From the Steppes to the Savannah

The story of a young girl her sister and mother who are forcibly removed from their home in Eastern Poland at the beginning of World War II by the Red Army and deported into the interior of Soviet Russia. In 1939 Barbara Porajska was nine-years-old living in eastern Poland with her mother her police chief father and her fourteen-year-old sister. Theirs was a comfortable leisured life. Then in September while Poland was struggling against the German invaders from the west the Red Army invaded from the east occupying and annexing that part of her homeland. Her father missing their possessions confiscated or stolen she her mother and her sister were transported like cattle as were hundreds of thousands of Poles deep into central Soviet Asia. This direct simple and moving account of the hardships and deprivation they survived is an eloquent testimony to the abiding resilience of the Human Spirit. For two appalling years courage and human kindness endured against the systematic cruelty of Stalin's Russia until reunited as a family they were able to leave the Soviet Union for a new life in a refugee village hacked out of the forests of Uganda in East Africa.