Crater's Edge

Book excerpt: In September 1939, as a 10 year-old boy, Michal Giedroyc watched the Russian security police seize his home in Eastern Poland. His father, a senator and judge, was imprisoned while his mother, with Michal and his two sisters, were left on the streets of the local town to fend for themselves. Later they were transported in cattle trucks to the wastes of Soviet Siberia, with hundreds of thousands of other deportees. "Here, by the will of the rulers of the Soviet Empire, we were to toil and die." Eighteen months of deprivation and hunger on a collective farm brought them to the brink of extinction. Exhausted, half starved, and ill, Michal's mother and her children set off on a second grueling journey that would take them across Central Asia to Persia, the Middle East, and finally England. In one dramatic incident their survival hinged remarkably on the just two simple objects—a potato and a penknife.