Without Vodka: Adventures in Wartime Russia
by Aleksander Topolski

Aleksander Topolski was sixteen when he was called up for military service on the morning of August 24, 1939. In eight days his native Poland would be invaded by the Germans. Shortly thereafter, the Russians rolled in under the Hitler-Stalin pact, and when Topolski tried to sneak across the border into Romania, he was captured by Soviet border guards. Thus began a more than two-year-long ordeal through the Soviet Union's outrageously absurd penal system. Writing with an unexpected sense of humor and irony and an almost superhuman capacity for recalling fascinating details, Topolski recounts his fight for survival in the gulag. Mendacious NKVD officers, whimsical pickpockets, ruthless youth gang members, wise political prisoners, Polish patriots, unfortunate Uzbechs, and countless other unforgettable characters populated this often raucous odyssey. The perplexing madness of Topolski's ordeal was perhaps summed up by an old Russian saying he heard along the way: "Without vodka you can't figure it out." Ultimately Topolski escapes into Iran to join the Polish Second Corps, assembling there to fight the Germans. . . but that's another story.

"[An] engrossing book. . . Topolski's memoir provides an unaffected, clear-eyed view of a life gone topsy-turvy during the first three years of the Second World War. By turns, his remembrances are wrenching, horrifying, surreal, even funny. 'Funny' is a rather unlikely word to describe a prisoner's memoir, but then at times it must have seemed to the teenaged Topolski that a sense of humour was the only cord to sanity."
THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR

ALEKSANDER TOPOLSKI was born in 1923, the youngest of three children. He grew up in Pruzana, in the Pripet Marshes of easter Poland, and in Horodenka, a small town in the country's southeastern corner. Following two years in Soviet captivity, he joined the army loyal to the Polish Emigree Government in London. A graduate in architecture from Manchester university, he practiced in England, Connecticut, Virgina, Puerto Rice, and the West Indies before settling in Canada. He has three grown children and lives with his wife, Joan Eddis, in Chelsea, Quebec.

Publishing House: Steerforth Press, South Royalton 2000
SoftCover book measuring 6" x 9"
386 pages, illustrations, maps
English Language Version

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