2025 Week 7: Letters and diaries

Although we have no historic diaries in the family, we are in possession of letters sent by Janina Stepek, my husband's grandmother, from the slave labour camp in Siberia, where she and her children had been taken by the Soviet Red Army from their home in Poland in 1940.

Dated 22 May 1940, Janina wrote the following to her husband, Wladyslaw, two months after they had arrived in the labour camp:

" Henrik (Janina's brother) wrote from Lwow. He thought you'd have received a letter from him by now explaining what happened to us. We are all alive, but I'm already down to 50 kilograms (Janina had lost a third of her weight in three months). We were taken away on the tenth of February and arrived at this camp on the tenth of March. We are 450 kilometres from Archangel. I can't write about everything as you can imagine the situation here. How are you? I hope you are coping."

We have another letter Janina sent to her husband in the August of the same year:

"Oh my dearest! We received your letter of seventh of July luckily. All of us are still alive. There are now lots of berries and mushrooms growing, so we are eating them and some we are selling. Somehow we are managing but what will winter make of us? Will we still be alive after that? All of us are barefoot and the winter lasts eight months and starts in two months time. "

Just reading that aloud to me makes Martin very emotional. It is awful to read what Janina, her two daughters and Martin's dad were going through, written in her own hand in her own words. The grandmother he never knew and her children, who must have carried these memories and trauma throughout their lives.

Martin has told the full tragic story of his family history in relation to both World Wars in his book about his father Gulag to Glasgow

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