An underground Ukrainian translation of George Orwell’s subversive novel infiltrated postwar Europe’s displaced persons camps.
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Reading the introduction to Animal Farm by Christopher Hitchens a few years ago, I was stunned to learn that George Orwell, then a struggling writer in London, worked by letter with a group of refugees to publish the novel in Ukrainian in the displaced persons camps of postwar Europe.
The story of Orwell and the refugees was an incredible triumph of life amidst so much death and destruction. Between Stalin’s terror famine and the Gulag, Hitler’s concentration camps, the clash of Soviet and Nazi armies in World War II, it was as though hell had opened up across Eastern Europe. Sixty-five years ago this March, Orwell wrote a heartfelt letter to a group of Ukrainian refugees sharing in their solidarity of wanting to expose the incomprehensible evil of totalitarian regimes. The refugees turned the letter into Orwell’s only published introduction to Animal Farm, and the only known personal account of how he developed the book that would be considered his masterpiece.