Through Polish Tears

This is a novel or creative non-fiction, whichever you prefer, about war, the Second World War. It is based on facts and eye-witness accounts. The vast majority of the characters existed and did do what the novel details. If an exact date is given, the event is factual. All of the peripheral characters are fictional as is the vast majority of the dialogue. The main exceptions being many of Winston Churchill's speeches, anecdotes and comments, plus Chapter 42 which is based on the Hansard transcription of the Parliamentary debate. The cover photo shows the medal awarded to Alina Margareta Kibilski, nee Andrzejewska, in August 2014. It was awarded at a small ceremony at the Polish Embassy in London, and recognises her suffering in the camps of Siberia from 1940 to 1942. The other side of the family, who lived throughout the war in Poland, experienced equally harrowing times. I was born in England, the son of an Irish immigrant, and was interested to hear the stories of Polish immigrants, who arrived in England like my father, but on a far more complicated journey. I had missed the war by just a few years, but with my friends I played in the bombed out buildings, which didn't get replaced until the 1960's. We were fascinated by the conflict that we had only just missed. With my friends I collected a series of war comics from a second-hand shop, until we had them almost right up to date. By then we were twelve years old and decided to grow up. However the fascination has never left me. The book deals in particular with the contrasting experiences of the Polish families of my wife Irena, or Irenka as her aunt still calls her. Both of her grandfathers served in the Polish Army, were captured and sent to the Gulags and subsequently served as part of the Polish Corps assigned to the British 8th Army. How could that be? Well, read on. I have contrasted the experiences of ordinary people with that of the politicians and the senior military leaders, such as Felix Steiner a Waffen SS General, who was born in Stallupoenen (now Nesterov and part of Russian enclave on the Baltic), and Marshal Konstantin Rokossovski, born to a Polish father and a Russian mother, who grew up in Warsaw when it was the capital of a region of Russia. The borders of Poland had always been fluid and yet again proved to be so in the 20th Century. In the war years Poland suffered the loss of over six million citizens, over 90% of whom were civilians. It was a battlefield in 1939, 1941, 1944 and 1945 and the country where horrific crimes were committed against the Jews of Europe. In all over ten million people died in Poland between 1939 and 1945, and it didn't stop then due to the partisan wars. It is a tragedy, which I will try to explain, but no one could ever justify. The award of the medal in 2014 gave me the impetus to write this novel, which I hope you will thoroughly enjoy.