Pod Insights ABC Rewind Secrets and Lies | A year behind the Iron Curtain About this episode At the height of the Cold War a New Zealand teenager is sent to a hospital in the Soviet Union to grow new fingers on her left hand. Sounds like fiction? This actually happened to Miranda Jakich and in this episode she tells her tale.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:10 Speaker 01 It's New Zealand in the 1970s. My family's sleepy suburban routine is regularly interrupted by my father
0:19 Speaker 02 Hello.
0:20 Speaker 01 bellowing down the phone.
0:22 Speaker 02 You bloody bastards, leave my family alone.
0:27 Speaker 01 He believes our phone's being tapped by the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service, the SIS, but to my mind, a tradesman, a housewife, a uni student obsessed with music and hair, and my innocent little sister, do not pose a national security risk.
0:48 Speaker 03 Hello, Kirsty Melville here and welcome to the History Listen and our series about families. At the height of the Cold War, a New Zealand teenager is sent to a hospital in the Soviet Union, alone. She spends almost a year there, having six operations in an attempt to grow new fingers on her left hand. Sound like fiction? Well, this actually happened to Miranda Yarkech. And just a warning, there's some disturbing material coming up. The story starts with Miranda's father.
1:25 Speaker 01 After my father died in 2017, I asked the SIS for his file, hoping it would lead to the mother lode of truth. It revealed that his politics, some key decisions he'd made, and SIS surveillance had had devastating consequences for my life.
1:45 Speaker 03 My memories of Tata are, he was always very much tied to the homeland and loved everything about Yugoslavia and all things Yugoslav. I guess idealised it because he was living so far away and was bringing all the old memories with him. But he didn't belong in New Zealand culture and nor did he really want to belong. He was always very tied to his roots.
2:13 Speaker 01 That's my sister Silvana. Our father, Krasju Mirjakec, arrived in Wellington, New Zealand, from the village of Podgora, on the Dalmatian coast of former Yugoslavia, at the age of 14 in 1939. He was one of the last and youngest migrants to squeak in before war broke out. Influenced by his father and older brothers, he quickly adopted left-leaning politics and became a member of the New Zealand Communist Party. In 1946, he appeared in court for pasting up posters advocating the election to Parliament of a communist candidate, and he publicly burned the Union Jack.
3:00 Speaker 04 My name's Slovenka Mesa. I'm the secretary of the Dalmatian Archive and Museum in Auckland. Yugoslavia at the end of the World War II was a completely devastated country. All the infrastructure was destroyed. A lot of people had died. They were starving. They'd lost housing. So it was a case of rebuilding from almost nothing.
3:33 Speaker 01 The new leadership in Yugoslavia, headed by President Tito, tapped into the loyalty that many Yugoslavs around the world felt towards their homeland.
3:44 Speaker 04 There was a huge upwelling of patriotism. After the Depression, after the war. I think people were really... They needed to believe that there was going to be something better. And Tito was certainly quite a heroic figure.
4:02 Speaker 01 President Tito's government sent two troop ships, the Radnik and Partizanka, to North and South America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to gather up volunteers to rebuild Yugoslavia.
4:17 Speaker 01 Before my 21-year-old father boarded, he renounced his status as a naturalised New Zealander and vowed never to return.
4:27 Speaker 01 In Yugoslavia, he was put to work in a youth brigade, helping build a new motorway between Belgrade and Zagreb. And then he did military service.
4:37 Speaker 04 Their heads were shaved and, basically, they didn't have mattresses or anything to sleep on. And the food consisted of beans and bread and not much else.
4:47 Speaker 01 I have a photo of my father from that time, looking like a skeleton. The New Zealanders and Australians struggled under Yugoslav communism. Fueled at first by idealism, they were later discouraged and defeated by the harsh conditions.
5:04 Speaker 04 It wasn't what they were used to. They were used to being in a democratic country where people were a bit more their own boss. And everything was coming top-down and the freedom of choice was very minimal. And this wasn't something they could accept.
5:27 Speaker 01 But before he came back to New Zealand in 1953, he met my mother Nita. They lived in the same village. Problem is, he was actually engaged to someone else in the village, but jilted her for my mother's charms and failed to return the sewing machine that was part of the first woman's dowry. Seeking revenge, her brothers went after my father with the dogs, and he was forced to hide in the Biakov Mountains. The attraction between my parents was powerful, but they were second cousins. Everyone cautioned them not to marry and prophesised there would be problems with their children. Ignoring the warnings, they went ahead and married in 1952,
6:12 Speaker 01 and my mother fell pregnant with me. Grinding post-war deprivation, avenging brothers, maybe a stable capitalist monarchy with a socialist heart would actually be better for a young family. But he'd renounced his New Zealand citizenship, so his visa was denied. His mother, our Baba, who'd recently joined her husband and sons in New Zealand, knew just how to fix that problem. Our cousins Drina and Krasna tell the story.
6:44 Speaker 05 She'd trot off to immigration. Baba went every single day.
6:49 Speaker 04 Yep.
6:50 Speaker 05 For a great period of time, we're not sure exactly how long.
6:53 Speaker 04 How long, yeah, that's the thing. It was weeping and much wailing.
6:57 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, so she would bore her heart out.
7:00 Speaker 04 Yeah, so this poor man eventually caved in.
7:03 Speaker 05 She wanted her son back in. It didn't matter at whatever cost.
7:07 Speaker 04 Yeah.
7:08 Speaker 05 And it worked.
7:08 Speaker 04 It worked.
7:09 Speaker 01 And then, there was our mother.
7:13 Speaker 03 My memories of Mama are unhappy, angry, missing Yugoslavia terribly, pining for her mother in Yugoslavia. I know that coming to New Zealand as an immigrant with no English language was very difficult for her. She spoke about that often and how isolated she was. Working in the fish and chip shop was a huge nightmare. Not her idea of a new life in a prosperous country. So she resented those nine or 10 years where she was on her legs all day and packing fish and chips. I think also her perfectionism caused her a lot of misery and suffering ultimately
7:55 Speaker 03 because nothing lived up to Nita's expectations. And certainly I can see how your hand was something that would always be a thorn in her side. Unreasonably so, but just being honest here.
8:14 Speaker 01 I was born without all five fingers on my left hand. So, the prophecy of the village had come true and my mother felt she'd been punished. In every photo, she made me cover my hand. But there was pressure to prove that I could still do everything, including playing a baby piano accordion. But all those buttons, not our hope. That fantasy was only realised years later by my sister.
8:43 Speaker 03 The Yugoslav club was the central beacon in our father's life and therefore ours. It was a place where they could infuse us with a lot of Yugoslav culture. And that meant we were in folk dancing Yugoslav band. We would watch Yugoslav films, have Yugoslav picnics. All things Yugoslav.
9:09 Speaker 01 Aside from being a model little Yugoslav, my parents expected me to be better than average: top of the class, bilingual, a high achiever. I learnt my role was to excel in both worlds, and all that confusion affected my self-image. One of my oldest friends, Stephanie, remembers me at high school.
9:32 Speaker 06 Quite shy, the term I now use is low self-esteem, just not believing in yourself. And really unsure of who you were and what you were is probably the biggest thing I remember. And yet that was at such odds with how you actually were. So it was like your self-belief and your actual persona didn't match. I just liked you. I liked your company, I liked who you were. I thought you were gorgeous. So I was indeed envious of your legs. They're so very long. And you were smart.
10:06 Speaker 01 I really didn't know who I was or where I fitted in. It was classic culture clash. Tito worship at home, down with the Queen, but at school it was homage to the monarchy. In those days at the cinema, you'd stand up as they played God Save the Queen. At my father's command, we remained seated while everyone hissed at us.
10:42 Speaker 03 In our home, Tito was for my dad what the Queen of England would have been for the regular Kiwi. We had images of Tito throughout the house. And in the front room, on the piano, there was a tapestry image of Tito which sort of presided over the living room. Dad had equated Yugoslav-style communism as much the same as Soviet Union-style. He thought all communism was great, had a very idealistic view on that, and tended to ignore the fact that Stalin and Tito had fallen out. Dad was very good at rewriting history in his head, both his own and global. And once he thought something was the way it was, there was no changing his mind.
11:26 Speaker 01 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. But first, I needed to reach puberty. In 1967, when I was 14, the Great Pilgrimage to Moscow took place. After a quick huddle with Russian surgeon Vladimir Blaken, speaking no common language, my father left me in the Central Institute for Traumatology and Orthopedics. He said, "For my own good." When he called the next day from Hotel Metropole to say goodbye, my sobbing and pleading fell on deaf ears.
12:12 Speaker 02 I'm Stephen Gilbert. I'm a retired plastic surgeon in Auckland, New Zealand. And I spent a lot of time doing hands surgery and trained in the States back in the 1978, so I'm familiar with what was going on in the 1960s for hand reconstruction. Your surgery was called reconstructive hand surgery. It was a technique which had been used during the First World War by Harold Gillies, who was a New Zealand plastic surgeon. And he reconstructed the faces of injured people who were caught up in the trenches and shot through the face and jaw. And he would expand the jaw and put in bone grafts, and then cover that with a tube pedicle.
12:54 Speaker 02 So that was very much appropriate for what he was doing at the time.
12:59 Speaker 01 But this technique had never been used anywhere in the world for hands. They cut my stomach, then attached my hand to it, and then encased me in plaster from my neck to my hips. I looked like a walking fridge. Daily, Professor Blaken would open a small swing door near my hand to monitor the growth of two new fingers from the skin and fat of my stomach.
13:25 Speaker 02 Well, what they would do was to make two cuts into the abdominal skin, and these were parallel cuts, and then that
13:33 Speaker 06 Strip of skin would be raised up. And what would have happened was it would tend to tube underneath. That was why it was called a tube pedicle. And then a bone graft would be put into it. So it was attached to your, I think your index finger stump. And then it was divided at one end and attached to your middle finger stump. And the idea was to try and make two fingers.
14:01 Speaker 01 Months later, when the plaster came off, I was a mouldy, green frog of a girl, reeking like stale cabbage. It took several nurses to hack off the green scales. I looked down at the long sausage still attached from my hand to my stomach, destined to be my new index and middle fingers. I felt hideous.
14:28 Speaker 01 This wobbly sausage was severed from my stomach the next day.
14:33 Speaker 01 In just under 12 months, I had six operations, five without general anaesthetic, because the anaesthetic was so low grade, it would have caused brain damage. I begged for general, not just local. But Professor Blahene stood his ground. The choice was brain or pain, and he decided for us. There was no point escaping from the operating table, although I often made it to the door, because the white coats dragged you back and tied you down.
15:13 Speaker 06 I think one of the most powerful memories from that period is actually that letter that you wrote to the class from hospital. It was a very poignant, sad, horrifying letter, actually. And it was read out to the whole of the class. And it was pretty gruesome, because you described in quite some detail some of the, what really seemed like barbaric treatment.
15:39 Speaker 01 I remember the electric saw breaking against the bone of my leg, and Professor Blahene sending an intern scurrying to find a manual saw. And nurses carrying away basins overflowing with my blood. The photo of my two-year-old sister scrunched next to my heart was all there was to remind me this torture was not forever. She was waiting for me.
16:07 Speaker 01 And the worst thing was that you didn't have any option at all. That you were just taken to the Soviet Union. You had to go ahead with what was planned for you. Nowadays, of course, even at your age of 14, you would have to give informed consent and understand what was going on and agree to it.
16:26 Speaker 01 I did make some friends in hospital. Armando from Cuba, a burns victim who looked like a melted candle. Irina, who lost her heel in a train accident. Yubasha, whose brother shot off her fingers playing with his father's gun. And my first crush, Genya, who also lost his fingers in a train accident. They came from all over: Azerbaijan, the Ukraine, Belarus, Siberia.
17:03 Speaker 01 I learned to speak and read Russian and was passed off as Ukrainian to new patients.
17:10 Speaker 01 Each long yawn of a day was spent playing cards, sneaking out to the adjoining forest in our dressing guns, trolley racing the spinal injury patients. A morbid pastime was counting bodies arriving at the morgue from our window. Horizontal bundles delivered by men in blue tunics like deliveries at a supermarket. Twenty was a busy day.
17:39 Speaker 01 Burning pain and delirium meant there was a lot of crying in room 527. We resented the whalers and with five beds, there was always a whaler. One doctor told me I arrived a wimpy kid but became more like a brave little Soviet.
18:01 Speaker 01 Nurses stabbed us with penicillin for pain relief, but it may as well have been borscht. And so, nobody slept. We watched the moon through the window and cried, hoping those who loved us would come. And yet, there was laughter. We would howl and shake until our raw wounds pulled.
18:26 Speaker 01 At night, after the doctors went home, our ward transformed. Patients and night nurses found comfort in each other's arms. My suitors were content just sitting on my bed. We younger ones yearned for the day we could stop observing and start loving.
18:47 Speaker 01 Home felt so far away. Family friends wrote letters echoing the same mantra: "Be strong, it will all be worth it." My mother sent the occasional parcel from Yugoslavia, including the equivalent of Dolly magazine, my first bra, chocolate, and a blue-quilted dressing gun that became the envy of the ward. They'd never seen anything from outside the Soviet Union. Most precious to me was a tape recording of my little sister's first words and books sent by New Zealand ex-Prime Minister Sir Walter Nash and his sister Emily, who assured me I was in clever hands.
19:31 Speaker 01 That was contradicted by my roommate Irina, who asked, "Why did your father bring you here when everyone knows our medicine is so terrible?"
19:56 Speaker 04 It was a shame that anything was done for you at the time because you were managing quite well by yourself and it never would have been successful. And you weren't given the opportunity to say no that you were managing...
20:10 Speaker 01 Perfectly all right as you were. So you were just dumped in Moscow and you had to go ahead with it. And I think your father was expecting a normal hand to be reconstructed, which wasn't possible then, it's not possible nowadays even.
20:30 Speaker 01 All those years later, when I opened my father's New Zealand security file, there were all the newspaper clippings. A Russian journo had come to the hospital and taken photos of me, then wrote an article about me and circulated it around Europe. Was that propaganda or just over excitement? Back in New Zealand, fantastical headlines like, "A surgical triumph and a medical miracle", quote my father. Was he using me to push the wonderful Soviet health system? Heartbreak turns to joy for family man. Luck has come the way of Mr. Yakich at last. After 15 years of heartbreak,
21:13 Speaker 01 he has been told that his elder daughter now has fingers.
21:19 Speaker 01 We were portrayed as a grateful, working-class family who'd come all the way from the bottom of the world and were going home with a fabulous hand. But there was no good news story in room 527 of Ward 10. When I was discharged, now 15, and caught the train from Moscow alone to Yugoslavia, where my mother was waiting, a media pack greeted me. Heavy bandages concealed my shame, but probably added to the mystique. Parents from around Eastern Europe kept showing up in the village, wanting to see my hand and take their children to Moscow. I did my utmost to discourage them.
22:03 Speaker 01 My mother would just look away.
22:10 Speaker 01 I've always wondered, were we all just a Cold War experiment? Or did Professor Blahin genuinely believe his method of human grafting would improve our lives? I think that the Soviet Union was really trying to prove they could do something that the West couldn't do.
22:26 Speaker 03 If the Soviet Union had been able to reconstruct a hand like that, it would have been well known in the West. I can't remember you coming back from hospital because I was so little. But apparently I was told that you were my sister. And I refused to believe it. And that must have been very hard on you.
22:46 Speaker 01 Back in Wellington, I took to my room and studied hard to make up for two lost school years. In seclusion, barricaded behind books, I could hide the sausage and the claw on my hand and the scars on my leg and stomach, which my sister described as red polystyrene and a Sydney plastic surgeon as the worst scars he'd ever seen. I wanted to become totally invisible.
23:17 Speaker 06 You wore a glove because they really were not pretty. And I can remember how self-conscious you were of it. And I understand why. You know, it was a time when we're teenage girls. You're interested in boys. You're trying to find your way in the world. And my guess is that the experience itself was so traumatic. You couldn't not feel the experience. You couldn't not have felt self-conscious. And you couldn't not have felt pain.
23:59 Speaker 01 At school, I just couldn't relate to other students' everyday concerns. After a year living in hospital gowns and body plaster, isolated, institutionalized, fearing the next operation and the next.
24:16 Speaker 03 My first memory of really noticing your hand was when I was about six years old and I walked into your bedroom and I saw a bowl of hot water and I saw our mother crying and you looked like you were on the verge of tears as well and then she bolted out the room and I found out later that it was because you were trying to keep it a secret that your fingers were pissing and you wanted to hide that from her so that you didn't upset her.
24:50 Speaker 01 I returned from the Soviet Union crushed and my parents, instead of healing me with affection, continued to crush me. Their abuse and violence escalated.
25:02 Speaker 03 I never saw Tata hug you or be warm with you or even smile at you fondly. Looking back, as an adult now, he must have had tremendous guilt about what he'd done taking you to the hospital and just dumping you there. And because he didn't know how to say sorry, he ended up avoiding you and avoided connecting with you. And then all you have to do is look at the photos of you as a teenager, not a smile in any of them. I mean, he must have known that your unhappiness had a lot to do with him and his choices, poor choices.
25:43 Speaker 01 At least I had my sister back in my life and our affection for each other was the only thing that kept me from deep despair.
25:51 Speaker 06 Even your relationship with your parents, that incredible hold they had over you. You were always reluctant to hurt them. I think that's testament to your character as well, you're just a thoroughly good human.
26:04 Speaker 01 I did well at school and then studied languages and literature at uni. Stephanie did the same degree and we became closer.
26:12 Speaker 06 I mean, then it was so clear how brilliant you were, but I think you were still full of self doubt.
26:19 Speaker 01 When I was 21, I thought out the opinion of a Melbourne hand surgeon whose assessment was:
26:26 Speaker 07 "The end results of the procedures in Moscow were fairly disastrous. There was no attempt to provide sensation in these extensions and there were also quite severe problems of inadequate blood supply resulting in insensitive, painful and easily damaged appendages."
26:42 Speaker 01 I took myself off secretly to Melbourne to have the two unbending useless extensions removed. And I lost the nubbins on my thumb and forefinger. I was worse off than what I was born with.
26:56 Speaker 03 I remember when I was about 12, and you would have been 25, that you started talking about possibly leaving home, even though I knew I'd be miserable without you. I just knew that it was better for your mental and emotional health to get the hell out of here. I just didn't want to see you unhappy anymore.
27:32 Speaker 01 I set my heart on a career in the New Zealand Foreign Service, and stood a good chance of being accepted, given my first-class master's degree and two scholarships.
27:54 Speaker 01 I applied for formal selection two years in a row, but was never called to an interview. In the late 1970s, a young Helen Clark, well before she became New Zealand Prime Minister, offered to investigate in case of unfair discrimination. The outcome was opaque, and the investigation fizzled. I was disappointed, but pursued journalism and moved to Sydney. Then, six years ago, my father died, and I applied for his Secret Service file. It was a revelation. He'd been right all along. The SAS had been spying on him and other Teta loyalists for 50 years.
28:36 Speaker 04 The New Zealand Secret Service had grave suspicions about anyone that had any connection to a communist country. And they would watch them like hawks.
28:48 Speaker 02 My name's Stephen Lovridge. I'm a historical researcher at Victoria University of Wellington. Generally, the community is seen as a potential target from various sites. They might be influenced by Moscow. They might be influenced... By Belgrade, Yugoslavia. They might be influenced by Croatian separatist elements in Australia. The SIS wants to keep an eye on what is happening in this community and how it might affect New Zealand interests. Certainly, there were informants, that is, people inside the community who are willing to talk to the service for whatever reason.
29:21 Speaker 01 As well as watching the Yugoslav club, the SIS was even watching our whole family. They knew my parents had sent x-rays to a Moscow hospital in 1966, that I had a summer job at the local library. We were recorded, photographed, scrutinised and judged. Informants' names were redacted, so I'll never know the source who lied to the SIS that I was known as being very pro-Russian and my father was KGB-trained. But the biggest shock was what I found out about what they called the dangers involved in employing me and the reasons given for why my application to join the Foreign Service
30:06 Speaker 01 had been blocked. The letter I found in my father's file from the Director of Security, written in 1974, slayed me.
30:15 Speaker 02 I refer to our discussion on 16 April 1974 concerning the possible employment by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Miss Yarkic as a diplomatic trainee. From the enclosed copies of press articles, it will be evident that Miss Yarkic is under a tremendous obligation to the Russian authorities for their magnanimity, skill and kindness during her stay in the Soviet Union. This will naturally result in a sense of gratitude which could lead to a future situation where she may face a conflict of loyalties almost certainly impossible for her to resolve in New Zealand's favour.
30:53 Speaker 01 I never owed the Soviets anything. I would have gouged my eyes out sooner than betraying New Zealand.
31:00 Speaker 06 I cannot believe that they could have arrived at that judgement, that you were somehow a security risk based on sympathy with Russia. It just meant that they didn't understand. They didn't know your history. They can't have even ever looked at your hand and known what trauma. So they had to have been so ill-informed about your life as to be almost laughable. And I just think you've got to wonder about the quality of their information and their reasoning.
31:36 Speaker 01 By my mid-30s, I was living in Sydney. I walked straight into, ironically, a government role working for legal aid. I'm grateful the Australian and New Zealand governments didn't share intelligence. And I'm grateful for the love of my sister. We survived an unhappy home life because we had each other. Both of us are now in the best place. And the talking we've done for this podcast has let us share emotions and thoughts that were long hidden or forgotten. You once told me that you had a dream where I was stuck under two enormous boulders, but I burst through like a sunshine?
32:15 Speaker 03 I dreamt that you were not in human form. You were this tiny little ball of light. And you were trapped under a very huge, dark cliff. And at one point, a tiny crack appeared above you and you travelled as light through this cliff. And you just kept on going until eventually you burst out of the cliff and you were free.
32:51 Speaker 03 Secrets and lies. My Year Behind the Iron Curtain was written by Miranda Yackich and produced by Claudia Taranto. Our sound engineer is Simon Brantley. And a special thank you to Silvana Yackich. I'm Kirsty Melville and I'll catch you next time here on The History Listen. See you then.
33:39 Speaker 00 You've been listening to an ABC Podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.
Previous Friedrich the Fraud Next Sam Poo | A Chinese bushranger? Page updated November 5, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated