In memory of my father : September 29,1967

from his home on Ul.Antoniegohttp://maps.google.de/maps?f=q&hl=pl&geocode=&q=Ignacego+Mo%B6cickiego,+97-200+Tomasz%F3w+Mazowiecki,+Tomaszowski,+%A3%F3dzkie,+Polska&sll=51.532295,20.017262&sspn=0.025095,0.058365&ie=UTF8&ll=51.530987,20.015373&spn=0.050191,0.11673&z=13&om=1



My father,Dr.Stefan Felix Bornstein, who I loved very much,and lost him,when I was 17 years old.
In 1940 he was arrested by the invading Russians,as he stayed in Poland fighting for his home and country.He was taken to
Kazakhstan as a prisoner into forced labor in a gulag .

The gulags once spread over the Kazakhstan steppe like a thick wreath. Eleven sprawling camps with names like Alzhir, a Russian acronym for the Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors of the Motherland, housed hundreds of thousands of prisoners and their families. The camps, built shortly after the creation of the Soviet Union, were partly emptied to provide soldiers and workers during World War II and were eventually closed, although not dismantled, after Stalin died in 1953.In Kazakhstan today, a large percentage of people have parents or grandparents whose life trajectories were savagely rewired by deportation and imprisonment in the camps. But memories of the gulags are dying.