Woman in Exile

Juliana Starosolska was taken by the Stalinists from her parents’ home in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv and deported in a sealed boxcar to a distant and primitive outpost in Siberian Kazakhstan. In Woman in Exile, she records her ordeals in a series of vignettes that capture the horrific, the humane, and even the occasionally humorous aspects of her experience.

Her father was arrested by the Stalinists and sent to a forced labor camp deep in Russian Siberia, where he died less than two years later. In the spring of 1940, the rest of his family, who had remained behind in Ukraine-Juliana; her frail mother, Daria; and her brother, Ihor-were forcibly deported by the Soviet government. They were forced to live and work under the most brutally primitive and backbreaking conditions. After the death of her mother and the reassignment of her brother to a different part of Kazakhstan, Juliana found herself alone. When World War II ended, as a former Polish citizen, Juliana was allowed to leave Kazakhstan for Poland in 1946. She immigrated to the United States in 1967, where she resumed her journalistic and literary career. Now she tells the story of those difficult years-of her time as a Woman in Exile.