The Silent Unseen by Amanda McCrina

Sixteen-year-old Maria Kaminska is being held prison in the NKVD headquarters in Lwow, Poland. She has been captured with no identification papers, and a German pistol, a Walther. The Soviets have been in Lwow, only for twenty-four hours and they are still clearing the area of Germans. 

Comrade Colonel F. Volkov, 64th Rifle Division, NKVD questions Maria as to why she is in Lwow. She tells him she was a slave labourer for two and a half years at the Opel automotive plant in Russelsheim, Germany. She escaped during the bombing of the plant by the Americans, travelled by rail to Tarnow and is trying to get back home to Brod in Wolyn Province.

Volkov writes Maria a pass, but advises her to go back to Przemysl and register with the Red Cross to locate her surviving family. Volkov warns Maria that a Red Army pass is a death sentence if she encounters the UPA or the Polish resistance. Maria doesn't know who the UPA are, but there had been Polish resistance in the forest outside Brod in 1939 when the Soviets first invaded.

In Lviv, Poland, seventeen-year-old Kostyantyn (Kostya) Vitaliyovych Lasko has been in a bar drinking vodka, waiting to meet his contact. He is working as a courier for the UPA. He's dressed in a stolen Red Army uniform with papers that say he is Valerik Fialko, Second Battalion, 100th Rifle Division. He doesn't know what his contact looks like as the coded message came to Commander Shukheyvch's headquarters in Volyn, and he's getting nervous having been here so long.

His contact turns out to be Nataliya, a blonde-haired woman who is a UPA mole in the Red Army front. She tells him there's a cache under the bench across the square but she also gives him a coded message for Marko, commander of the L'viv UPA group. 

 

However, instead of first taking the message to Marko, Kostya meets up with his twenty-two-year old cousin, Kyrylo Romaniuk, a squad leader in the UPA. He tells his cousin who the contact was and the location of the cache. But when Kyrylo asks Kostya to decode the message meant for Marco, he angrily refuses, asks to leave the group and threatens to tell Marko that he's intercepting his messages. For this Kyrylo briefly has Kostya locked up but releases him to return to Marko and warns him that if he tells Marko about the messages he will kill Kostya's mother and his sister Lesya.

When Kostya finally arrives at Marco's headquarters in the crypt of a church, he is questioned and beaten as Marco knows he is taking the messages to Kyrylo. Aleksey Solovey offers to take care of Kostya and his cousin Kyrylo, outside of the city. Kostya is handcuffed, his mouth stuffed with a handkerchief and Solovey and Andriy drive him north of Lviv to an isolated farmhouse. There a Polish woman, Mrs. Kijeck tends to Kostya's smashed-in face.

Solovey gives her photographs of the train station where the Red Army is putting the Polish resistance prisoners, in exchange for bags of medical supplies. For Kostya, he obtains a change of clothes, a gun and a map and tell him to avoid the roads.

Meanwhile, Maria manages to reach her village of Brod on the Slonowka River. The river cuts the village into two parts: the western part is Blizszy Brod, the eastern part is Dalszy Brod. Enroute, Maria has encounters four NKVD patrols who allow her to pass with Volkov's pass. They tell her there is no Brod and that she should return to Lwow. When Maria comes to her family's farm, nothing remains but the ancient stock barn where she spends the night.

In the morning, another NKVD patrol arrives, this time with a young peasant boy as a prisoner. From the hayloft, Maria watches as the NKVD lieutenant shoots the boy in the left knee and when he attempts to shoot him again, Maria shoots the lieutenant and four other NKVD soldiers dead. One escapes. As it turns out, Maria has saved Kostya's life.

He tells her the NKVD are hunting UPA and explains to her who the UPA are and that he is former UPA. It is evident he can't travel so the next morning Maria travels into Dalszy Brok seeking help for Kostya. There she encounters the Polish Resistance who disarm her and tell her that in retaliation for the deaths of five NKVD, Dalszy Brod was raided, everyone machine gunned and the homes burned. Maria attempts to explain that she is responsible for the NKVD deaths. It is at this point that she is reunited with her brother Tomek, whom she believed was dead. Tomek tells Maria that he managed to escape to England via France and that he parachuted back into France as a trained special-operations agent for the English. She learns he is what is called "Silent Unseen" whose orders come directly from the war ministry in London.

In the Polish bunker, Tomez and his group drug and interrogate Kostya. Tomez's goal is to force a meeting with Kostya's cousin, Kyrylo also known as Lys, and to attempt to get the UPA to agree to a ceasefire and to work together with the Polish Resistance against the NKVD. This seems very wrong to Maria because the UPA killed their parents. Nevertheless, Tomek believes this is their only chance to rid Poland of the Soviets whom he believes do not just want to defeat the Nazis but occupy the country as well. He tells Maria that he plans to take the message himself to Kyrylo. 

 

However, this plan goes awry when Tomek goes missing. Maria believes that Kostya is the only person who can lead her to his cousin Kyrylo and locate Tomek. But finding Tomek will test their loyalties and draw them deeper into danger.

 

Discussion

 

The Silent Unseen is a well written historical fiction novel that focuses on a small area in eastern Poland near the end of World War II. The war has seen alliances flip as eastern Poland was first invaded by the Soviets (the Germans took the western half of the country) in 1939, then "liberated" by Nazi Germany during Operation Barbarossa and is now being invaded again by the Soviet Red Army as they push the Nazis back. During the German occupation, the Polish Resistance and the Ukrainian nationalists (the UPA) who wanted an independent Ukraine incorporating part of southeastern Poland, fought the Germans and each other. The Silent Unseen is set as the Soviets over-run eastern Poland, hunting down not just Nazi soldiers but both Polish resistance and the UPA. 

 

The title, The Silent Unseen is the name given to special operatives who where Polish soldiers who were parachuted into Poland and who worked to subvert the Germans, the Ukrainians and the Soviets in Poland. With the invasion of Poland in 1939 by Germany and the Soviet Union, the Republic of Poland  government fled into exile in Great Britain, the Polish navy escaped to Britain and thousands of Polish soldiers escaped to France and then to Britain via Hungary or Romania. Some of those soldiers became what were called Cichociemni - a term that meant "the silent unseen." They were volunteers who  simply disappeared overnight from their units in Britain, entering specialized training to become operatives in German-occupied Poland.  They were trained by the British SOE (Special Operations Executive) and the officers of the Polish Special Unit and usually worked in groups of between two and six men. They were trained as radio operators, sappers, intelligence agents, and were taught survival skills, hand to hand combat, and the use of explosives. Not only were the Cichociemni parachuted into Poland but drops containing much needed supplies for the Polish underground were also made.

In her Author's Note at the back, McCrina indicates that the character Tomek Kaminski is based on the real life Cichociemni, Marian Golebiewski, a Polish soldier who commanded units of the Polish resistance in the Volhynia region. He was willing to work with the Ukrainians against the invading Soviets, sometimes against the wishes of the Polish government in Britain.

McCrina has crafted another exciting story told in alternating chapters by two young people whose families and lives have been utterly destroyed by war. A young Polish woman, Maria Kaminska is one narrator. She had been captured and sent to Germany to work as a slave in a factory. Before this she and her parents were informed that brother Tomek who was a soldier in the Polish army had been killed. When she returns to her village of Brod, she finds her family's farm destroyed and the graves of her parents. 

The second narrator is a young Ukrainian boy, Kostya Lasko, also from Brod. Kostya has been working as a courier for the Ukrainian nationalists but wants out from the UPA after almost being murdered for being discovered to be a "rat". He had been forced by his cousin, the brutal Kyrlyo Romaniuk, to provide access to the coded messages from UPA command. Kostya's papa is already dead, the Germans took his sister Lyudya, but he believes his mother Klara and his sister Lesya have likely been murdered.

Eventually Maria and Kostya's paths cross when Kostya is taken prisoner by the NKVD in Brod and Maria steps in to save his life. However, Maria being Polish and Kostya being Ukrainian means neither trusts the other, reflecting the distrust and conflict between the Ukrainian and Polish peoples in the region. In Brod, the two encounter Maria's brother Tomek, who it turns out is not dead but a special agent, a Cichociemni, or silent unseen. 

A major strength of The Silent Unseen is the author's ability to portray how the two main characters, one Polish, one Ukrainian, view each other, how the war has changed everything. Their relationship is a reflection of what has been happening in Poland over the duration of the war: mutual distrust between the Polish and Ukrainian population. This distrust is so great, that the two groups even have difficulty cooperating in the face of a more serious, mutual enemy - the Soviet Union.

As Tomek sets out on his mission to try to unite the warring UPA and Polish resistance against the Soviets, Maria and Kostya themselves are caught in a web of distrust. An example of this is when Tomek doesn't return from his mission to seek out Kostya's cousin, Kyrlyo. Maria thinks, "He was dead, and the boy knew it. The boy had been working for Marko all along. This whole thing was a trick, an elaborate trick, and Tomek fell for it. I fell for it. We were both going to die for it."

Even though Maria saved Kostya's life he doesn't trust her and the feeling is mutual. For Maria, she considers her relationship "...purely utilitarian. He did this, therefore I did that, he did that, therefore I did this. Kindness --genuine, unthinking selfless kindness -- just left me suspicious." 

When the two set out to find Tomek, Maria takes Kostya along because her brother went to see Kostya's cousin, Kyrlyo. She lies to him, telling him that his mother and sister are being held prisoner and that if he doesn't co-operate they will die. Their mutual distrust plays out numerous times on the journey. When Maria goes to find water and gets lost and is long in returning, Kostya believes the only reason she returned  "...she remembered she needed  him after all -- because he was useful. It was only ever because he was useful. She had saved his life in that barn because he was useful, and she was dragging him along with her now because he was useful."

They are helped on their journey by a farmer Marek and his wife Agata. When Maria sees the food that Agata has packed for them in the musette bag,  this act of kindness after so much cruelty and death catches her off guard. "I hated that it caught me off guard -- people helping because they wanted to, not because they had to or because they were expecting something in return. I hated that I always assumed there was some hidden motive, some angle. I hated that my first instinct was to ask why -- why would somebody do that? Why would she? Why would Marek? Why would Lew?"

Maria also recognizes how war has changed her and her country. When she and Kostya arrive at what used to be Kyrlyo's safe house, they are initially taken in by a neighbour, Inna. When Maria sees a photograph of Inna's husband, Mykhaylo a Ukrainian in a Polish uniform she is stunned. "Mykhaylo and Inna were both Ukrainian names. It was so jarring now - after Blizsy Brod, after Gora - to think of a Ukrainian in Polish uniform. But of course five years ago it wouldn't have been jarring. It was perhaps too simple, even five years ago, to think we were all just Polish by virtue of being from Poland. Even I, relatively privileged and sheltered, could have told you that was too simple. Even then I knew that in some schools and universities Jewish students were made to sit on separate benches in the classrooms and lecture halls; even then I knew that in Wolyn Province ethnic Ukrainians had been forced off their land all through the twenties and thirties to make way for ethnic Poles. But despite that, despite everything, we were all Polish. There were Jews in Polish uniform. There were Ukrainians in Polish uniform. It had taken this war to tear us apart in ways that seemed irreparable."

 

Ironically, Inna whom both Maria and Kostya trust, gives them away to the NKVD, but fortunately it is to double agent Nataliya who likely saves their lives in arranging them to be set free.

In the end, Maria and Kostya begin to learn to trust one another. This budding of trust happens in during the wagon ride on the way to Lwow when Maria cannot bear to be hidden in the dark in the false part of the farmers cart. Kostya holds her hand, providing a measure of comfort to her. 

As the novel builds to its thrilling climax, the arrival of Kostya's badly wounded cousin at the safe house on Marka Street, places Maria in mortal danger as a double agent with the NKVD seeks revenge. Despite his damaged knee, Kostya risks his life helping Tomek save Maria, a risk Maria recognizes and is thankful for. The author leaves her readers with some semblance of hope in the beginnings of trust between two young people.

The Silent Unseen is a novel filled with violence, brutality and murder and is therefore recommended for older teens. While all war is brutal, the Second World War was particularly terrible in Poland which suffered from both the Soviet and Nazi invasions, as well fighting between Polish and Ukrainian nationalists. McCrina does an excellent job of portraying what this meant to the average Polish and Ukrainian family - the loss of parents, the disappearance of loved family members and the complete destruction of family homes and villages.

 

The author has included a List of Military and Paramilitary Forces, a much needed List of Characters and an Author's Note that explains the origins of her novel. A map detailing the setting of the story is also included although the author notes that her villages of Brod and Gora are fictional.

 

A very well-written historical fiction novel about a little known aspect of the war in Eastern Europe.

 

Book Details:

The Silent Unseen by Amanda McCrina
New York: Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers    2022
301 pp.

Traitor. A novel by Amanda McCrina

Traitor is a historical fiction novel set during World War II that explores the little known events during the war in Poland and the Ukraine. It is told through two narratives, that of Tolya and Aleksey.

Tolya Korolenko is a sniper with the First Ukrainian Front of the Soviet Red Army which has now moved into the Ukraine. On Stalin's orders, the First Ukrainian Front are rounding up and disarming every Polish Resistance fighter left in the city of Lwow. The officers are to be shipped east to the labour camps; the rank and file soldiers offered amnesty if they will join the Soviets.

It is late in the day when Tolya comes across a man assaulting a woman. Tolya fires a bullet into the back of the Soviet, only to see that it is Zampolit Sergei Petrov. Toyla finishes the job with a bullet to the back of the head and offers to help the young woman whom he suspects is Polish resistance. But she is having none of it. Instead she robs the dead Petrov of his gun and ammunition turns on Tolya but leaves him unharmed with his rifle.

Tolya has no regrets about killing Petrov as he's wanted to kill him after what happened in Tarnopol. Tolya's friend and mentor, Comrade Lieutenant Spirin had managed to make it back from behind German lines despite two broken ribs and a bullet in his back. Petrov had him executed by firing squad, believing he'd survived because he was a double agent. After the girl leaves, Tolya is spotted by Russian soldiers and runs through the streets to lose them.

Back with his unit at the train station, as the night settles in, Comrade Lieutenant Maksym Rudenko, the battalion commander warns Tolya not to miss curfew again. He tells him he will inform Comrade Colonel Sokolov, commander of their division, "it was an accidental discharge."

The next day Tolya meets up with Nataliya Koval, a sniper also with the First Ukrainian Front. Koval warns Tolya that the Soviets suspect one of them killed Petrov. She tells him that the NKVD (Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del - the People's Commisariat for Internal Affairs) Soviet secret police will be certain to investigate.They will torture him to reveal "all the other anti-Soviet elements in the company." She warns him that the NKVD will know he had issues with Petrov and that other soldiers will talk. Koval tells Tolya that he could be far into the mountains in two days but he refuses to run. He lies to Koval and promises her he will leave that night for Stryy.

But at noon, the NKVD come for Tolya. Three men take him from the noon mess hall to the station and into a black car. They tell Tolya they are not NKVD, introducing themselves as Andriy, Taras, Yakiv and Aleksey known as Solovey. They are with the L'viv group of the UPA (Ukrainska Povstankska Armiia) - "the Insurgent Army, radical Ukrainian nationalists and anti-Communists." Tolya believes their claim of being part of the UPA and speaking Ukrainian is an attempt to trick him. When they show papers supposedly from the Front's senior NKVD officer Fyodor Volkov at the roadblock, Tolya is certain they are NKVD. 

They leave the city behind and eventually pull off the road.As they begin hiking into the woods, Tolya tells them to just shoot him. Solovey insists they are not NKVD and that they have "extracted" him. Tolya tries unsuccessfully to convince Solovey to let him go but when he refuses, he runs and is shot in the shoulder. When Solovey opens Tolya's shirt, he sees the rosary around his neck and knows this means he is Polish and a Roman Catholic. With Andriy, Taras and Yakiv coming, Solovey rips the rosary off and pockets it. Still Tolya believes the UPA who hate Poles and believe in cleansing the Ukraine, will kill him.

Tolya is given morphine, the bullet removed by a Red Cross nurse and he begins to recuperate in the UPA's field camp. Solovey tells him that their source in the Front arranged to get him "extracted" as he was in danger. But Tolya has no idea what's going on. The Red Cross nurses want to take Tolya to Toporiv to recover but Solovey refuses and offers Tolya another choice after he proves he can still shoot. He is asked to assassinate Fyodor Volkov, the highest ranking NKVD officer in the western Ukraine. Tolya agrees and the group begins planning. When they are told by Yakiv that Volkov is not at headquarters, Tolya goes to sleep. He awakens to find the camp under attack by NKVD forces. They have been betrayed. He and Solovey escape, running into the forest, Tolya without his boots and Solovey with a broken leg from a machine-gun slug. 

Initially they planned to stay at Solovey's grandfather's cabin however they encounter NKVD and realize that this no longer an option and head to Hruszow. Solovey wants Tolya to leave him behind as he is becoming weaker from his injuries but Tolya refuses. At this time Solovey reveals that his real name is Aleksey Yevhenovych Kobryn and he tells Tolya a bit about himself. The issue is settled when they are attacked by the NKVD and Solovey, badly wounded by gunfire, kills himself. Tolya escapes but goes back to bury Solovey and is captured by Vitalik and his UPA squad. 

He is tortured by Vitalik who believes Tolya is really NKVD and that he robbed Solovey. However, when their cabin is surrounded by NKVD who are then surrounded by the Polish Resistance, Tolya is rescued and taken to the home of Mrs. Kijek where he begins to recover from the torture. However, during his convalescence, the NKVD attack the house. As he's taking out the machine gun nests in the forest, Tolya unexpectedly meets up with Nataliya Koval whom he thought was dead. She explains what has happened over the past few months. She gives Tolya a chance to escape along with Mrs. Kijek and her daughter, Lena. The truth about the informer in the Ukrainian Front is revealed.

A second narrative by Aleksey Yevhenovych Kobryn, set three years earlier, in 1941 as the Germans are entering Lwow,  provides some of the backstory of the characters encountered in Tolya's narrative. Like Tolya, Aleksey encounters the various factions fighting in Lwow, including the Nachtigallen, Ukrainians who are the advance troops for the Germans, Vitalik of the UPA, and the Kijeks who work for the Polish Resistance.

Discussion

In Traitor, the complexities of war in Eastern Europe are explored along with the themes of loyalty and betrayal and what it means to be a traitor.

The main story is told through the narrative of Tolya, an eighteen-year-old of mixed Ukrainian and Polish ethnicity. The story is set in Galicia, a region that contains parts of both Poland and the Ukraine. In this region, with a long history of conflict, people were fighting not only occupation by the Germans (Nazis), but the Russians (Communists) as well as each other; Polish against Ukrainian and vice versa. Tolya's mixed heritage makes  him a possible traitor no matter which side he chooses and this seems to be his lot in the story. His father, a Ukrainian had died in prison while his mother was murdered simply because she was Polish. With the death of his parents, he was taken in by his Aunt Olena and his uncle who were Communist Party members but eventually when the Germans arrived in 1941, he was conscripted into the Russian army as a sniper.

Some characters in Aleksey's story are found three years later in Tolya's story: Aleksey is now Solovey of the UPA, Vitalik a brutal man who tortures Tolya and who killed Aleksey's father because he knew too much, and Mrs. Kijek, a nurse who treats both Aleksey and Tolya.

Readers will not find Traitor an easy read. There are many characters, who switch in and out of the various factions and at times it's difficult to know which side a character may be affiliated with.  While this serves to drive home the complexity of the conflict in Galicia during World War II, it can also be very confusing. And Aleksey, one of the narrators, appears as a character under a different name (Solovey) in Tolya's story. Thankfully McCrina does provide her readers with a List of Characters at the back of the book - something that should have been placed more prominently at the front.

Overall the impression after reading this novel is that it is really two books meshed together. What would have made the novel more readable and more enjoyable was to simply tell the stories chronologically, first Aleksey's story set in 1941 with the coming of the Germans as they were initiating Operation Barbarossa, then Tolya's story set in 1944 as the Germans were fleeing the area and the Russians moving in to occupy Galicia. Most adults don't know the 20th century history of this region, never mind teens. The alternating narratives added a layer of complexity that wasn't necessary.

Tolya is representative of the theme of what it means to be a traitor. First there is his heritage. When Lena Kijek mentions that at first she thought Tolya was a Polish conscript, but then realizes he's Ukrainian Tolya doesn't bother to explain. "What was there to say? He wasn't Polish, and he wasn't Ukrainian. He was a traitor to his father's people on account of his mother, and a traitor to his mother's people on account of his father, and a traitor to both on account of the Reds, and a traitor to the Reds on account of Zampolit Petrov."

But Tolya's story is also about the hunt for an informer in the Ukrainian Front - the Russian Red Army moving into the Ukraine in 1944. The Front were afraid the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) would place an informer into its ranks.In Tarnopol, they believed the informer was now within their ranks. After Colonel Spirin was executed, Zampolit Petrov was certain Tolya was the informer and wanted to act. However, Colonel Sokolov refused mainly because he did not want to lose another soldier. Instead, they allowed the UPA to take Tolya and tracked them to their camp. Koval was part of the NKVD who attacked Solovey and the UPA. The NKVD continued to follow Tolya;  he was recaptured by the UPA, then tortured and freed by the Polish resistance. Eventually the NKVD caught up with him at the Kijek's house where Tolya unexpectedly meets Koval and learns the truth about what has happened over the last few months. She admits to being the informer but she participated in the attacks so as to not blow her cover.

Unlike most young adult novels today, Traitor does incorporate some of the Catholic culture which was a part of the Galicia region into the story. Tolya is Catholic and carries a rosary which is considered by the Ukrainians as a way to identify a Polish person. He only knows some of the prayers, but he prays those bits he knows. Although he has no problem as a sniper taking out other soldiers, in his mind he's constantly recalling the counselling of his priest. Father Dmytro tells him "Hate is like hogweed...easily seeded, easily spread--but have you ever tried to root out hogweed? And you've got to root it out, because it chokes out everything else." 

Aleksey spends time in prayer when he returns to the room he shares with Mykola. "I went to the icons and made my prayers in silence -- To Christ first, with the sign of the cross, then to the Theotokos, then to the saints in turn, Saint Yevhen last of all."  Despite his prayers, Aleksey finds himself  considers stealing. "The obvious thing would be to take advantage of the fact that Altshuer's was closed. I'd stolen before, of course, when I'd needed to. It was easy to justify stealing from Poles and Reds. They were the ones who'd created the need in the first place. Repayment in kind -- God would understand and forgive."  When he kills Strilka, Aleksey's surprised at his lack of reaction. "I waited for the pangs of conscience. It was never as easy as you thought it was going to be. I knew that because I'd failed every time before. I hadn't even been able to kill that Red sentry, down at the station. I hadn't been able to kill Andriy, and I hadn't been able to watch Andriy kill that Pole... It was because I didn't have time to think about it, I decided. It would be harder later."

Traitor is a novel that manages to convey the brutality of war both for soldiers and the general population. It is a reminder that during this time people were murdered simply because they were a certain ethnicity (Jewish, Polish or Ukrainian) or because of their political beliefs or for no reason at all. In this regard, Traitor is an important book for our times.

Book Details:

Traitor: A Novel by Amanda McCrina
New York: Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers   2020
355 pp.