Ceremony honors WWII survivors of labor camp

When Krystyna Balut was 10 years old, in June 1941, soldiers of the Soviet Union's Red Army came in the night. Her father had already fled the home in eastern Poland and gone into hiding two years before. The soldiers told her mother to pack.

Fearing she would be wrenched away from her daughter, the mother collapsed. Krystyna had to fetch help to pack for a journey of unspecified length to an unknown destination.

Krystyna, her mother and her grandmother were transported together to a Siberian labor camp.

"This is where my childhood ended," said Balut, a petite 77-year-old with short gray hair and intense vitality.

On Saturday, Balut hurried home from her part time check-processing job on the Eastside to attend a special ceremony.

At a Polish community center on Capitol Hill, Polish Consul Paulina Kapuscinska from Los Angeles presented Balut and 13 other Seattle-area survivors of the mass Polish deportations during World War II with a special medal to commemorate their suffering and survival against the odds: the Cross of Siberian Exiles.

"It is not mine. It is my mother's," Balut said. "I didn't do anything to really make it. It was her care, her responsibility, her devotion."

Living in barracks, 20 people to a room in the Soviet gulag, her mother, Helena, slaved to keep her only child and her own mother alive, Balut recalled.

Laboring to construct grain elevators, Helena hauled mixed cement up six floors. In the depths of the Siberian winter, she spent nights out on the frozen Ob River feeding wood to a fire required to keep a hole open in the ice.

"The most frightening thing was the fear of the unknown. People died so often. Existence was kind of temporary," Balut said. "We are part of a miracle. We have survived and made it to our old age."

Wearing an elegant pinstriped suit for the occasion, Balut spoke with passion of her extraordinary seven-year odyssey from Siberia through Persia, India, Uganda and finally to safety — first in Canada and then the United States.

Balut came to Seattle in 1959 when her husband, Jan Balut, a Polish survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, took a job at Boeing.

Soviet leader Josef Stalin and Germany's Adolf Hitler agreed to carve Poland up between them in the lead-up to World War II. In 1939, Germany occupied the west, the Russians the east.

The Soviets massacred tens of thousands of Polish Army officers and deported between 1.5 million and 2 million Poles to Siberia.

Russia attacked

Then, just three days after the Red Army arrested the Baluts, Hitler's army attacked Russia. A year later, Stalin agreed to let the remaining Polish soldiers and their families leave Russia so they could join the British effort against the Nazis.

Since the Baluts had no Polish army connection, the mother forged papers, bribed officials and gave the family assumed names so they could join the Polish military exodus to southern Russia and thence to Persia, now called Iran.

Balut was shunted with her mother and grandmother to wartime displaced-person camps across the British Empire: a year in Persia, where the camp was racked with disease and the children were skeletal; five years in India, that ended with the chaos of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1948; then Uganda, Africa.

At the ceremony Saturday, a map of the world on display showed similar journeys for the 13 women and one man honored.

Similar journeys

One arrow showed the itinerary of Bozena Chodakauskas, 80, who also ended up in Seattle because Boeing hired her engineer husband. Chodakauskas lost her parents and her brother, and made her journey as an orphan. She was educated in a British school in India, and in 1947 came to the U.S., where she completed college. She worked for 25 years as a school counselor.

"I had good breaks," she said, laughing heartily.

Balut's grandmother returned to Poland after the war. Her mother, Helena Martusewicz, settled in Montreal and died there in 1981.

Saturday, Balut recalled how she returned to Poland in 1966 and met her father and other relatives again. She was 36. She hadn't seen her dad since she was 8.

"For hours, we couldn't speak without crying," she said. "It was like celebrating life."

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com