osprey_archer | Book Review: Krysia

Krystyna Mihulka’s Krysia: A Polish Girl’s Stolen Childhood During World War II is a memoir about her years in Siberia after the Soviets deported her family from Poland. It’s meant to be a memoir for children, and I suspect that morbidly inclined children will love it. I probably would have eaten it up when I was ten.

For me as an adult, though, it suffered somewhat because I couldn’t help comparing it to Esther Hautzig’s The Endless Steppe, which is a minor classic and covers much the same ground. Obviously Hautzig’s and Mihulka’s experiences are not the same, and if you’re interested in the topic both memoirs are quite readable; but if you’re only going to read one, Hautzig’s is longer and meatier and far more alive with telling detail and remembered emotion.

It helps probably that Hautzig wrote her book in the 1960s, much closer to the events depicted, so her memories may have been fresher. And I also think that Hautzig is simply a better writer; I read her book years ago and I can still remember parts of it, like the scene where they dye curtains yellow with onion skins to cheer up their Siberian hut, or Hautzig’s grief when she has to leave Siberia before the Pushkin recitation contest she worked so hard to prepare for.

But of course I also have to take into account the fact that I read The Endless Steppe in junior high, which is a susceptible age; perhaps I would have been just as enthralled by Krysia if I had read it then.