From War to Westminster

click here for more details, find new or used items	Stefan Terlezki Our price £13.19 (£19.99) New from £11.70 Used from £10.98 Pages: 224 (Hardcover) ISBN: 1844152650 Pub: Leo Cooper Ltd Pub date: 2005-07-30 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 103886

Reader Reviews:

An amazing story (0/0 people found this helpful)

Enslaved by both the Nazi's and the Red Army he walked across Europe to start a new life in the UK, rising to become an MP and businessman. A very well written and engaging account

The MP who had escaped from slavery. (6/6 people found this helpful)

The memoirs of the man who was briefly Conservative MP for Cardiff West are quite unlike most politicians' autobiographies. Most of this book is concerned not with his time at Westminster but with his teenage years.

In 1942, Stefan Terlezki was taken from his native Ukraine into Nazi slavery at the age of fourteen and put to forced labour in Austria, interrupted only by a spell in a Gestapo prison for insubordination. As a seventeen year old in 1945, he was on the run from the Red Army, throwing hand grenades at Russian soldiers before finding sanctuary in the British Occupation Zone. His escape, against the odds, is vividly recalled.

These chapters describe when Terlezki the man, the implacable anti-communist politician, was formed. The earlier years are necessarily seen through the eyes of a child, though an observant child who had to grow up fast. It's a first hand account of the persecutions great and small suffered by Ukrainian villagers in 1930s Poland, followed by a brutal world-turned-upside-down after annexation by the Soviet Union in 1939.

As for the Nazi slave traffic, it's made clear that no more thought was given to the welfare of slaves being transported to the Reich than in the trans-Atlantic trade of an earlier era. In both cases there was an attempt to clean the slaves up at journey's end to make them presentable for sale.

Stefan Terlezki recalls how the prospective purchasers "picked out a boy or girl whom they wanted to examine more closely. A young man...beckoned me closer to the fence". That young man was Hansel Böhmer, who had been called up into the German Navy and was looking for someone to work on his family's farm. Stefan Terlezki spent his first winter sleeping with the cattle; though later there were occasional acts of kindness.

Youth, initiative and luck saw Terlezki through and he is unashamedly the hero of his own life story but there is a second major character, his father Oleksa. A leader of his community, he was imprisoned by the Poles, nearly executed by the Germans and exiled to Siberia by the Russians. As an MP, Stefan Terlezki was able to have his father brought from Siberia to Wales. A month later Oleksa was returned not to exile but to their home village in Ukraine.

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