• Photo

Co-authors Mary Akers and Andrew Bienkowski hold their newly published book on a recent visit to Floyd.

Sphere IT

Save This Page

Reader Reaction

digg it

Authors take different approach in sharing one’s experience in Siberia

by Wanda Combs
Editor

It was a cold and unforgiving place and time. Andrew Bienkowski was only five years old when he and his brother, mother, and grandparents were taken from their homes in Poland and “dumped unceremoniously” in the Siberian countryside. But Bienkowski decided to turn that experience into something positive. Discovering the only way to recovery was through forgiveness, he spent a lifetime helping others.
Now at 74 years of age, Bienkowski is sharing his story and the insights he received as a result of the experience in a new book – Radical Gratitude and other life lessons learned in Siberia. Working with writer Mary Akers, a former Floyd resident now living in New York, Bienkowski has also been able to tell his story from a different perspective.  The over 250-page book, reads like a novel, but has an additional purpose – as an inspirational book.
The “radical gratitude” in the title, Bienkowski explains, refers to being thankful even though terrible things have happened to you. Throughout the book, lessons are interspersed with experiences.
In 1939, at the beginning of WWII, Poland was invaded by the Germans and Russians. “My family was living in the part taken over by the Russians,” Bienkowski comments. “They took 1,000,000 people to Siberia on trains and dumped us.”
In the book Bienkowski tells of the three weeks spent in cattle cars, each of which held hundreds of people, with no food, bathroom or heat. Even then, he had a desire, the book states, to help those who were frightened or despondent.
A key part of the story revolves around his grandfather, a courageous individual who is credited with saving his family’s life. Vladislav Paluchowski decided to stop eating so there would be more food for the boys and the rest of the family. “He died so we could live,” Bienkowski remarks. The grandfather also made an unusual request before his life ended – to be buried naked so his clothes could be sold for food.
The Siberian landscape was flat and had no trees, its severe winters comparable maybe to northern Canada, Bienkowski notes. The family lived in a mud hunt with only one room. The most common fuel for heat was dried cow dung, he adds. “During the warm seasons we’d collect as much cow dung as possible. It was a very good fuel.” Surprisingly, he comments, “it had a nice odor.”
Food during those two years in Siberia was difficult to find. Bienkowski’s mother was required to work – “under communism then, you didn’t eat if you didn’t work” – and she would get one loaf of bread a week to share with her family. Bienkowski remembers finding mushrooms, wild plants, and strawberries and picking up single grains of wheat from the wheat harvesters. “Even at a young age I felt I was really contributing to the family’s survival.”
Bienkowski says he refused to go to school in Siberia; his younger brother, however, went to preschool and would hide a piece of bread in his pocket and bring it home to the family.
His grandmother decided to become the village fortuneteller, Bienkowski says. “She would go from house to house. They would give her carrots, potatoes, a stale piece of bread.”
Bienkowski’s family was well-to-do in Poland, and he says the family members had brought some jewelry to Siberia with them and were able to sell the pieces from time to time. “It didn’t last long,” he says. “No one ended up with wedding rings.”
When living in Siberia, the Polish people were considered to be enemies of the country and they were not to be treated with kindness, Bienkowski comments.
The women sometimes would marry Russian soldiers to protect their children. “Some did this to survive, but they couldn’t leave,” Bienkowski states, adding his mother was very attractive and received several proposals, but declined.
When Bienkowski’s father, who had been held as a Prisoner of War by the Russians, was released, he was allowed to find his family in Siberia.
The family ended up in a refugee camp – “like a military tent city” - in Iran for about a year, where Bienkowski says “we basically got back to health.” He nearly died from malaria, malnutrition and dysentery.
Bienkowski credits Akers with bringing his stories to life.
The task “was a little scary at first,” she says.
“It’s like taking a black and white picture and putting color in it,” he comments. Akers, he adds, organized chapters into sequence, and “in some ways the book reads like a novel.”
Bienkowski, who is the only surviving member of his family and one of the few who were in Siberia at that time still living, says his book had been sitting on the shelf for 15 years before he found Akers. “She is a wonderful writer.”
The two authors have an international mix of supporters in their book project with an Australian publisher and a London agent. The book has been picked up in the Ukraine and Canada, the authors said. Their agent is also negotiating with a German publishing company to publish it in German. There is some interest in Poland.
After being in the Irianian refugee camp, Bienkowski lived in Palestine for three years and then in England for a year. He learned to speak English in England. He went to Utica, New York in 1948, where he attended high school. In 1952 he joined the Air Force and served in military service for four years. He went to Union College and Western Reserve University and earned a Masters in clinical psychology and became a psychotherapist. He got a job with the State of New York, where he worked in clinics and institutions for 32 years. He retired 12 years ago. He volunteers for Hospice and also at the Food Bank. He has two sons.
Akers, who is the daughter of Lee and Sally Johnson of Floyd, received her FBA from William and Mary and her FA from Queens College, North Carolina. She is married and has three children.
Bienkowski and Akers both live near Buffalo.
It seems it has always been Bienkowski’s initial intention to pass on what he learned to others. And although some choose not to talk about what happened during those times, he has found that doing so is healing.

(Editor’s Note: Signed copies of Radical Gratitude and other life lessons learned in Siberia are available at notebooks in Floyd and also at Annie Kay’s in Blacksburg.)