Julian BETTER

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My family
Comintern
Moscow
NKVD

GULAG
The WWII
Poland
New Times

I was born in Moscow in the Butyrskaya prison on December 15, 1937. My mother Henrietta Better is from a Polish Jewish family; my father Paweł Sierankiewicz is the son of a Polish peasant woman. The parents moved to the USSR as political emigrants and were arrested in 1937. My father was executed and mother was sentenced to camps. I’ve spent my first seven years in the Gulag in various orphanages until we were released in January 1945 and returned to Poland. The anti-Semitic campaign of 1967 forced my wife and me to emigrate to Sweden. My book of memories "Jag var barn i Gulag" was first published in Sweden in 2013. In 2016, the book “Dziecko Gułagu” was published in Poland, and in 2022, “Дитя ГУЛАГа” - in Russian.

© Julian Better
© freelancelotta IM
2022