About 18,000 civilians ended up in camps in Africa like the camp at Tengeru where Anna Sokulska Forster and her family were sent. The Red Cross compiled lists of the deportees as they arrived and the print below shows just some of those whose names began with ‘S’ and the camps to which they were sent. Anna, her mother and her brothers are listed under the family name of Sokulska/Sokulski. You can see images of Anna, her family and other refugees at Tengeru camp in the background of the print, reminding us of the faces behind the names. The original photos can be seen here and here.
That figure of 18,000 is much smaller than the hundreds of thousands of Polish people originally deported to Soviet Russia in 1940. As noted elsewhere, some ended up in the newly formed Polish army; others stayed in Uzbekistan or Iran or some of the other countries they passed through en route, after they had been liberated from prison camps in Siberia. Others, like Anna’s father, died on the journey. Diana Forster has captured this in a number of ways in her art, including in this print to the right, called ‘Siberian Burial’.
In this final artwork below, Diana Forster uses the colourful materiality of cloth to evoke the humans at the heart of her story. Like other Polish deportees, Anna was only able to pack a handful of clothes before being transported to Siberia – including her Polish national costume, clearly an item of importance. Once released from Siberia, local people and Red Cross support workers donated other items of clothing for Anna and her family to wear. On arrival in Pahlevi in Iran, for example, they had to go through a strict delousing process, including having their heads shaved; and all the clothes they had arrived in were burnt. ‘New’ clothes were distributed, donated by an American charity, and Anna’s two young brothers were given dresses since there were no boys’ clothes left. The artwork below is based on a skirt that Diana found amongst her mother’s possessions. The darn in it was made either by her mother or grandmother. The title of the image, ‘Sewing mends the soul’, captures the labour that refugees take on, as they try to keep going, making do with what they have and slowly piecing their lives back together, against the odds. Like Diana’s other artwork, it draws the viewer in with beautiful colours and charming images; but on closer inspection, it has a darker story running through it, a story that helps us to visualise both rupture and mending.
