I guess I need to explain.....The crash caused me to think of why the group was traveling......and then to what took place back then.....and who was involved.....and how close my dad's family farm was to the area....and how he was "detained" by the Soviets.....and ended up on one of those "cattle trains" to Siberia, where men, women, children, and the elderly were often left on them for days at a time, with no food, no water, no facilities, no room to move, without heat, watching friends and family get sick and, without receiving a bit of care, dying and remaining in the train car, only to get to one destination and be moved to another train….


to be separated, with men sent one way, women and children (sometimes) in another, left to build their own shacks from the scraps of lumber that might have been left behind in the forested wilderness, to make socks from mittens, and mittens from hats, and hats from socks, to suffer frostbite and hunger and lice and dysentery, to travel miles to a frozen lake, and there, to break through the ice in order to retrieve fresh water only to have it freeze again.....

...to finally be freed by the Soviets once Germany attacked, but only after being forced to admit to the Allies that Stalin had "detainees" from an Allied country, to travel by whatever means, again in cattle cars for days and weeks with the promise of food and clothing only to be denied, finally ending up in Iran and Iraq only to be sent further south to Palestine, .....to being outfitted and trained, but to only be used as back-up to the British Forces for fear that you would run away from battle, to distinguishing yourself time and time again once allowed to fight, to be THE armed force that takes Monte Cassino when the American and British were repelled for months and time and time again, fighting in the mud and blood, eventually in hand to hand combat, to again fighting the Nazi army each time you were called upon….

.....to find out after years of agonizing over being able to free your home land that the British and Americans "decided" that it would be better to "give" Poland to the Soviets as a "prize" for all the work they did in defeating Germany, leaving you without a country and an inability to go "home" for fear, once there, you would be returned to your "vacation" in Siberia, and to finally end up as the greatest man I've ever known? How did you survive? How did any of you survive?

PS. That even to this day, where the Batan Death March has always been considered a War Crime, none of the actions taken by Stalin, the Soviets, and the Soviet Army against the Poles, Lithuanians, Bulgarians, Hungarians, and others were EVER considered to be so. That may be why neither Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev, nor Putin has never felt the need to appologize. For them, it was, and likely continues to be, just business as usual because no one would dare accuse them otherwise.....