Nina Zylko | polishexiles

Nina ŻYŁKO

I was born in Siberia.

On the last day before the Soviet war with Germans, my family was deported to Siberia on 20 June 1941. As my mother used to tell, at dawn they surrounded the house, and the soldiers told them to pack some necessary things. They then loaded them on a cart and took them to the Narewka train station.

They took my mother, 8 months pregnant with me, my four-year-old brother Janusz, her brother and his wive and 8-month-old daughter. Grandma Anna wasn't on the list so the Russian soldier said: "Grandma run because you won't survive there." Grandma was 60 years old, but Grandma said where my children are, there I am. And she came with the family. At that time, my father had been forcibly conscripted into the Soviet army stationed in Osowiec.

Cattle wagons were set up at the station, where there were already a lot of people. You could hear children crying, curses, old women with rosaries in their hands praying to God. People were loaded into wagons and transported to the unknown. Then Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. The journey took us for 3 weeks to reach the town of Biały Jar in Archangelsk. The town was located 5 km from the Taiga.

They put our family in barracks where there were already 5 families. In the middle stood a stove. Mother was assigned to logging work, together with her brother and two Russians. One day my mother felt bad, she knew that she would soon give birth so she decided to stay at home. But the Commandant said that pregnancy was not a disease, Russian women work until the end, so she took a sheet, a towel, a few rags tied in a knot so that there would be something to wrap the baby, in and she went to the forest. Her brother told her to go and rest, and he would make the norm for her, so that she would get her portion of bread. Mother went to a fir tree, broke off a branch and covered it with a sheet, and on that August morning she gave birth to me there, and the cries of a child were only heard by a blue taiga. After a few hours, with the help of two Russian women, she got to the barracks. Grandma dripped a little water on me and named me Nina.

And so, for 5 years this child grew forever hungry. My mother fed me nettle, and sometimes a Russian woman brought a cup of goat’s milk. After 5 years of this wretched life, they returned to Poland. Only Grandma Anna remained forever in this inhumane land. She died of typhoid and is buried in Omsk. Many Poles didn't return because Siberia is the biggest prison in the world with no roof, no bars, no windows. and you can't escape.

Father didn't return from the war so mother raised us herself. But we were no longer hungry and we had something to wear. Her brother served in the army, led construction in Cz Odstochów and there at the age of 26, he died in a car accident. His mother had been very desperate that he not die of hunger in Siberia and here he died in an accident.

When I grew up, I finished school, I met my husband, started a family and became a mother of three daughters. I found my home in the picturesque Nowogrod by the Narva, where the river tells my own stories, sometimes calm and sometimes stormy like human fate. When the Sybirak Association was established, I joined its ranks. I have served various functions in the Union for 25 years as Secretary and Spokesperson of the Branch.

I am a memory's keeper. I write poems that carry truth about the past. I meet with young people talking about the hell experienced in Siberia, so that no one forgets what freedom is and how much it costs. And even though I've stopped working, I'm still on duty once a week. It must also be mentioned that at the Lomza Branch a lot of memorial signs were created, such as: Monuments, epitaph plaques, street names, squares, roundabouts, symbolic names of schools, and the “School of Polish Children of Siberia in Szczepankowo", the Oaks of Memory. books, poems, paintings, and banners.

We should first and foremost remember about the people who were victims of that time, both about those who survived and who returned after experiencing unimaginable persecution and suffering. For this Golgotha of the East, today it is a symbolic definition of this tragic fate, and also an obligation upon us. Because those who were not there won't believe, and who were there will never forget. As Peter Skarg wrote: Homeland is our Mother - it is not only a country, but it's the most important good that we must love and suffer for it if it is necessary.