In the shadow of the Holocaust, the Soviet Union's quiet yet brutal campaign against Polish citizens is often overlooked. Wesley Adamczyk's gripping memoir, "When God Looked the Other Way", gives voice to the hundreds of thousands of victims of Soviet barbarism. Adamczyk was a young Polish boy when he was deported with his mother and siblings from their comfortable home in Luck to Soviet Siberia in May of 1940. His father, a Polish Army officer, was taken prisoner by the Red Army and eventually became one of the victims of the Katyn massacre. The family's separation and deportation marked the beginning of a ten-year odyssey in which Adamczyk endured nearly intolerable living conditions, meager food rations, and life-threatening epidemics, first in the Soviet Union and then in Iran, where his mother succumbed to exhaustion after mounting a harrowing escape from the Soviets. A memoir of a childhood spent in unspeakable circumstances, "When God Looked the Other Way" not only illuminates one of the darkest periods of European history but also traces the loss of innocence and the fight against despair that took root in one young boy.
Unflinching and poignant, "When God Looked the Other Way" stands as a testament to the trials of a family during wartime and an intimate chronicle of an atrocity yet to receive its historical due.