Krysia
Page 11
Epilogue
After our boat left Krasnovodsk, we sailed all night and day until we reached Pahlavi, Persia. For a month we lived on the beach. Our next home was a refugee camp in a park that had been a residence of one of the shah’s wives, in Persia’s capital, Tehran. Now it was filled with tents, and we settled into one of them.
Not long after, Ciocia Stefa, Wujcio Władzio, and Zosia arrived. Zosia soon left to travel with the army to Lebanon and Italy, while Ciocia Stefa and Wujcio Władzio remained until 1943, when they followed Zosia. In May 1944 my mother, Antek, and I were sent to Africa to await the end of the war. My mother was assigned to a medical team in Northern Rhodesia, and so we joined the 1,000 people at Bwana M’Kubwa, the Polish refugee camp there. My mother worked in the pharmacy, my brother went to the camp school, and I was sent to Dominican Convent High School, a boarding school in Ndola where I learned English.
The war finally ended in May 1945. To our dismay, we learned about a secret meeting in December 1943 between the United States, England, and Russia. The three countries had agreed to keep Poland under Soviet control in exchange for Soviet participation in the war against Japan. The Polish Communist government announced that anyone who did not return to Poland by a certain date would be deprived of citizenship. We were not willing to live under Communism, and no other country wanted us, so we remained in Northern Rhodesia.
We knew nothing about my father until 1946, when my aunt in Poland wrote with the tragic news that he had been caught by the Soviets in 1944 and shot. His body was never recovered. I was 16 years old when we received this news, and I felt I had been robbed. My country, my baby sister, my cousin, and now my father had all been taken from me because of that horrible war. I had barely had a childhood.
I never returned to Poland. I no longer felt that it was my country. After my experiences, I could never live under Communism. Lwów, the town I so loved as a child, became part of Russia and then, after the fall of Communism, Ukraine.
In June 1947 I took a secretarial job with the Northern Rhodesian government. By the time the refugee camp closed in 1948, I had saved enough money to send Antek to boarding school in South Africa.
By 1946, when this photo was taken, my mother, Antek, and I were living in Africa in Northern Rhodesia. We were no longer the gaunt, starved figures that had sailed from Krasnovodsk.
In 1954 I sailed to England for a six-month vacation. Ciocia Stefa and Wujcio Władzio now lived in London. There I met Franek, a Polish chemical engineering student at London University. Four months later we were engaged, but I had to return to my job in Africa.
Two months later Franek moved to Africa and got a job at a copper mine. On January 31, 1956, we were married. I moved from Ndola to Nkana, where he lived, and started working for the government medical bureau.
In June 1958 our son Andrew was born. By the time our daughter, Barbara, was born in January 1961, winds of change were blowing across Africa. Communists who had been trained in Russia and Cuba infiltrated the peaceful villages and towns. Violence against white people became common. In August 1962 we moved to Johannesburg, South Africa, where Antek was studying mining engineering. Our son Richard was born in December 1963.
But the political future of South Africa presented many problems. Riots erupted from time to time. We decided we didn’t want to bring up our children under these conditions. When Antek received a scholarship to Stanford University in California in 1967, we decided to go to the United States. On June 29, 1969, we boarded the RMS Windsor Castle and sailed away from South Africa.
When we arrived on the US East Coast on July 29, Zosia, whom I had last seen in Persia in 1942, met us at the dock. She was now married with three children: Krysia, Renia, and Marek. Ciocia Stefa and Wujcio Władzio had been living with Zosia and her family in New Jersey since 1956. We stayed with them until Franek got a job in San Francisco. On October 19, 1969, we arrived in California and settled in the Bay Area. My journey across the world had finally ended.
A Guide to Geographical Names
The world has changed a great deal since my family and I were taken out of Poland in 1940. My own city of Lwów is now located in Ukraine, not Poland. Many of the small villages and settlements in Kazakhstan no longer exist. Many cities and countries throughout the world have new names. In this book, I have used the geographical names as they were when I traveled through, and lived in, these places. Here is a guide to the contemporary names of the places mentioned in this book, in alphabetical order by the original names.
THEN
NOW
Akdendek, Kazakhstan
No longer on the map
Alma Ata, Kazakhstan
Almaty
Czechoslovakia
Czech Republic and Slovakia
Georgiewka, Kazakhstan
Kalbatau, or Qalbatau
Krasnovodsk, Turkmenistan
Türkmenbaşy
Lwów, Poland
Lviv, Ukraine
Northern Rhodesia
Zambia
Semipalatynsk, Kazakhstan
Semey
Yangi Yul, Uzbekistan
Yangiyo’l, or Yangiyul
Acknowledgments
First of all, I would like to thank Elaine Starkman, my writing teacher at Diablo Valley College and California State University, East Bay. Without her encouragement, support, and belief in me, this book would not have been written. I would also like to thank all the students who participated in the writing classes with me for listening to my stories and offering their suggestions and support. I hold a special memory of one of the students, Dr. Roy Kahn, whose help I’m very grateful for. He passed away before this book was published, and will be greatly missed.
Great thanks go to my cousin and collaborator Krystyna Poray Goddu, who served as both editor and agent for this project, working with me for more than a decade to shape my stories into a book and then persevering to inspire an editor’s interest. I’m very grateful to Lisa Reardon for being that editor—and for her excitement and enthusiastic belief that this story needed to be told. Many thanks to Lindsey Schauer and everybody at Chicago Review Press who helped make this book both look and read as beautifully as it does.
I am deeply grateful to my brother, Antek Mihulka, who lived through these years with me. He and I have spent a great deal of time discussing the many events that occurred, and his memory of so many details enriched my own.
Thank you to my children and grandchildren for their ongoing support of my writing. I’m especially grateful to my daughter, Barbara, who wanted me to write these stories down, and to my granddaughter Christina, who read them when she was a young girl and who urged me to keep writing. Christina also devoted her time and filmmaking skills to creating a promotional video for the book, which my cousin Krystyna and I appreciate very much. Thank you to my son Richard for his computer technology support in so many ways! I also want to thank my son Andrew for enlightening me regarding issues of historical perspective, which further motivated me to write this book.
Thanks to the authors and experts who helped with this book: Wesley Adamczyk, author of When God Looked the Other Way, for lending photography and sharing his expertise; Steven Barnes, professor of modern Russian and Soviet history at George Mason University and author of The Wives’ Gulag: The Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland, for his insights into Kazakhstan geography; Vladimir Okhotin, representative of AboutKazakhstan.com, for additional geographical help; and Franek Rymaszewski, of www.rymaszewski.iinet.net.au, for lending photography.
Born in 1930, Krystyna Mihulka was deported from Poland to a remote village in Kazakhstan in 1940, where she lived as a political prisoner under Communist rule for nearly two years. After several years in refugee camps in Iran and Africa, she settled in Zambia, where she married and had three children. In 1969 she and her family migrated to the United States. She lives in Pleasant Hill, California, under her married name, Christine Tomerson.
Krystyna Pora
y Goddu is the author of A Girl Called Vincent and Doll-makers and Their Stories, among others. She has contributed to American Girl magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. She lives in New York City.
Jacket design: Sarah Olson
Front cover photo: Courtesy of Krystyna Mihulka
Printed in the United States of America