A Homeland Denied: In the Footsteps of a Polish POW [Paperback]

This is an eye-witness and harrowing account of the brutal life in a Soviet labor camp. It tells of Waclaw Kossakoski???s unwavering determination to survive against the odds and the heroic sacrifice and bravery of the Polish Resistance and the Warsaw Rising. The role of Polish soldiers in the Italian campaign, notably the Battle of Monte Cassino is also featured.??A Homeland Denied follows the horrific journey of Waclaw Kossakowski, a young Warsaw University student whose peaceful life was changed dramatically and with far reaching consequences that fateful day of 1st September, 1939.From imprisonment in the notorious Kozelsk prison to the forced labor camp in the Siberian Arctic Circle, the compelling story pulls the reader into a world of suffering and brutality it would be impossible to imagine. Forced to dig runways in temperatures as low as???50oC while under constant threat from sadistic guards, it was an indescribable living hell with death the only companion. He endured and witnessed atrocities which haunted him for the rest of his life with so many friends murdered or frozen to death in the unforgiving cruelty of Siberia.But fate intervened and the icy wasteland was replaced by the blistering heat and dry deserts of the Middle East, where the student who had never picked up a gun was taught to fight???in the Italian campaign, at Monte Cassino, Ancona and Bologna. Yet the intense desire to return to his homeland never left him and only memories of his idyllic life before the war sustained him when he sank to the lowest depths of despair.Waclaw could not know of the terrible suffering of his family or the sacrifices of his countrymen as they fought so desperately to keep Warsaw, only to be denied their homeland in the cruelest way imaginable. Although they were ultimately the victors, they lost everything???their home, their loves, their country and nothing was ever the same again.In a country governed by Communist Russia and controlled by their secret policls