Fool's Circle

On the 10th of February 1940, NKVD soldiers barged into a farmhouse near Baranowicze, in what is now Belarus, before dawn. Jan Zacharewicz was nine years old. Within hours his family was on a cattle truck heading north to an Arctic labour camp. His deportation number was 193863.
Jan had been born in 1930 in the Polish-Lithuanian village of Rykonty, but the family had moved west before the war. It was from Baranowicze that they were taken.
His father, a decorated reconnaissance pilot who had won Poland's highest military honour, died in Kolyma on Christmas Eve 1940. His mother died of typhus in Uzbekistan in 1942. Jan survived the camp, the amnesty, a journey south through the Soviet republics, a sea crossing to Persia, and eventually arrived in South Africa in April 1943 as one of 500 Polish orphans aboard the HMT Dunera. He was twelve years old.
He spent the next seven decades rebuilding what the war had taken. He was educated at the Polish Children's Home in Oudtshoorn, trained as a bricklayer, completed his matric, entered the priesthood, studied theology and Biblical studies at the Gregorian University and the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, was ordained at the Lateran Basilica in 1959, and left the priesthood in 1968. He married, taught History and English in South African schools for thirty years, and was known by his students as Mr Zac - Zacharewicz being a name that defeated most South African tongues.
He called the choices he made along the way a fool's circle. He was not wrong about all of them.
In 2011, at eighty-one, Jan returned to the ruins of his childhood home in Lithuania for the first time since the deportation. Fool's Circle is his account of everything that happened between those two moments - told plainly, without self-pity, by the man who lived it.
The book closes with an epilogue by Sabelo Ndabazandile, Jan's companion of fourteen years and his literary executor, who saw the story from the inside and was present at the end.