Publication
Amsterdam Atlas 1999
ISBN
9045001268 / 9789045001265
Language
Collections
Description
In the summer of 1992, the exiled poet Zofia Ilinska stepped into the Belorussian village where she'd spent her childhood. It was 53 years since the day she'd been forced to flee. In part, this is the remarkable story of what she found, the account of a woman coming face-to-face with her own past. But it is also the reconstruction of a world which vanished in 1939 when Soviet tanks rolled into eastern Poland.
Subjects
User reviews
LibraryThing member pnorman4345
A woman Sofia living in Cornwall but brought up in the area between Belarus, Lithuania and Poland has the diary and letters of he mother Helena. These are the source of information for this book. It is he story of her landowner family's difficulties in World War I with the Germans on one side and
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the Russians of the czar initially and then the bolsheviks on the other. Aft WWI with Poland's independence there was an idyllic period between the wars. Then WWII: the escaped from the Russians and the Germans to Vilnius and eventually to England. The author is a young friend to the daughter Sofia. He focuses exclusively on the information from Helena's diary and letters. It is hard not to think of the fact that this area was heavily populated with Jews and almost none survived. Show Less
Original publication date
1995