Review: Anchors Down in Africa by Zbyszek Miszczak Southern Right Publishers

There is a particular kind of memoir that works not because of grand literary ambition but because the story itself is simply too good to keep quiet. Zbyszek Miszczak's Anchors Down in Africa is exactly that kind of book - and for some readers, it will be something more unsettling than a good read. It will be a mirror.

The extract published in the Sunday Times drops us into a refugee camp in Traiskirchen, Austria, in September 1981. Miszczak and his friend Jacek have fled communist Poland, leaving behind the Solidarity crackdowns, an unwanted army call-up, and a country rapidly closing its doors. Their wives and toddler sons are somewhere between Vienna and the camp, unaccounted for, and the tension of that waiting saturates every paragraph.

September 1981. Traiskirchen. For at least one reviewer, those words don't read as history. They read as memory. There were other Polish families in that camp that month - other engineers, other doctors, other parents with small children and suitcases containing everything they had decided their new life would need. The corridors Miszczak describes, the smokers in the passage, the Albanian fixer with his overpriced beer - these details have the specific, unimprovable texture of things that actually happened. Because they did. To more than one family.

What makes Miszczak's voice so readable is its refusal of self-pity. When he needs to get past a camp guard to search for his missing wife and sons, he borrows a baby's bottle and bluffs his way out. When the reunion he has been desperate for finally comes, his wife explains the delay simply: he had written in his note that they should go shopping, so they did. He files this away as a lesson in precision of language. The guard's reaction - jaw dropping, then laughing - when Miszczak returns sweating with two toddlers under his arms instead of milk is one of those quietly comic scenes that makes the unbearable feel survivable. That, perhaps, was the point of writing it down.

The path from Traiskirchen led, for Miszczak, ultimately to Cape Town and to employment within apartheid South Africa's military machine - an irony the book's framing does not shy away from. Other Polish families took different roads. Some landed in Johannesburg and were taken swiftly to the infrastructure of the apartheid state by other means - power stations, engineering projects, the vast industrial skeleton that kept the regime running.

This is what Anchors Down in Africa opens up, beyond its own pages. It asks what it meant to escape one authoritarian system and land, gratefully and without full comprehension, inside another. It asks this not with accusation but with the honesty of someone reconstructing his own choices in good faith. That moral seriousness, worn lightly in the writing but present throughout, is what elevates this beyond a straightforward emigration memoir.

Miszczak writes the way an engineer thinks - sequentially, accurately, with an eye for practical detail. The village of Altenmarkt is sketched in a single efficient paragraph. He clocks the pub, the church, the bank, the grocery shop stocked with alcohol, and is back in time for lunch. There is something almost tender in that economy of observation. He is a man who pays attention to the world and trusts the world to be interesting enough without embellishment.

It is. It was.

For those who were also in Traiskirchen in September 1981, it is also, simply, a reminder that you were not alone in that corridor.