cover image The Unsettled Account: An Autobiography

The Unsettled Account: An Autobiography

Eugenia Huntingdon. Severn House Publishers, $0 (225pp) ISBN 978-0-7278-2085-3

When her husband, a Polish officer, became a war prisoner of the Soviets in 1939, the author, daughter of a Russian White Guard officer, was deported from Wilno, along with her young son, to Siberia. From a comfortable, sheltered environment, where her taste for fine things could be indulged, she was plunged into a struggle for survival. Huntingdon's acount of the mental and physical hardships endured in a freezing climate among hostile natives is tempered with appreciation of the band of escaping women with whom she threw in her lot. Their trek as related here is a blend of wheedling common sense, incredible luck and occasional black humor as the group narrowly escapes westward. Although the body of the author's husband was later found in the mass grave of victims of the infamous Katyn Forest massacre, Huntingdon's story is free of self-pity. Remarried, she now lives in England. Photos. (March)