My mom suggested I read this and I’m glad she did (she knows me well and this is the sort of book that’s right up my alley). Liberation — Russian Style is short at only 106 pages, but it packs a big emotional punch and really drives home the inhumanity of the forced civilian deportations by the Soviet government during WWII. This is one of those overlooked historical events in the American understanding of the US, I think, but millions of people were forcibly deported, usually into Siberia or one of the Far East Asian regions. About 250,000 Poles were sent off via cattle cars, with many people dying en route or of deprivation once they were thrown out into the steppe.
In this case, Ada Halpern and her mother and sister are sent from Polish Lwow (now Lviv in Ukraine) to Kazakhstan where they are dumped unceremoniously in a rural village and left to live or die. To her credit, Halpern manages to keep all three of them alive under extremely harsh conditions, which is astonishing considering that her mother is very sick the whole time and her sister is a young teenager. The Kazakhs are not welcoming and Halpern scrapes by with every ounce of cunning and hard work that she can, but by the end of the book her health has been broken due to the intense, non-stop manual labor and she is clearly at the end of her physical and mental rope. The descriptions of what they went through during the winter, nearly getting buried alive and freezing to death in their hut every day because of the non-stop snow, are horrific. She gets them out of Kazakhstan through heroic measures and the dust jacket notes that they were evacuated to the Middle East.
For me, this book serves as a reminder of the depredations and pure evil of the Soviet regime. It felt especially important to read given the attacks on Memorial by the current Russian regime (see the recent exchange of Oleg Orlov) and their desire for narratives like this one to vanish. Halpern’s incisive style and sheer human courage in the face of seemingly impossible odds made this book a special read.
Just as a note, I think this book was also published under the title Conducted Tour, but physical copies are hard to find either way. Lots of content warnings here for everything associated with being hauled away from Lwow by the secret police, sexually menaced, physically abused, nearly dying of illness and starvation, etc.