Stubborn Life: Hardship and Hope in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Poland
In her earliest memories of life in 1930 on the Soviet side of the border between Ukraine and Poland, author Michalska recalls activists coming to her family’s small village and plundering property—dismantling the red roof tiles, cutting beams, and letting the clay fall on a baby’s crib—being forced to hand over grain, cattle, milk, and eggs to pay taxes, trading fabrics for rye and flour. In her memoir, Michalska shows readers the desperation of residents during the great famine when 3 million died and survivors were often too weak to bury the dead or gather willow leaves to pound into bran for flatbread.
Stubborn Life follows Michalska after she and her family are exiled to Kazakhstan, where for the first time she thinks the world may not be so cruel and inhumane when she is released from forced labor so she can attend school and pursue a medical degree. She nevertheless witnesses women dying from tuberculosis, hemorrhage, and sepsis during childbirth, hides sacks of wheat carried in a sleigh by a dying horse, shares a single microscope with 300 students during anatomy class in an unheated classroom. Yet she perseveres, completing her exams in 1948 and getting her diploma in 1950.
The book pulls no punches. It does not use emotion but direct, unadorned prose to convey the few instances, as Michalska acknowledges, when fate took “her under its wing in a hostile, cruel world” and enabled her to return to her homeland. It sidelines feelings of hope, instead elevating a fierce, unrelenting determination.
Not an easy read, but an important one.
