Beata Obertynska. Photo: Public Domain. Wojskowe Biuro Historyczne

This book is not ‘mine’. History wrote it. It was written by the harm and suffering of over a million Poles, thrown into the concealed depth of Russian land, from where only some of us got back alive. This is how Beata Obertyńska, who also used the pseudonym Marta Rudzka, described her unique book.

Beata Obertyńska, daughter of the poet Maryla Wolska and petroleum entrepreneur Wacław Wolski, was born in 1898 in Skole, Ukraine. She was raised in Lviv, where the local intellectual elite was meeting in her family home. At the age of 26 she made her debut on the pages of ‘The Polish Word’. She also studied at The State Institute of Theatre Arts, and then in 1933–1937 she performed on the stages of Lviv theaters.

In 1940 she was arrested by the NKVD and found herself in the ‘Brygidki’ prison in Lviv. Then, through prisons in Kiev, Odessa, Kharkiv and Starobielsk, she reached the labour camp in Loch-Vorkuta. The next stage of her wandering was Samarkand, then Tashkent, and finally the kolkhoz near Bukhara. She was released as a consequence of the Sikorski-Majski agreement. Close to starvation, she joined the ranks of the Anders’ Army, with which she went through the entire war trail. After reaching Italy, she served as a lieutenant in the 2nd Polish Corps Education Department in Rome.

In 1940s she wrote down her memories, which she entitled In the House of Slavery. The first edition was published in Italy in 1946. Although the book was from the beginning perceived as one of the most outstanding testimonies of Stalinist crimes in world literature, in Poland it remained unknown until 1983, when it appeared in samizdat.

In her memories, Obertyńska described all situations in which she found herself as a poet: the entry of Soviet troops into Kresy, the moment of arrest, interrogations, prisons, labor camps, kolkhozes, up to the service in the Anders’ Army. She recreated the realities of the other co-suffering women of different nationalities. She also added poetic descriptions to her memories. These, thanks to their plasticity, further emphasized the tragic situation even more.

30 years after the first edition of The House of Slavery, Obertyńska’s book, thanks to fund-raisings organised by the Polish Americans community, was published in Chicago in the United States and the author herself began to receive many literary awards, including the prize of ‘The Universal Review’ from London in 1967, and the prizes of The Lanckoronski Foundation and The Polish Combatants’ Association in 1972. She died in exile in London in 1980.

Translated from Polish: Sylwia Szarejko, Kamila Czechowska

Biogram based on the book: S. Szarejko, Kobiety niepokonane/Undefeated Woman, Białystok 2019, edited by Sybir Memorial Museum