The Ice Road

The Ice Road: An Epic Journey from the Stalinist Labor Camps to Freedom by Stefan Waydenfeld, Foreword by Norman Davies. Aquila Polonica (2010). 

The author grew up in Poland in a small town south of Warsaw. In 1939, during World War II, he and his family were sent East by the Soviet Red Army. At first they went by train to the Pripyat marshes in Belarus. Then, in 1940, the NKVD sent them by train to Kasha, in Siberia. They became slave labor for building a road out of ice. The road was used primarily for the transport of timber. In 1941 the Polish prisoners were released from Kasha. The latter chapters of the book are about his family’s journey down the Volga to the Caspian Sea, then through Central Asia to Iran, and then finally to Western Europe.