I've been reading Martin Stepek's poems about his family's experiences during World War II for years. He would send me some of his and I would respond with some of mine, and I can honestly say that I was always moved by his stories of what happened to his Polish family when the Soviets came and forced them and almost two million other Poles to go to Siberia. Reading Martin's poems taught me so much about that forgotten tragedy.
So I was happy to see that Martin was finally able to gather his poems
together in a single bilingual volume, For There is Hope.
Here's a part of the book's Forward written by the great historian and
journalist Neal Ascherson:
Martin Stepek has written this astonishing poem which is at once a
monument, a meditation, a prayer and an epic. It is a memorial or monument, in
the first place, to the fate of his Polish family in the 1940s, a fate they
shared with hundreds of thousands of Polish civilians deported to the Gulag or
the Asian wastes by the Soviet invaders in 1940. It is a meditation on
life and death; his grandfather died as a Resistance fighter against the Nazis,
while his grandmother survived her escape from the Soviet Union by only a
few months. Their children survived the war and settled in Scotland; they used
to the full the chance of a long life in a peaceful country, but now they in
turn are approaching their end. Martin's father Jan, a leading figure in
Scotland's Polish community, died almost as this book was going to press. The
memory of what they
experienced and survived must not disappear with that generation.
The poem is a prayer, not only for Poland . . . but
for all peoples and places in all times which have known displacement and
suffering: the Clearances or the agony of Darfur. And it is an epic, the tale
of one of history's great wanderings.
_______________________
Here are some sections of Martin Stepek's epic:
Siberia – GULAG 10 March 1940 to 11September 1941
In the pitch
black
amidst the
failure
the bleak
desert
my own mind
When no-one
wants you…
Don’t give up
for there is a
flame
in the barbed
wire
Though I
thought this
only happened
to others
the night came
and I drowned
in a lake of
pain
When no-one
wants you…
Don’t give up
for there is
light
in the barbed
wire
Trying to
settle into my fear
remembering my
lovely children
cannot reach
and touch them
in this wall
of walls
When no-one
wants you…
Don’t give up
for there is a
candle
in the barbed
wire
When Janina
fell
for the first
time
ill and weak
Mother Mary
please
When no-one
wants you…
Don’t give up
for there is
hope
in the barbed
wire
When
Solzhenitsyn crumbled
in New
Jerusalem
something grew
in its place
derived from
desolation
When no-one
wants you…
Don’t give up
for there is
love
in the barbed
wire
When my father
holds
his head in
his teenage hands
his young
sisters around him
in the gnawing
gulag
When no-one
wants you…
Don’t give up
for there is a
precious candle
shining like
God in this barbed wire.
......
When the warm
snow fell we all wept
White like
tiny angels floating down to us
kissing our
eyes
melting on our
cheeks and slowly trickling down our faces
Little tears
on our soft white skin
Snow is always
warm to the dead
Our souls rose
as one to meet the loving clouds
and thaw
In the gulag
grime
plagued with
rats and thieves
a man was born
of another man
Granite
In the sleaze
and greed
infected with
rats and thieves
in the
victorious West
a pillar rises
soft as cotton
Iron
In the ebb and
flow
waves of
ignorance
through
history
something
great arises
Diamond
the rebirth of
wisdom
another chance
to listen and
see love.
......
_________________________
For There is Hope is available from Fleming Publications and Amazon.
To read more about Martin Stepek's work, I recommend his website. It's available by clicking here.
_________________________
For There is Hope is available from Fleming Publications and Amazon.
To read more about Martin Stepek's work, I recommend his website. It's available by clicking here.
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