Posted by Irene Tomaszewski
The Second Homeland
By Anuradha Bhattacharjee
SAGE Publications, New Delhi, 2012
In 1991, Anuradha Bhattacharjee was a
rookie journalist in the Indian city of Pune
assigned to work on the new local supple-
ment of The Times of India. A few months into
her new job, Bhattacharjee met a Polish lady
who told her a very unlikely story about ar-
riving in India during World War II as an or-
phan after being saved from starvation in Si-
beria.
The family, it seems, was deported from Po-
land by the Soviets to the Gulag where thou-
sands of Poles, including her parents, had
perished. Intrigued by this, the young jour-
nalist presented her notes on this gripping
and tragic tale to her superiors who promptly
threw the story out and ridiculed her for fal-
ling for such a fantasy.
Since the victims were not Jewish and the op-
pressor not Nazi Germany, she was unable to
place Polish Catholic victims of Soviet perse-
cution into “any known historical perspec-
tive.” Reluctantly, she gave it up.
Ten years later, Bhattacharjee was working
for a New Delhi newspaper, The Pioneer, and
since she was for a time in the United States
she used this opportunity to follow up on
that Polish story. She visited the Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, located
the sister of the Polish lady she first spoke to,
and had a long conversation about that event.
She got enough information to publish an ar-
ticle in Pioneer’s Sunday supplement,
the Foray. The online version generated a lot
of attention, including an offer to publish the
book – if she could get a manuscript to the
publisher in six months’ time.