Two Trains From Poland

Synopsis

A midnight knock at her door changed everything for 6-year old Krystyna Sklenarz. In the middle of the night, a Soviet KGB agent informed her family that they are being deported from Poland to Siberia. When asked by her terified and anxious mother for more details regarding final destinations, the KGB officer coolly responded ‘you are going where devil says goodbye”, an Old Russian saying needing no amplification. Krystyna experienced horror of war, from 2 years in Siberia, starvation, typhus, an opium den in Persia, being torpedoed near South Africa, and the arriving in London to live through the Nazi Blitz in the London subway. Through it all, Krystyna refused to give up. This is her story. This is her journey from the Siberian west land, through her struggles to achieve education in a foreign language in only five years, to her entrance into medical school at only 17. Krystyna recounts all of this in this tale of courage and perseverance, discussing not only this journey in a foreign land, but the journey through the practice of medicine as a female when women weren’t supposed to be doctors. With her attention to detail and vivid recollection of events, Krystyna takes the reader through a remarkable journey in history and of the human spirit