Before she was exiled to Siberia, and before she caught malaria in a refugee camp in India, and before she conspiratorially tucked £10 notes into my tiny hands every time I went to visit her in Bradford, my grandmother was an ordinary Polish girl. Born in 1925 in the village of Buszniewo – now part of modern-day Belarus – Maria Soltan was the happy and healthy daughter of a forester, worried only by the wolves she had to avoid on her walk to school. The first tragedy came at eight years old, when she awoke in the middle of the night and stood by as the flu claimed her mother’s life. Six years later, the Germans invaded from the west, and the Russians invaded from the east.
My grandmother – or babcia in Polish – spoke in miracles. She was a gifted storyteller, and more often than not the tales she told about the miraculous people who saved her would end with the shiver-inducing statement, “and I looked again, and there was nobody there”. She firmly believed that a guardian angel followed her everywhere, and while it may be up for debate who or what saved her throughout her life, it is undoubtable that she was saved.
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