Wanda Chwastowska-Bystram: I nursed women who had eaten children
- Keywords: Poles in the Gulag / resistance / interrogation / torture / frost / hard work / hygiene in the Gulag / relationships in the Gulag / hunger / children in the Gulag / rats
Wanda Chwastowska-Bystram was not intimidated easily. When the Nazis took her native Lvov, she joined the underground Home Army aged just 23. The resistance movement along with the Red Army succeeded in freeing the city from Hitler’s rule soon.
The Soviets, however, took issue with Wanda’s courage. Afraid she could oppose them as well, they made sure to arrest the young woman, beat her brutally and then drag her through Gulag camps for years. She experienced deadly frost, hunger that drove many people insane, life-draining hard work and incessant attacks of lice, bedbugs and rats.
She met mothers broken so severely that they refused to feed their own children. She, however, did not let the system break her. She lived through all the hardships and, having returned home, gave a valuable testimony on living in the hell of Stalin’s labour camps.
Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski: The resistance fighter and writer experienced many people’s stories in the Gulag
- Keywords: Poles in the Gulag / hunger / diseases / Yertsevo / hunger strike / sexuality / protest / resistance / war / liberation
It seems as Gustaw Herling-Grudziński had experienced multiple lives of several different people. A resistance fighter, journalist, writer, literary critic and Gulag survivor, he was a member of the generation raised between the two World Wars in Poland when the country regained independence after more than a century.
This may be why he valued freedom so much and would not easily give it up, whether it was his personal or national freedom. Destiny would always take him where history was made. He used his exceptional observational and literary talent to deliver a testimony on what happened for future generations.