IRENA: An Inspiring Journey through the Trauma of a Russian Invasion

1. A PUZZLE

When my mother was a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl, free and innocent of any crime, the Russian army took her captive, padlocked her in a cattle train, and deported her to Siberia where she was imprisoned and forced into unpaid labor for the Russian state.

It was my father who told me this story. I don’t know how old I was when Dad first related these events—it’s as if I’d always known this piece of family history. My father, who was English, seemed proud of his Polish wife’s resilience. As for me, I was left thinking that Russians were not very nice people.

But I’d never met a Russian, at least not until I was a teenager.

When I was seventeen, the same age my mother had been when she was abducted, Mum invited me to accompany her and Dad to a cocktail party at a neighbor’s house in Beaconsfield, a town in Buckinghamshire, just outside London. I was home from boarding school for the Christmas holidays, and Mum knew that my social calendar was not exactly booked up.

I didn’t like cocktail parties. When I thought of the upcoming event, I imagined a crowd of old fogies small talking about English weather. But I had nothing else to do that Saturday afternoon in January 1965, and I thought maybe I’d find someone interesting to talk to, perhaps a young woman. Maybe I’d fall in love.

When we arrived, we were ushered into a large sitting room with French windows looking out onto a tidy garden with neatly trimmed hedges. I quickly scanned the guests. The room was populated with people holding glasses, standing in small groups. I was the only one under forty. The whole room seemed to thrum with multiple conversations to which I did not belong and about which I had no real interest.

To get over my discomfort, I decided the best thing to do was to take the step to talk to people, and before long, I was the one mouthing polite words to people I didn’t know, trying to disguise my awkwardness with small talk.

I was standing next to Mum, wishing this whole thing were over, when two men walked over to us. “Hello,” said the heavier set of the two. He was speaking to my mother, a petite, vivacious blonde in her early forties with big blue eyes and neatly mascaraed eyelashes. She introduced herself as Irena and then introduced me. He asked her where she was from and then said in his sonorous voice, “We’re from Russia.”

My interest was piqued. I figured this conversation with the Russians was going to be more interesting than talking about what school I went to or what jobs people did.

The heavyset man explained, in perfect English, that he and his partner were in England for a year on business, and then, as if trained on the importance of weather-talking to the British, he changed the subject. “It’s a bit cold outside,” he said, “but not very. It’s not like a Russian winter.”

No, I thought, nothing like a winter in Siberia!

“Last year,” he continued, “when we experienced spring here in England, we didn’t really notice much difference between winter and spring.” He smiled. “You don’t really have proper seasons here.”

His partner chimed in: “In Russia, we have contrasts between our seasons. We move from thick winter snow to a sudden thaw, from cold to hot. There are big changes in temperature. It’s wonderful to feel the movement of the seasons. Nothing seems to change very much in Britain.”

I was irritated. My mother hadn’t found the climate in Siberia that great. And then, the Russians’ meteorological comparisons carried an edge of combat—as if they were rattling ancient sabers in a battle between old empires, muffled and mollified by the unspoken rules of cocktail etiquette.

Mum and I both agreed—politely—that the seasons in Russia were, indeed, more decisive than the seasons in England.

And then the heavyset man asked Mum, “Have you ever been to Russia?”

“Yes, I have.”

“How did you travel there?”

“By train.”

“And did you like the countryside?”

“Yes. It was beautiful.”

Now, I was angry. I wanted to yell at them—my mother couldn’t see the countryside! She was locked in a cattle car with no windows on a one-way train to Siberia! It was your people who locked her up!

I said nothing.

As soon as the two Russian men had moved on to meet other people, I spoke to my mother privately. I was still hot with indignation. “Why didn't you tell those two Russian men that you couldn't see the countryside because for thirteen days you were locked in a cattle car with no windows?”

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

That stopped me in my tracks. I had no reply.

Another guest then approached my mother, and I was left to myself for a while. My mind was buzzing with thoughts. Of course, those two men were not responsible for the actions of the Russian army all those years ago. Still, shouldn’t they know what happened! Shouldn’t they hear the unexpurgated history of their own country’s actions! The atrocities committed! The pain inflicted on innocent people!

That was my first reaction. I wanted them to know.

There was something else that baffled me—my mother’s words had carved a puzzle I could not solve. She seemed to carry no bitterness about being abducted from her country and forced to perform backbreaking manual labor in Siberia, whereas I—who had been neither abducted nor forced into unpaid labor—was carrying this anger about what had happened to her. Why was this? Why was I more incensed about what had happened to my mother than she was?

I wanted to know for my own personal understanding. Later, I wanted to know because I was a psychiatrist—or maybe I became a psychiatrist because I wanted to know. I’m not sure.

SOME THIRTY YEARS after that cocktail party, I finally asked my mother about the puzzle of her equanimity, a quality I did not share—at least not when it came to the subject of Russia. I was now living in the Catskills in upstate New York with my wife, Kathryn, and our two sons, Arthur and Alexander.

At this time my mother lived alone in Bourne End, a village about twenty miles west of London and close to the River Thames. She and I were the only ones still alive out of our original family of five. My father had died recently, and my two sisters had died long before.

Mum’s house had a fine view. She and Dad had turned an acre of wet, reedy terrain—a flood plain of the River Thames—into a parklike garden of lawn and exotic trees. About fifteen feet away from the picture windows of their living room, there was a tiny tributary of the Thames about twelve feet wide, cutting through the garden, its gentle waters flowing languidly.

One summer in the mid 1990s, during one of my visits to England, Mum and I were sitting together in her living room, looking out on the brook and the garden. She was in her early seventies, lively, decisive, and blunt in her opinions. Her fluent and well-stocked vocabulary of English was spiced with a Polish accent. She never quite mastered the English “th” so Kathryn, my wife, was ‘Katryn,’ and Arthur, our older son, was ‘Artur.’ “I think it’s very unfair,” she once joked with me, “that you called your son by a name that has a ‘t, h’ in it.” I looked at her with a smile, turning my hands palm-up in resignation. I told her that her pronunciation of English was a hundred times better than my pronunciation of Polish, which, unfortunately, I’d never learned. She agreed with me.

There had been a certain distance between my mother and me. We’d lived our own separate lives for a long time, and we lived an ocean away from each other. Now in my late forties, I found myself looking for a way of reconnecting.

As we were watching the garden, a great, gray, fluttering shape entered our fields of vision. “Look! Heron!” Mum exclaimed, pointing to the yard-high, bluish-gray bird that had just landed, somewhat awkwardly, next to the brook.

I smiled. I would have to have been pretty well blind not to have seen that heron. Mum loved watching her avian visitors and didn’t want anyone to miss these gifts from nature. She and Dad had chosen this house for the abundant wildlife—countless birds, deer, rabbits, foxes, frogs, and fish—that flourished in the garden, protected by the wilder land between the garden and the Thames.

We watched the heron as it walked into the shallows of the brook. Once the bird found a favored spot, it stood completely still, its legs disguised as reeds, its eyes alert for the tiniest movement in the water below. Mum and I said nothing for a few minutes. And then, from absolute stillness, the heron’s head suddenly accelerated downward in one, swift, lethal jab. In less than a second, the heron was holding a frog in its long beak. It tossed the frog into the air, imparting just the right amount of spin so that the hapless frog landed headfirst into the heron’s wide-open beak. Within seconds the frog was swallowed whole, ready for digestion and assimilation into the body of the bird.

“Amazing,” I said. “I’ve never seen that before.”

“I’ve seen the heron catch fish,” Mum said. “It’s a little harder seeing it eat the frog. When I was a little girl, I used to try to save frogs. There was a boy who would pull the legs off live frogs. I couldn’t stand to see this, so I used my pocket money to buy the healthy frogs from him. Then I let them go.”

“That was kind of you.”

“I couldn’t stand seeing that cruelty.”

Neither of us said anything for a while. I thought about my mother in Poland as a little girl, doing what she could to protect those frogs from being hurt. And then I thought about the Russian invasion of Poland and all the cruelty and hurt that she could do nothing about.

“Mum,” I said, “I have a question for you.”

She looked at me with a faint smile. “Yes?”

“This is about your time in Russia.”

“OK.”

“Here’s my question. How come you have no anger with the Russians, after all that happened to you years ago, while I—I who wasn’t stolen from my own country and imprisoned in Russia—still feel angry on your behalf?”

“You don’t need to be angry for my sake.”

“Yes, I know. And I know it’s not helpful—to you or to me. But I’m still mad about what happened to you. The question that intrigues me is why you’re not.”

Mum smiled. “Richard,” she said in an even voice, “I was angry when the Russians invaded. My life was turned upside down. My father disappeared. I was taken from my own country. My mother was beside herself with fear. Of course I was upset.”

She paused for a moment, looked out into the garden and then back at me. “I remember when the Russians came to my boarding school. The Russian Communist officials ordered the destruction of the school library. I used to love going to this library. It was a beautiful old room with pillars and shelves of leather-bound books. I enjoyed the peacefulness of the library. I liked thinking of all the knowledge stored in these classic books. I really liked learning.”

“They destroyed the whole library?”

“Not the building. The books. We were ordered to throw the library books into a huge bonfire. It’s something I’ll never forget. We were all staring into that fire, watching these beautiful books burn to ashes. We were all—teachers and students—standing there in silent rage. There was nothing we could do.”

“You witnessed a librocide!”

“I haven’t heard that word before.”

“The killing of a library of knowledge. Some empires go further than occupying lands that are not theirs—they do everything they can to destroy the culture and the history of the people they have conquered. It’s a kind of insurance policy to prevent the rightful people from ever wanting to come back.”

Mum said nothing. I continued, and I’m pretty sure there was some anger in my voice. “The Spanish conquistadors systematically destroyed the libraries of the indigenous South American civilizations, using the excuse that their writings came from the devil. The Communists used the same excuse: they just substituted ‘capitalist’ for ‘devil.’”

“They used to call us ‘blood-sucking capitalists,’” Mum said with a slight smile of amusement. “I think you’re right about the Russians trying to break up our culture. The burned books were all in Polish. I remember thinking they were trying to destroy our language.”

There was a moment of silence.

“How did you feel afterward?” I asked.

“Livid,” she said, though she was calm as she said it. It seemed to me that there was some cornerstone of fierce determination underlying that calmness, but I couldn’t be sure. “I think all of us were angry,” she continued. “After witnessing this act of violence to our books, I was also afraid of what the Russians might do to us. They had occupied our country. They had complete power over us. They could do anything they wanted. They walked into our schools and our homes whenever they pleased. They could take any possessions they wanted and any people they wanted. No one dared say anything for fear of the Russian response. We all knew that anyone who opposed them disappeared.”

“When you think of this now, do you still feel any of that anger or fear from time to time?”

“No, I don’t.”

Before I had time to make any comment, Mum continued: “I remember being at home when the Russians searched our house. My father had already disappeared. My mother and I didn’t know if he had been executed by the Russians or if he was still alive somewhere in Siberia.”

“Were those the only two possibilities?”

“We knew that these things had happened to many other people in our town. They were standard Russian practices for anyone who had ever been in the Polish army. My father had been a lieutenant.”

“How old were you?”

“Sixteen. I remember the bang on the door. The two Russian soldiers knocked so loudly on our front door that we were startled. We were afraid. When my mother opened the door, they marched in without invitation and started to search our house.”

“A violent intrusion into your privacy!”

“Yes. Though we did expect it. We knew from our friends that this was happening everywhere.”

“What were they looking for?”

“I don’t know exactly. They found my father’s revolver and took it. When they marched into my bedroom, I was pretty sure they wouldn’t find anything of interest to them. Still, I hated them coming into my room without invitation.”

“I can imagine!”

“They found one thing in my room that interested them. They picked up a little wooden box that was locked. ‘Where’s the key!’ they demanded. I told them I’d lost the key. I didn’t want them nosing around in my things. ‘No problem,’ they said, ‘we’ll break the box!’ I didn’t want them to do that—this was the most precious thing I owned. So I decided to find the key.”

She paused again. I waited.

“They opened the box with the key I gave them. The room was suddenly filled with the sweet scent of perfume.” Mum smiled. “Inside the box were my love letters and a little wad of cotton wool soaked in perfume.” The scent of perfume, she explained, permeated her writing paper at the bottom of the box, and also, on top, all the letters she’d received from her boyfriend. Beneath his letters, and above her writing paper, were letters from previous boyfriends. She’d kept them all. “I told the soldiers they were love letters of no possible use to them. They took the box and all my letters.”

“How did you feel?”

“Furious.”

The heron was still motionless.

“And what about now?” I asked. “Do you still feel angry when you think back on all this?”

“No, I don’t.”

It was true that she had related these incidents of Russian behavior with no visible rancor.

“So, you were angry at the time, but you just didn’t hold onto that anger,” I summarized. “You never became bitter.”

“No, I guess not.”

“How come?”

“I don’t really know.”

I believed her. At the same time, I wanted to know why she was so much less upset than I was. “Maybe if I knew your whole story,” I said, “that might provide a clue.”

“Richard, I’d be happy to tell you all that happened as best I can. I’d like to do that. But I don’t know if it will give you your answer.”

“Either way, I’d love to write down your story.”

“Good! I’d love to tell you.”

We were silent for a while, and then Mum said, “We can start right now if you like.”

“I think we just started.”

Mum smiled.

This was the beginning of a series of intimate conversations that, interspersed into my ongoing visits to England, continued over the course of eighteen years.