Stefan Maczka's father, (also Stefan), was a cavalry officer who fought victoriously in possibly the last and greatest cavalry battle of the preceding one hundred years, the 'Miracle of the Vistula'. It was the final victory in the Russian/Polish War of 1920. He was one of nine thousand former soldiers rewarded with a plot of land in the reclaimed borderlands. Stalin never forgot that humiliating defeat. Stefan B. was born in 1922 just over two years later. Life was hard in those early years; the military settlers had to defend their borders against invasion by armed bands from Russia, crossing into Poland from the east. By 1937, the rewards of hard work were paying off, and life was beginning to get easier... Then came the war, and Stalin's revenge on the military settlers he so bitterly despised for their victory over Soviet forces twenty years earlier. Rounded up, they were uprooted from their homes, put on cattle trucks, and forcibly deported to the frozen and inhospitable wastes of Siberia. Goodbye Poland is one man's account of his journey into adversity at the age of just seventeen. Written exactly as he spoke, his accent comes through loud and clear, in this inspirational story of stoicism, and survival against the odds.