About ten years ago I made a shocking discovery about my dad, a Polish World War II veteran. He had an impressive intellect, but his baffling lack of personal ambition meant he had seemingly wasted his life as a factory worker. After his death, I stumbled across a website that named him as a recipient of Poland’s highest decoration for heroism – the Virtuti Militari – an award he had never mentioned to me.
The discovery left me reeling. How was it possible that I knew so little about my own father? Why would he have wanted to keep his heroism a secret from me? I was angry that he had been so distant, but more than this, the guilt of having misjudged him so terribly and denied myself a closer relationship with someone of such caliber drove me to investigate what had happened to him. Against a backdrop of historical and military records, I was able to use letters written by him during the war to piece together the events that shaped his life. I learned that his mother and brothers were arrested and deported to penal colonies in the Soviet Union, punished for their relationship to an officer in the Polish army. Their subsequent death as a result of Soviet genocide was deliberately covered up by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in order to protect their military alliance with Stalin. Their bodies lie buried far away in Iran, their lonely graves never visited by my family. My father’s secrecy was necessary to protect his surviving family.
The cruelty with which my family was treated and the collusion of the West to allow Soviet war crimes to go unpunished drove me to document their stories and pay tribute to their lives. It was a daunting task that took many years of painstaking research and travel to Eastern Europe to meet with my estranged relatives and visit my father’s birthplace. At first, I wanted the story to be exclusively about what happened to my dad and his family, but my account evolved into a memoir that retraced my personal journey to uncover the reasons for his remarkable secrecy and how it affected my relationship with him.
The Betrayed War Hero’s Daughter describes my quest to discover the truth, an excavation that took a psychological toll in grief, shame, and guilt about the lack of compassion I had shown my dad. By confronting the facts, I emerged with a new understanding of my dad, a sense of pride in his accomplishments, and rekindled our closeness and affection when I was a young child.
nadiarupniak.com 