Survivor of the Red Holocaust The girl who defied Stalin and the horror of his gulag
THE stern-faced Soviet guard, Siberian winter turning his barked commands into smoke, ripped the baby from its mother’s arms as she stumbled, blinking, from the crowded carriage transporting prisoners to an icy gulag.
Shock spread across his features as he mumbled: “He is dead. The boy is dead.”
Helen Opiecki knew known it for two weeks.
For 14 long days, she had clutched little Eugene’s lifeless body to her heart in the cramped, cold railway truck carrying those captured during the Red Army’s 1939 invasion of Poland.
She cradled the infant, her frightened daughter Danuta holding tightly to her skirt in the it. She’d swaying, dimly lit carriage, because she knew how the Soviets dealt with death on the harrowing six-week journey. Like all the other corpses, Eugene would be flung from the train, left for wolves to dispose of the body.
This is just one nightmare memory that haunts Danuta Gray, a woman who survived the journey, survived Siberia’s minus-50°C temperatures and then survived a six-month march to freedom.
Sadism and starvation could not stop the Harborne pensioner from building a top-flight medical career in England.
Because Danuta Gray is a survivor of World War Two’s forgotten horror: The Red Holocaust.
On September 17, 1939 – a time when the modern world’s greatest monsters, Hitler and Stalin, were tied by a pact – Russia invaded Poland from the east. The Third Reich had invaded from the west 16 days earlier. In all, the Red Army rounded up 1.7 million souls. Less than half of them survived.
Danuta’s book, Footprints In The Snow And Sand, chronicles the moment residents of Luck, in eastern Poland, were herded like cattle on to freight trains.
She writes about the journey of death, the grim battle for survival in a Siberian camp and the long, torturous march across the tundra to freedom.
It was a walk from Siberia to Krasnovodsk, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, that destroyed many. Danuta, pulled on a sledge by her mother, remembers the bitter cold and biting hunger.
“I am not bitter towards the Russians,” says the former Solihull Hospital surgeon. “The Russians who had no political associations were very kind. They were also poor, but they shared their food.
“But Stalin was a monster, there is no doubt of that.”
Danuta, not even old enough for school, had her innocence ripped from her by the Red Army.
Frightened and confused, she, her baby brother, mother and father Frank were hurled into a railway carriage. It was made to carry 18 people. There were 50 inside.
“We were given black bread and hot water,” Danuta recalls. “Each day they would collect the bodies and throw them in the snow for wolves to eat.
“The cold was terrible. Those who slept with their heads against the wall, woke with their hair stuck to it. The toilet was simply a hole in the floor which soon became blocked by a cone of frozen waste. Eventually, the