Andrew Bienkowski
About the book: Radical Gratitude
Andrew Bienkowski has spent more than 40 years as a clinical therapist. At the age of six, he and his family were forced to leave their Polish homeland for Siberia where his grandfather deliberately starved to death so that the women and children might have enough to eat. The years that followed were harrowing, difficult and magical and influenced his entire life. After Siberia, the family spent a year in an Iranian refugee camp where Andrew nearly died from dysentery, malaria and malnutrition. Three years in Palestine followed, a year in England, before he finally immigrated to America where he went on to earn a Masters in Clinical Psychology and to be a psychotherapist.
1. What made you decide to write Radical Gratitude?
My original idea was to share with others some of the skills I acquired during my 40 years as a psychotherapist. I was convinced that there were people who were interested in helping others and that they could learn from my book how to do it more effectively. The original version sounded more like a manual or textbook. A “how to” book. And then I met Mary Akers, who is a wonderful writer and she converted the “manual” into a wonderful book full of stories, ideas, good information, and lessons from my experiences in Siberia. Without Mary, this book would never have materialized. She deserves more than half the credit for this book.
2. What is this book about?
It’s about my experiences as a child who, in 1939, was banished by the Soviets to Siberia with my family. It’s also about my experience as a psychotherapist for 40 years. It’s about what I learned from these experiences. Each chapter is presented as a lesson (such as radical gratitude, the power of understanding, empowering others). It’s full of stories and inspiring, practical guidance. The purpose of writing this book was to teach others to become more effective helpers themselves. The original title was “Helping Each Other”.
3. What role does Siberia play?
It plays a central role. Most of the life lessons I have acquired, I learned in Siberia. The key story is about my grandfather to whom this book is dedicated. When we were starving to death (sometimes we had no food for several days) my grandfather decided to stop eating so that there would be enough food for the children to survive (my brother and I). We watched him die of starvation for many days. Many such stories from my two years in Siberia have inspired my life and have been a source of many lessons which I share with the reader. Mary deserves most of the credit for literally pulling these stories out of me.
4. What happened to the other members of your family?
We came to the USA in 1948. My mother died three years later at the age of 37. My father died at the age of 60. My brother, who was a professor at Princeton, died at the age of 43 when he was struck by a car. My grandmother went back to Poland and died there in her 80s. She said to us, “I don’t want to die in a foreign country.” I am the only survivor.
5. Is Radical Gratitude a self-help book?
No. It is the opposite of a self-help book. I see most self-help books as being very ego-oriented. As in, it’s all about me--how can I become more popular, more successful, richer? By contrast, this book says to the reader: Let’s shift the focus to helping each other rather than helping ourselves. I suggest that helping each other makes life more meaningful and makes the world a better place to live.
6. Who is this book written for?
It’s written specifically for those people who are interested in becoming more effective in helping others. I often run into people who want to help others but say that they do not know how. Hopefully this book will give you the confidence and some ideas and skills to help those who need help.
7. How did you survive Siberia?
After my grandfather stopped eating and died, we buried him in a shallow grave because the ground was frozen. When we came back to visit his grave, we found that wolves had eaten and scattered his remains. Shortly after that he began to appear to my grandmother in her dreams, sometimes giving her specific instructions on how to find food. The first dream led us to a calf that had been killed by wolves but otherwise untouched. The second led my mother to walk to a nearby village where a stranger handed her a sack of flour that was said to be spoiled, but was fine. My grandmother then decided to use her gifts and become the village fortune teller. She would sometimes be rewarded with a carrot or some potato peelings or a piece of stale bread. My grandmother also taught us about edible wild plants and mushrooms that we gathered and ate whenever we could find them. My mother was assigned work as a cattle tender and sometimes her fellow workers would secret her some of the whey from making cheese, or some slops meant for the pigs. Occasionally a woman we never knew well would send her son over at night to sneak a piece of food to us. Anyone who helped us could have gotten in serious trouble if they had been caught. We were always very grateful, but could not show it for fear of getting them in trouble. The long, cold winters were the hardest. The wolves were starving, too, and they would come right up to the door and howl and scratch on it, making us very afraid. No one went outside on winter nights. But in general, my family was very good at creative methods of survival and we did not give up. Many others who had been banished to Siberia did give up, and as a result, died.
Mary Akers
1. What did you enjoy most about writing this book?
I think I most enjoyed getting to know Andy’s family. Granted, they have all been dead for many years, but hearing all of his stories, and having to write about his family in such an intimate way really brought them to life for me. His grandfather stubbornly starved to death in order to leave enough food to keep the children from starving. His educated, refined mother braved tending the village cows that terrified her because she was paid one loaf of bread a week to do so. Too old to work, his grandmother took up fortune telling as a way to bring in scraps of food to feed her family. Andy went into the empty fields and picked up one grain of wheat at a time after the harvesters had left, sometimes spending all day obtaining a single small cup of wheat. Even his three-year-old brother smuggled pieces of bread home from the communist school to share with his starving family. They pulled together and never lost hope, and they survived what many others didn’t. They even escaped Siberia.
Writing his story was also very educational for me. I learned a great deal about that period in history. It was such a pivotal time for the planet, the time of World War II. And writing Andy’s story allowed me some small access to this incredible experience of his.
2. What was the hardest part of writing this book?
I think the most difficult thing was the organizing of Andy’s family stories and then matching them up with life lessons in a way that made for a logical flow of information and also an interesting and intriguing storyline. I think we ultimately succeeded. ?
3. What was the most meaningful part of this book for you?
The lessons on hope and perseverance meant the most to me. I believe in never giving up, in staying positive and getting back up each time you are knocked down. It’s the only way to ultimately get what you most want in life. Not only does Andy’s family’s story of survival exemplify this, the book’s very publication does, as well. Our wonderful agent, Isobel Dixon was the first one to believe in this book, and we are forever grateful to her for that, and also for matching us up with Maggie Hamilton our extraordinary editor at Allen & Unwin. It feels like the perfect home for this book.
4. How long did it take for this book to be completed?
My records show that I first officially started writing the book on May 1st of 2005, so almost three years, start to finish. As most books do, it went through many different versions before we hit upon its final version that alternates the survival stories from Siberia with the life lessons Andrew learned during that harrowing time.
5. How did you and Andy meet?
A mutual friend--Joy Herrick—introduced us. Joy is a wonderful writer herself, but after hearing Andy’s story, and about his struggles to write the book himself, she thought of me and asked me if I would be interested in helping him to write his book. It sounded fascinating, so I agreed to meet him and Joy brought him by my house. We hit it off immediately and have been good friends and productive co-workers ever since.
6. How do you think this book will help others?
It will inspire them to think in terms of the big-picture things in life—the things that we often take for granted, like persistence, faith, hope, love, and the importance of gratitude, even for the difficult things that happen to us. Also, the book has been written in such a way that it can be inspirational to anyone—anyone can relate to Andy’s family and their story of survival. The case histories cited from his years of clinical practice are examples of the struggles that everyone faces. And the many timeless and inspiring quotations bring the book alive with a universal wisdom that speaks to everyone.
7. What is radical gratitude?
Radical Gratitude is the notion that we can learn to be grateful even for the difficult things that happen to us in our lives because they teach us how to be better human beings. It’s a version of the old adage, “That which does not kill uras makes us stronger.” When we embrace the idea of radical gratitude, we can learn to look back at the difficult experiences in our lives and see how they have transformed us—made us smarter, more resilient, more empathetic toward the suffering of others. Radical Gratitude also gives us hope during the darkest times--hope that we will someday be able to look back and realize what we have learned, that we will ultimately gain from our present pain. The grace lies in the lessons that the struggle imparts.
8. What makes one man’s lessons from almost seventy years ago applicable today?
Stories of survival and the human condition are timeless. 300 years ago, or last week, it doesn’t really matter when you are speaking about human suffering and the overcoming of it. But in general, I think stories of sacrifice, hope, and family appeal to everyone. We can all benefit from hearing true-life stories of persistence, faith, and gratitude that ultimately win out over adversity.
9. Andy was only five when he was sent to Siberia. How did he remember all of this?
That’s a great question, and one I struggled with during the writing of this book. Obviously his memories would be scanty. How much does any one of us remember about the years before we turned eight? Probably we only remember bits and pieces, if anything at all. But every family has its storyteller, and Andy’s grandmother was theirs. Babcia kept the stories from Siberia alive—telling and retelling them--so that they would not be forgotten, so that her children would remember their mother after her early death, so that the sacrifices of their grandfather would not be forgotten, and so they would understand the evils that can be set upon ordinary, innocent people when governments get too much power.
So, these stories from Siberia are a combination of the stories that Babcia told and retold over the years as Andy grew up (as he relayed them to me), and they are re-imagined stories of his own childhood events that he has been able to recall, and they are my attempts to understand, respect and accurately portray the members of his family and all that they endured.
