For There is Hope by Martin Stepek

I've been reading Martin Stepek's poems about his family's experiences during World War II for years.  He would send me some of his and I would respond with some of mine, and I can honestly say that I was always moved by his stories of what happened to his Polish family when the Soviets came and forced them and almost two million other Poles to go to Siberia.  Reading Martin's poems taught me so much about that forgotten tragedy.

So I was happy to see that Martin was finally able to gather his poems together in a single bilingual volume, For There is Hope.

Here's a part of the book's Forward written by the great historian and journalist Neal Ascherson: 

Martin Stepek has written this astonishing poem which is at once a monument, a meditation, a prayer and an epic. It is a memorial or monument, in the first place, to the fate of his Polish family in the 1940s, a fate they shared with hundreds of thousands of Polish civilians deported to the Gulag or the Asian wastes by the Soviet invaders in 1940.  It is a meditation on life and death; his grandfather died as a Resistance fighter against the Nazis, while his grandmother survived her escape from the Soviet Union by only a few months. Their children survived the war and settled in Scotland; they used to the full the chance of a long life in a peaceful country, but now they in turn are approaching their end. Martin's father Jan, a leading figure in Scotland's Polish community, died almost as this book was going to press. The memory of what they

experienced and survived must not disappear with that generation.

The poem is a prayer, not only for Poland  . . .  but for all peoples and places in all times which have known displacement and suffering: the Clearances or the agony of Darfur. And it is an epic, the tale of one of history's great wanderings.  

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Here are some sections of Martin Stepek's epic:


Siberia – GULAG 10 March 1940 to 11September 1941

In the pitch black

amidst the failure

the bleak desert

my own mind

When no-one wants you…

Don’t give up

for there is a flame

in the barbed wire

Though I thought this

only happened to others

the night came and I drowned

in a lake of pain

When no-one wants you…

Don’t give up

for there is light

in the barbed wire

Trying to settle into my fear

remembering my lovely children

cannot reach and touch them

in this wall of walls

When no-one wants you…

Don’t give up

for there is a candle

in the barbed wire

When Janina fell

for the first time

ill and weak

Mother Mary please

When no-one wants you…

Don’t give up

for there is hope

in the barbed wire

When Solzhenitsyn crumbled

in New Jerusalem

something grew in its place

derived from desolation

When no-one wants you…

Don’t give up

for there is love

in the barbed wire

When my father holds

his head in his teenage hands

his young sisters around him

in the gnawing gulag

When no-one wants you…

Don’t give up

for there is a precious candle

shining like God in this barbed wire.

......

When the warm snow fell we all wept

White like tiny angels floating down to us

kissing our eyes

melting on our cheeks and slowly trickling down our faces

Little tears on our soft white skin

Snow is always warm to the dead

Our souls rose as one to meet the loving clouds

and thaw

In the gulag grime

plagued with rats and thieves

a man was born of another man

Granite

In the sleaze and greed

infected with rats and thieves

in the victorious West

a pillar rises soft as cotton

Iron

In the ebb and flow

waves of ignorance

through history

something great arises

Diamond

the rebirth of wisdom

another chance

to listen and see love.

......

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For There is Hope is available from Fleming Publications and Amazon.

To read more about Martin Stepek's work, I recommend his website.  It's available by clicking here.