A short reading from Chapter 6 of The Dolls We Left Behind: A Child's Journey from Poland to Persia скачать в хорошем качестве

A short reading from Chapter 6 of The Dolls We Left Behind: A Child's Journey from Poland to Persia

'The Dolls We Left Behind' by Eugenia Krajewska is the author’s posthumously published memoir of her family’s deportation from the Kresy to Siberia in June 1940 from their pre-war home in Mołodeczno, on the far reaches of the eastern Polish border. This extract from Chapter Six, 'The Move to Helenowo,' describes life before the war and the relocation of the 86th Infantry Regiment to its new headquarters in the garrison town of Helenowo, near Mołodeczno. The author’s father, Leon Wenserski, had joined the regiment when it was still known as the Mińsk Rifles Regiment, celebrated for liberating the city of Mińsk from Bolshevik forces in August 1919. The regiment’s headquarters was entered through the iconic Mińsk Gate, inaugurated in 1930 by Polish President Ignacy Mościcki. The gate commemorated the soldiers who fell in defence of the Mińsk lands, once part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The chapter also introduces the author’s dolls — poignant symbols of a lost childhood and a subtheme of the narrative — later sold for food during the family’s long journey out of Soviet Russia in 1942. This reading forms part of a family memoir that bears witness to the wartime displacement of Polish families and the importance of preserving and honouring their memory.