And God Was Our Witness

About the Book

I was only sixteen when my family and I were pulled away from our home and country. My name is Alicja (Moskaluk) Edwards. I was born and raised in Poland and now am 77 years old. For the last 17 years I have been writing a story or rather memoirs of my family’s imprisonment in the Soviet Union during World War II, in Stalin’s bloody era. We were forcibly taken from our home in the eastern part of Poland to the Asiatic state of Kazachstan, where we were condemned to slave labor in the year of 1940. Over the three agonizing years we faced mistreatment and degradation, sickness, hunger and death, till our release from bondage and fight to freedom across the Caspian Sea to Iran, where I met my husband, an American Army lieutenant. My story was originally meant to answer many questions posed by my family and friends, but somehow the explanation of what happened to me and the other forgotten war victims grew into enlarged vignettes of nonfiction events and history, unknown or forgotten by the rest of the world. (I say unknown or forgotten because I have yet to hear or read about any of the atrocities inflicted on Polish survivors imprisoned in Soviet Russia during World War II ---- could I be the only one alive?)

About the Author

I was born in a small town of Eastern Poland. My vivid recollections are of being raised in a comfortable atmosphere of tranquility and culture rich in art, theater and music. The war brought unforeseen changes and the end of an peaceful era. When destruction from German bombs had ceased, the people in the east of Poland faced another danger, the occupation of the Soviet troops. Our father was arrested immediately as an enemy of the “ red regime” and few months later we followed his fate. I was only sixteen when my family and I, were pulled away from our home and country. We were forcibly taken and sent away to the Asiatic state of Kazakhstan in the year of 1940, where we were condemned to a slave labor for the next three years, facing mistreatment, sickness, hunger and death till our release from bondage and a flight to freedom across the Caspian Sea to Iran where I met my husband, an American army Lieutenant. Before meeting my husband, my family and I, lived in the refugee camps in Teheran, later after the death of my mother, I was married in 1945. At that time we lived in the southern Iran, in Khorromshahr at Persian Gulf till my husband was shipped back to U.S., leaving me to wait for a permit to enter U.S. which came very much later in 1946, letting me arrive in New York. Barely acquainted with a new way of living in the great U.S., I was back on the trail, following my husband to Japan, where my son Chris was born. We spent four glorious years in the land of Rising Sun, then headed back to U.S. to circulate in several army posts finally settling in Washington D.C. where my daughter Tina was born. Next came Germany , a short stint and back to Wisconsin for a while then a long stretch of four years in a vacation land, a seaside adventure in La Baule, France.- In 1960 we were back in States and time of retirement from the army but still in touch with a government. Our son Chris had volunteered for Vietnam and my husband working in a civil service, followed him also. One year in Saigon and then back to Chicago long enough to pack again , moving to New England, Ayer Mass. New life again, new friends and new interest in antiques. Few years and we were back Chicago with my husband enjoying a new profession, in auctioneering. It has been a glorious life, wonderful children, -no regrets except for a loss of my husband 6 years ago. I am back at the keyboard, to bring back our life in refugee camps in Iran. I hope I can finish and go on to other places we have lived in and enjoyed no matter what circumstances and conditions. Throughout the years of our roaming around the world, each return became quite sentimental greeting with a warm feeling for being back home no matter what state or the corner of the U. S., it always was a safest place, the best , our land of Stars and Stripes.