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Krysia: A Polish Girl's Stolen Childhood During World War II by Krystyna Mihulka and Krystyna Poray Goddu (view source)
Revision as of 13:15, 22 March 2018
, 13:15, 22 March 2018no edit summary
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|title=Krysia: A Polish Girl's Stolen Childhood During World War II
|author=Krystyna Mihulka and Krystyna Poray Goddu
|website=
|video=
|amazonukaznuk=1613734417|aznus=1613734417|cover=<amazonuk>1613734417</amazonuk>
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And make no mistake about it, Krysia's story is a new one. (Think Trisha, but with a K.) In the many photos we get in this book we see her as a slightly frumpy, slightly severe girl with a most unfortunate bowl cut, her facial expression varying between cynical and sternly determined. But, of course, a lot of her story was not told by a camera. It's down to her memory to bring to us the winters in the farm, where you were provided with a ladder to prop against the snow that you cleared from the dorm door to walk on the surface crust, on a level with your eaves. It's down to her mistakenly wandering about in the night in one instance, thinking bright lights were bringing her and a companion home when they were actually the eyes of starving wolves. It's down to the nine year old's point of view, that conveys the horror of your mother being taken away by interrogation by the NKVD regarding your father's whereabouts and military status, even when there are several thousands of miles between him and you.
And it's down to the author to convey the tribulations that sees the family slowly, inexorably, brought back - not to Europeas you may assume, and but at least through to a an albeit troubled peacetime. Those troubles aren't any the lighter for this being a book designed for the under-twelves; far from it. What we see need not be deemed solely for the young audience – like the best of books it reaches all ages, and tells anyone of any level of expertise something new. There was me, looking to tick off Kazakhstan on my list of weird countries I've been to – I would have no idea victims of WWII were fetched up there, where potential babies had no hope, where children might if they were lucky be trained in potato sorting, or creating dung cakes for winter fuel, or if they were unlucky, be snatched off to a quick bit of brainwashing in a Soviet orphanage.
What this is, then, is an unexpected, fresh and most unusual story of that War that like as not you have not come across before. What it is, is a narrative of how the entire century changed – where people with a nanny-cum-maid, a French tutor and piano lessons were forced away, and had to struggle to return on crowded trains in wartime, alongside parents that had been stripped of all class and prestige by a Soviet ideal. It shows a point in time that while the war encompassed a lot of the globe, the world these people knew expanded incredibly, as they found foreign corners to reside in afterwards. The book is really quite accessible, and while there's nothing to comment on as regards literary style, the selling point is how fresh and different this familiar-''seeming'' narrative is. I just wish the ending was not so emotionless and abrupt, otherwise this would have reached the highest rating.