Many years ago an artist applied the final brush stroke to the portrait of a beautiful woman. The woman was very young, newly married, and as close to happiness as she would ever be again.
Somewhere in the Soviet Union, the portrait still exists, hanging, perhaps, in a museum. The image belongs to another time. After it was painted, the world the young woman knew was irrevocably altered by revolution, war, and bloody struggles for power.
The portrait caught a moment in a life. It captured the woman’s expectations of a future that would fulfill the promise of the life she had known as a child. Her expectations never changed; her world did.
The woman who sat for that portrait lies buried in a nation that grew increasingly foreign to her while she lived. Long before her death, she ceased to resemble the woman in the painting. In her heart, however, she changed little.
Wanda Stanishevsky’s story is one of a promise thwarted; the telling of it is a promise kept. Inevitably, the chronicle of Wanda’s life becomes the story of many lives, including that of Rita Brei, who pledged to tell it.