Book Review : A Memoir of Postwar Life in the U.S.S.R.

Between Two Worlds: The Life of a Young Pole in Russia 1939-46 by K. S. Karol, translated by Eamonn McArdle. (Holt/A New Republic Book: $19.95; 309 pages)

The cataclysms of history, blizzard-like, drive millions of lives before them in great indistinguishable clouds. Newsreels, photographs, television reports show us the columns of the dispossessed trudging hundreds of miles from one homelessness to the next, as anonymous and perishable as the swirling snow.

But people have voices and memories, and every once in a while, one will speak out in such a way as to assert the stubborn individuality of the human spirit over the mass displacements of human life.

Independent and Prickly

K. S. Karol is a Pole by origin who, for many years, has lived and worked as a journalist in France. He is an editor at Le Nouvel Observateur. There was a time when, like the magazine, he was a leftist; over the last couple of decades, he and the magazine and much of the French left underwent a sea-change that turned them independent and prickly, being armed, like the porcupine, all ways at once.

Karol was one of the extreme displaced. His father was a prosperous Russian Jew who lived, until the Revolution, in Rostov-on-the-Don. The family moved to Lodz, in Poland, and Karol was brought up a Pole. When World War II broke out, he and his fellow schoolmates joined the cadets, were captured by the Germans who, not knowing what to do with 15-year-olds, released them.

With the Soviet army invading Poland from the east and the Germans pushing forward from the west, young Karol, who thought of himself as a Socialist and part-Russian, fled eastward. Before long, he found himself deported to Western Siberia along with more than a million other Poles. He managed to escape and, through string-pulling by relatives in Moscow, was permitted to settle in Rostov where he finished high school at the top of his class.

In Political Section

Not long afterward, a member of the privileged Komsomol, he joined the Soviet Army as an assistant in the political section. Eventually he found himself once more on the wrong side of the Stalinist whirlwind. He was arrested and sent to a Gulag. Later, in still another shift, he was released with apologies and a bonus. He moved back to Rostov, returned to Poland for a few postwar years and finally fled West.

Truly, a snowflake. And here, in his memoirs of those years--translated woodenly from the French--he sets down the human day-to-day account of what it was like to live in a historical palimpsest.

Karol oscillates, sometimes disconcertingly, between very personal, homely detail and lofty abstract reflections. He is not a brilliant memorialist, as a rule, and yet his book has great vividness. Repeatedly uprooted and put down, suffering and flourishing by turns, he writes a picaresque account that profoundly subverts our orderly mental arrangements.

The description of his raggle-taggle Polish cadet corps zig-zagging back and forth across Poland to try to avoid capture by the advancing Germans and Russians has a gentle absurdity to it. Karol manages his escape from Siberia by giving a railway worker his suit in exchange for a ticket.

There Is Love

It is only the beginning of a chain of barter and maneuver that will allow him and his friends to survive. While there is life there may not be hope, necessarily, but there is trade. There is also love.

He writes of Olga, fellow worker in an agricultural youth brigade; of Nievka, the aristocratic Rostov nurse--her family knew a Politburo member--and Klava, whom he married for a couple of years before emigrating to Poland. These young women, and several high-spirited companions, provide a winning circle of warmth and survival in the hand-to-mouth life of a society where everyone is marginal--the government’s energies were directed overwhelmingly to the war effort--and survival means wit and illegal agility.

Striking Vignettes

There are striking vignettes. A group of Polish deportees, many of them doctors, lawyers or merchants, finds itself in the West Siberian forest. An overseer tells them reassuringly that if they work hard, they may eventually be able to afford a cow. “This provoked the sudden nervous collapse of those present,” Karol writes.

With his army buddies, Karol gets separated from the main detachment during the Soviet retreat, and they take to the remote interior of the Caucasus. He describes Kola, their high-spirited jester and finagler, turning silent and apathetic in the placid countryside. “He needs, in short, a field of action and not a field of watermelons.” Their leader, Zassya, tricks a peasant out of his horse and, in explanation, uses the theory of the withering away of the state: “Until the coming of Communism, nobody can be totally honest.”

The most affecting section concerns Karol’s time in the gulag. There is no specific mistreatment, but he is starved and put on forced labor until he finds himself dividing into two people. One is himself, the other is the pozharnik or fireman, this being one of the jobs he was assigned to.

From then on, free once more, he finds himself--young, free-spirited, hopeful--periodically becoming the pozharnik, with his wariness, his suspicions, his ineradicable despair.