Encounter with Survival

It was in Ukraine

in the farming village

next to where my father was born.

Dad's village had been destroyed

to wipe out all signs of it

after the war.

So no one we spoke to knew of it

until an old woman came out of her house

and she walked with us

to where the settlement had been.

Through the translator

she explained that she remembered the Polish village school.

She went there, after the war,

when it was no longer a Polish school,

but a Soviet-Ukrainian one,

all the Poles having been

deported to Russia in 1940

or murdered in 1943

or deported after the war to Western Poland in 1945

which, months earlier, had been part of Germany.

And then she said that she,

just a little girl,

used to live in a part of Poland

which was still a part of Poland

after the war,

and that she and all her Ukrainian neighbours

were all deported to Soviet Ukraine.

Thus the Poles were ethnically cleansed to Poland

the Ukrainians to Ukraine

the Germans to Germany

and so on

like a tumbling massive game of chess.

So, she said in summary,

she didn't know the Poles who used to live here

because she came after they were all gone,

and she, as a Ukrainian raised in Poland

became lost and bewildered when sent to Ukraine to live,

she laughed, I was lost because I was now a Ukrainian in Ukraine.