepared. He got out maps of Europe before and after the second WW and showed them, there and then, how Poland had been moved Westwards. Even with the evidence of the maps in front of their eyes, they said they couldn’t believe it. This was not what they had learned in their motherland. The changing of history by autocrats the world over can be scary indeed.

It may seem that my parents’ attempt to let these Russian men know what had happened was a failure. But this may not be true.

In the 1960s, Russians were generally not allowed to leave Russia, and if they did, they had to travel in pairs to avoid the possibility of defection to the countries they visited, which manifested so much more material abundance than they had seen at home. The forced-pair-system worked well because neither one of a pair dared dissent from the Russian story for fear of being denounced by the other. It is quite possible that my father’s display of maps cast some doubt in their minds even if they could never admit it to each other.

Of course, we cannot know the effect on these men, in the same way that we often cannot know the results of any good we may attempt, or how many years it might take for an action to bear fruit. But I do know the results this day had on me:

Despite my mother’s genuine absence of anger or bitterness about her past, it took me more than 20 years before I was able to be free from my prejudice against Russia. So my mother’s words to me did bear fruit eventually. Over a period of seven years I interviewed my mother and got every detail of her story. I intend to publish it. My mother’s story was also an inspiration for me me to focus my professional life on attempting to understand divisiveness and how to overcome it.

Thank you for reading.