The Moscow night is crisp. Soon the first snowflakes will fall on the trauma hospital where I’m staying, on the city’s outskirts, far from my New Zealand home.
In room 527, my left hand has been sewn to my burning stomach.
Nobody can tell me what’s going on. They speak Russian and I don’t. I hear a train whistle, and it is the most mournful sound I’ve ever heard because I’m not on that train, escaping back to my home.
Judgement blinded by faith in miracles
It all began with my father, Krešimir Jakich. His staunch faith in Soviet miracles had its genesis years before I was born.
In 1939, just before WWII broke out, Krešimir arrived in Wellington, New Zealand, from the village of Podgora on the Dalmatian coast of former Yugoslavia.
Influenced by the leftist politics of his father and older brothers, he became a member of the New Zealand Communist Party and in 1946 appeared in court for pasting up communist posters, advocating for a Communist parliamentary candidate and publicly burning the Union Jack.
His political fervour would later blind his better judgement.
One year later, in 1947, when Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito called for his country’s citizens to rebuild their devastated homeland after WWII, my father joined other patriots to return.
Emaciated from harsh post-war conditions, my father nevertheless managed to win the attention of Nita, his close cousin.
Villagers prophesied that there would be problems with their children.
Ignoring the warnings, they married in 1952 and Nita fell pregnant with me.
Grinding post-war deprivation and imminent war between Joseph Stalin and Mr Tito after their political split made my father wonder if maybe a stable capitalist monarchy would be better for a young family after all.
‘It’s for your own good’
We returned to New Zealand and en route, in Melbourne, I was born, without all five fingers on my left hand.
The village prophecy had come true and my mother felt she had been punished by a God her communist husband did not recognise.
My sister Silvana, born 12 years after me, remembers our mother’s profound homesickness for Yugoslavia and her perfectionism, which caused misery because nothing lived up to her expectations.
My hand was always a thorn in her side. When she cried, I knew it was because of me. In every family photo, I was encouraged to cover my left hand.
When I was still little, my parents started searching the world over for a doctor who could reconstruct a hand. And while every other country said they couldn’t help, the Soviets offered hope.
Perhaps they wanted to prove they could do something the West couldn’t.
But first I needed to reach puberty.
So in 1967, at the magic age of 14, the great pilgrimage to the Soviet Union took place.
At Moscow’s Central Institute for Traumatology and Orthopaedics, after a quick interaction between my father and surgeon Vladimir Blokhin, who shared no common language, my father left me to return to New Zealand. My mother would wait for me in Yugoslavia.
When my father called the next day from Hotel Metropol to say goodbye, my sobbing and pleading for him to take me home fell on deaf ears.
“It’s for your own good,” he told me. He trusted the Soviets.
Burning pain, delirium
The surgeons sewed my hand to my stomach before encasing me in plaster from my shoulders to my hips.
Daily, Professor Blokhin would open a small swing door by my hand to monitor the growth of two new fingers from the skin and fat of my stomach.
Stephen Gilbert, a retired plastic surgeon in Auckland, New Zealand says this surgical technique had been used during the First World War to reconstruct the faces of injured soldiers. It was, he says, “very much appropriate for what he was doing at the time”.
“But this technique had never been used anywhere in the world for hands.”
Progress was slow because I had stopped eating from stress. This frustrated Professor Blokhin, who insisted I show more enthusiasm for the kasha (porridge), compote and borsch soup that were slopped from buckets onto my plate.
When my body cast came off after three months, I was mouldy beneath it, reeking like stale cabbage. It took several nurses to hack off the crusty scales.
The wobbly sausage (later divided into two fingers) that was attached to my hand was then severed from my stomach, leaving a raised scar like red polystyrene, and a bulge like a small egg by my waistline.
In just under 12 months in hospital, I’d experienced burning pain and delirium.
I’d had six operations — five of them without general anaesthetic. My hospital roommate told me the Soviet anaesthetic was so low-grade it was feared it could cause brain damage.
I begged for general, not just local, but Professor Blokhin stood his ground.
Several times I tried escaping from the operating table. I often made it to the door, but the white coats would drag me back and tie me down.
I kept scrunched next to my heart a photo of my two-year-old sister, all there was to remind me this torture was not forever.
That she was waiting for me.
Security file secrets
It wasn’t until 50 years later, in 2018, that I opened my father’s New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (SIS) file.
It was a revelation. My family had been under surveillance by the New Zealand government for years, due to my father’s ties to communism.
But the file’s spin that I was “a Soviet sympathiser with a KGB-trained father” was not my story. It was their judgement, not my truth.
Later, in the 1970s, a young Helen Clark — who would years later become prime minister of New Zealand — offered to investigate potential unfair discrimination after my applications to be selected for the diplomatic service were repeatedly unsuccessful.
In an investigation, SIS officials concluded that the most traumatic experience of my life left me “under a tremendous obligation to the Russian authorities for their magnanimity, skill and kindness”.
Therefore I had “a sense of gratitude [that] could lead to … a conflict of loyalties almost certainly impossible … to resolve in New Zealand’s favour”.
The director of security came to the conclusion that “there are dangers involved in employing Miss Jakich”.
But I owed the Soviet Union nothing and would never have betrayed New Zealand. Only I knew the truth about what had happened behind the Iron Curtain — but nobody bothered to ask me.
In the security file, there were newspaper articles by a Russian journalist that had circulated around Eastern Europe, which inflated the success of my hand graft surgery.
At the same time in New Zealand there were fantastical headlines like “A Surgical Triumph” and “Medical Miracle”.
“Luck has come the way of Mr Jakich at last; after 15 years of heartbreak he has been told that his elder daughter now has fingers”, ran one story.
While I did return to New Zealand with two new “fingers”, they were hideous and useless, and I had endured months of experimental surgery — largely without anaesthetic. It was a trauma that would shape my formative years.
Had I been a propaganda pawn that fed a hungry media? Because nobody told it as it was.
The newspaper articles misled families around Eastern Europe, who visited our village to check out my hand in the months I spent in Yugoslavia before returning to New Zealand.
To them I said emphatically: “Accept your children as they are.”
Choice to reject pain, hold on to love
Adjusting to a normal routine in New Zealand was hard. I couldn’t relate to my peers and their teenage interests.
My sister has told me that because she was so little, she didn’t recognise me when I returned. She refused to believe I was her sister.
When I was 21, a Melbourne plastic surgeon told me the results of the procedures in Moscow were “fairly disastrous”.
The operations had resulted in “insensitive, painful and easily damaged appendages”, he told me.
He removed the unbending, useless extensions, with no choice but to make deep cuts as the fingers were showing signs of infection. I lost the original nubbins, and more. I was worse off than what I was born with.
A different surgeon performed two more operations at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney to tidy my stomach, which he called “the worst scar [he] had ever seen”, and my leg scar, where the saw used in surgery in Moscow had broken against my bone.
In Dr Gilbert’s opinion, the operations done in Moscow could never have been successful.
“[A normal hand reconstruction] wasn’t possible then. And it’s not possible nowadays even,” he told me.
He believes I should have been given the opportunity to say no to the operation, instead of being “dumped in Moscow and made to go ahead with it”.
My father’s poor decisions and a government’s wrongful judgement created setbacks in my life that often felt insurmountable.
Their impact has faded with the passing of time, thanks to healing friendships and the love of my sister. My fortune changed.
And now that more of my truth has been told, those are the good things I will choose to remember.
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