Without Vodka: Adventures in Wartime Russia
by Aleksander Topolski
Steerforth Press, South Royalton, VT, 2001; with illustrations by the author

A 1939 photograph of Aleksander Topolski reveals a young, open-faced, slight young man with a warm smile; he wears his high school's cadet uniform and carries a rifle. In 1939, Aleksander Topolski lived with his family in Horondenka, Poland, a small town in that war-torn country's southeastern corner. The sixteen-year-old Topolski--considerably smaller than his fellow cadets in this photo--is eager for war.

Like most Poles, Topolski believed that each generation goes to war twice. "Worry was left to mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters," Topolski writes. "It was their job to fend for elders and the little ones while their men were denting their sabres on enemy armour."

Denting their sabres, indeed! In August of 1939, just months after Topolski's cadet photo was taken, the German Luftwaffe bombed Polish towns, radio and railway stations. German panzer division tanks quickly defeated the Polish Army. Just weeks after the German invasion, Russia declared war on Poland; Russian troops arrived in Horondenka at the end of September. Aleksander Topolski, devastated by how quickly Germany had defeated his country--a country now occupied by Russia--worried he'd be denied the opportunity to fight. And so, despite his youth and his parents' protests, Aleksander Topolski decided to escape into Romania and from there, to join the French Army.

In a 1942 photograph--taken in Iran near the Caspian Sea--Aleksander now wears a Polish army uniform (complete with a New Zealand brimmed hat). The still-slight young man scowls at the camera, his eyes old beyond his nineteen years. Without Vodka tells what happened to Aleksander Topolski in those three years.

On December 11, 1939, immediately after setting forth for Romania, Aleksander Topolski was captured by Soviet border guards; he spent much of the next three years shuttling from one Soviet prison to another. It did not take Topolski long to discover that the Russian expression "Without vodka you can't figure it out" epitomized the Soviet Union's penal system--its capriciousness, its deprivation, and its horror.

Topolski's memory is phenomenal. This memoir--written in the voice of a curious and eager young man--comes alive with the author's detailed descriptions of fellow prisoners, prison cells, train rides from one prison to the next, what he was given to wear, but, above all, what he was--or wasn't--given to eat. "What I may have failed to convey in this book," Topolski writes in the preface, "is the feeling of hunger that for three years was the basso continuo of my existence. . . To make the reader aware of this, I wanted to write 'I AM HUNGRY' at the top of every page."

Surprisingly, Without Vodka is upbeat and charming; at times, this extraordinary memoir is even funny:

On the corridor wall just outside our cell door [Topolski was being held in Corrective Labour Colony No. 7 in Kiev] was a large political map of the world in Mercator's projection, which flattens the globe and overly enlarges the northern and southern regions. I often thought that if Mercator had not invented his way of portraying the earth in the 16th century, the Soviet cartographers would have invented it, for it made the Soviet Union look twice as big as it really was. Its blood-red amorphous blob before me spread through eleven time zones and dwarfed countries like Germany, France and Great Britain. I spent a lot of time standing in front of this map following on it the vicissitudes of the British Army fighting the Italians and the Germans across North Africa. I also loved to trace with my finger my imaginary route to the Afghanistan border in quest of freedom and soon knew by heart the names of key cities along the railway lines to the south.

Then one day as I was doing my map gazing, I felt somebody was standing behind my back. I turned around and saw a boy younger than me, Plygan I think his name was, also looking at the map. When he saw my face he winked at me, looked around to check if anybody was within earshot, then whispered, "I know, I know. I know what you think. You don't have to tell me. I am sure in Poland you had maps where Poland stretched for half the globe and the Soviet Union was little bigger than a wart. Those bastards always lie to us."

--Patricia Wild is a member of Friends Meeting at Cambridge, and the author of the novel Swimming In It (Flower Valley Press).

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