Читать книгу Nine Lives - Waldemar Lotnik - Страница 6

The first time my family suffered an irredeemable loss was when my Uncle Joseph was shot some time before June 1941. Since from childhood he had been forced to compensate for his size, he was the most fearless of my uncles. Such qualities can be fatal, but I never discovered exactly what happened to him. My surviving uncles and grandparents refused to discuss dangerous subjects in my presence for fear I might blurt out something at the wrong moment. Everyone who knew what happened to Joseph is now dead. I believed for a long time that he had been present with his brother Kasimir at some sort of gathering in Hrubieszow which had involved Germans and Ukrainians, though why as Poles they should have been present I can’t say, and the question did not occur to me until I came to piece together this story, and that he had been stupid enough to shout out something to the effect that the Germans would not be in charge forever, or that one day they would be made to pay for their crimes. On reflection, it seems more likely that he and Kasimir had been asked to do something or other for the Germans and, refusing, had insulted the soldiers. Open dissent like that could lead to a quick killing. I know that the body arrived back at our house, that it was identified and that we held a funeral, which makes it highly unlikely that he was executed or died in combat. I do remember that his widow kept fainting at his funeral before trying to jump into the open grave and be buried with him.

Kasimir, who had broken so many girls’ hearts before the war, found himself on the run from this moment. He fled to the farm in Modryn, where my grandfather held frantic discussions with him out of my eager earshot. I remember my grandfather getting out his secret ‘treasure drawer’, which contained gold roubles saved up from long-gone Tsarist times, and saw Kasimir stuff his pockets with money before disappearing. By the time the Gestapo called, he had vanished. ‘You killed him,’ Grandfather said in response to their questions. Kasimir was to spend two and a half years in the underground, working as a messenger between various Polish units. On the few occasions when he turned up unexpectedly at the farm, he crept into the house after dark. My grandfather died a few months after his last such visit at Christmas 1943 when Kasimir was tortured to death by the Ukrainian militia.

Uncle Stanislaw was not interested in feats of bravery, nor was he the sort of man to cling to principles, which he did not possess anyway, if he might have to pay for them with his life. When the Germans first arrived, they sent him to work in a power station where he quickly picked up a working knowledge of German. By the summer of Joseph’s death he had landed a comfortable job in a club for German officers. Here he prospered for a couple of years, organising shifts for the Polish waiting staff while taking advantage of his all-night pass to smuggle out goods to sell on the black market. My other uncles teased him by calling him a collaborator and said that he would apply to be the next Führer.

I had my own first brush with death when I foolishly strayed into the centre of Modryn where a Wehrmacht company was billeted. ‘Brush with death’ is the wrong expression if taken to mean that I had merely been in some danger of dying: most people experience moments at some time in their lives when death seems a distinct possibility – perhaps for a split second, maybe for a little longer. What I recall was a distinct certainty rather than a possibility – the sure knowledge that in a few seconds I would cease to exist. The condemned man who is granted a reprieve moments before the sentence is due to be carried out knows this feeling and all who have experienced it agree that it concentrates the mind to an absolute degree. I can recall every second of the incident.

I was standing at the far end of the village square watching the German troops outside their HQ as they swigged vodka straight from the bottle. A very drunk Hauptmann suddenly noticed me and shouted at me to step towards him, brandishing a pistol in the air as he got to his feet and laughing at himself and his own bravado. The others watched him. When I reached him, he pointed his pistol at my forehead, repeatedly yelled ‘Polnische Schweine’ and started slowly to pull back the trigger. I could see the bullet inside as the drum began to revolve and I knew that these were the last seconds of my life. They lasted an eternity. Then there came a deafening crack followed by a ringing buzz in my left ear and the stench of cordite.

He had thought better of killing me, or maybe all along had just wanted the fun of scaring me, and had fired a fraction of an inch above my head, having jerked the pistol upwards just before pulling the trigger. I was deaf in my left ear for weeks. Many times since then I have been on the point of falling asleep when I have heard that bang and smelt that cordite.

Three Jewish families lived in Modryn. One was an elderly couple who had lived alone after their only son had moved to the city. What befell them, or when it befell them, I don’t know. Neither did I notice what happened to the second family and can only remember that they had owned some sort of business, as did the third, who, unusually for Jews, lived in the centre of the Ukrainian village. Their shop sold hardware and domestic utensils, pickled herrings, tobacco and eggs, but I remember them because of their beautiful daughter who swayed gently from side to side as she walked, her right hand held out in an infatuating gesture.

Before, the war she had started to see a Polish boy known as Baron, who was said to be related to me distantly – I think our grandmothers were second or third cousins. He was three or four years older than me and had been brought up by his mother on a remote farmstead on the edge of the forest.

People said it was because he had no father that he became a petty thief and a hoodlum, boasting a criminal record by his late teens when the war started. But he was also naturally charming and when he had got a job at the Jewish shop, shifting boxes and serving behind the counter, he fell in love with the daughter and she with him. When her parents discovered their, affair, they dismissed him and forbade the pair to see each other again. After that they met secretly in the fields and woods roundabout.

She had been lying with him in the grass one afternoon when her younger brother ran to tell her that their parents had been arrested. From that moment all three took to the forests where Baron had made himself a dug-out, carved from the earth beneath a large oak tree, in which he intended to hide if the police came after him. All three could sleep there comfortably in the summer and autumn and Baron had stored enough supplies to last a few weeks. For a while they lived in relative safety, coming out at night to light a fire at some distance from their hide-out and to cook food, which Baron had usually stolen from Ukrainian peasants, whom he now, like the rest of us, regarded as his enemies. He had begun to rob Ukrainian officials and took watches and money, as well as food. He had a couple of rifles, one or two pistols and even a few hand-grenades that he had picked up from the defeated Polish troops in the autumn of 1939. When his victims resisted, he killed them.

To kill a Ukrainian in pursuit of loot was not high up on the list of crimes for the Germans and they did not bother to pursue him, if indeed they heard of his exploits amidst the general mayhem. They would have thought of Baron as a common criminal rather than a partisan, as he disguised his assassinations as robberies. For me, he was a Robin Hood of the Polish Resistance and I admired his courage and secretly wanted to emulate his deeds. When I finally ran away to join the partisans, it was his example that inspired me.

When his assassinations took on an unmistakably political character, the authorities did begin to take an interest in Baron. His days were numbered after he had killed a particularly unpopular Ukrainian who ran the co-operative dairy. His victim had replaced a mild-mannered Polish official who had attempted to persuade the Germans that their imposed quotas were hopelessly unrealistic. Perhaps because he had been instructed to follow the letter of the law, the Ukrainian replacement did all in his power to harass the Polish farmers into meeting the production targets. Even some of his compatriots took exception to his methods, and after his death their general view seemed to be that he who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword. I felt so intrigued by the murder that I made my way to the church where his body lay. There was nobody to mourn him, as no one knew where he came from, and I remember feeling puzzled that no one had placed a cross on his body, as was the custom. Whether that was a careless oversight or a deliberate omission, the awful impression of godlessness it created felt entirely appropriate.

Even after this assassination the Germans did not look for Baron straightaway, despite the fact that everyone who lived nearby knew that he had carried out the killing. It was several weeks afterwards that three German SS men arrived in Modryn on a two-horse sleigh, stopping first at the dairy, where they had a drink with the new foreman and asked a few questions, before setting off in the direction of Baron’s mother’s house, where they drew up at about noon. Baron still visited his mother and younger brother and could hide in the loft above the front door if he felt in danger. His luck must have been running out by this time because he was there when the SS sleigh approached. Two men went into the house and got their business over with quickly. They turned to depart leaving two bodies on the floor, those of Baron’s mother and younger brother, both with bullets in their heads. But as they reached the exit, Baron shot them from the loft through the open hatch. He then jumped down as the third SS man made off in the sleigh. Even though Baron wounded him, the German was able to return to Hrubieszow to raise the alarm.

While the killing of a few Ukrainians might pass more or less unnoticed and the assassination of a Ukrainian official not bring the weight of the law down on the killer immediately, to shoot two SS men and wound a third was a different matter and would be avenged ruthlessly. The following day three dozen troops in armoured vehicles rattled into Modryn. Once they had failed to discover Baron, they arrested 60 young Polish men from the surrounding villages. Ukrainian militia based east of the Bug combed the area, stopped and harassed passers-by and enforced the curfew with extra diligence. Meanwhile the SS took the hostages to Hrubieszow for interrogation, which served little purpose since none of them knew Baron’s whereabouts any more than their interrogators. What was unusual in this case was that the hostages survived. Once the Germans had found and killed Baron, they released them.

Baron was now well and truly holed up in the forests with his two companions and had to go further and further afield to forage for food. In winter it is always much more difficult to survive than in summer; the dug-out must have been dripping with water, if not covered in icicles, and the depth of the snow would have made lighting a fire an arduous task. Now armed militia posed a constant threat to them. Soon Baron was stopped at night by a patrol and killed a soldier before escaping, lightly wounded, back to his hide-out. He needed medical attention and could no longer venture out on raids. Instead he retreated to his lair like an injured beast and prepared to fight to the last with all the desperate fury of a cornered animal.

For a while his girlfriend’s younger brother, a boy of fourteen or so, tried to get food, taking valuables that Baron had stolen in the hope that he could exchange them for supplies. When the boy was stopped and searched, they made him drop his trousers to see if he was Jewish. After beatings and promises that he and his sister would be saved if he showed them where Baron was hiding, he led a reinforced search party through the forest. A group of Germans surrounded the dug-out and shouted to the young couple that they should come out with their hands up. There was never any question of what would happen to them and Baron preferred to sit out a siege, which he had planned for many weeks, first shooting the Ukrainian volunteer who was sent in to get him and then tossing back a hand-grenade, which exploded in front of his attackers, wounding a couple more. Realising that he stood no chance, he then shot his girlfriend and clambered out to face a volley of bullets. The Germans shot her brother on the spot.

The two young Jews were buried in the forest, but Baron’s emaciated body was hung in the centre of Modryn, bandages still dangling from arm and leg, and a notice in German, Polish and Ukrainian attached around his neck which read: ‘Anyone who raises his hand against a German citizen or soldier will be punished like this murderer.’ It stayed there for three days and all the villagers were made to file past it.

In 1941 we were due to break up from technical school on 20 June, a Friday. For me there was a peculiar symmetry to the military upheavals: the German invasion of Poland had begun on the first day of the new term; now Operation Barbarossa began at midnight on the second day of the summer holidays. Since the end of April we had seen trains covered in tarpaulins shrouding field guns, tanks and lorries draw into the station in Hrubieszow. Polish labourers had widened the road to the east and dug fortifications along the western side of the Bug. None of this necessarily signalled an imminent German invasion, as the military installations seemed to be designed for defence, but when tens of thousands of troops marched through the town in mid-June it became clear that they only had one purpose and that was attack.

The other school in Mirce had finished two weeks early because the Germans had requisitioned the building for use as a Divisional HQ and it was from the headmaster’s son, a classmate of mine, that I first heard that the invasion had begun. I raced home to tell my grandfather that German troops had crossed the Soviet border from East Prussia. My friend’s father had heard officers discussing it, so it must be true, I told him, but my grandfather made little sign of taking the news seriously, since it came from me via a second-hand source. The following day the radio announced that panzer divisions had advanced on all fronts.

In that last week of June we watched column after column of German troops marching east. A little later there were human columns of a rather different sort being marched in the other direction. These barefoot prisoners quickly became a common sight on all the roads, as they trudged in the direction of Germany. If Polish civilians threw the prisoners scraps of food, they scrambled to pick them up, pausing only to nod thanks, knowing that should their guards see them the penalty for eating the merest morsel was death.

I remember one typical column, which, walking in twos and threes, took an hour and a half to pass me, meaning there must have been upwards of 15,000 men. When they fell from exhaustion or because the pain from their bloody feet had become unbearable, guards shot them in the head or ran a bayonet through their stomachs. Human remains littered the countryside.

One September afternoon I was driving a cart of potatoes and sugar beet with my grandfather when we overtook a straggling line of Soviet POWs. Several of them, believing themselves to be out of sight of the guards, dived towards the raw vegetables and started to devour them in a hectic frenzy which ended abruptly with a burst of gunfire. Two or three were killed and the others stopped eating. What has stuck in my mind ever since is the way a young captain yelled to the survivors.

‘Fall in! Quick march!’ he ordered, as if he was still on the parade ground, and then added in a voice full of anger, wounded pride and defiance, ‘We shall carry on for as long as we can. The day shall come when these murdering bastards will pay with their blood for what they have done to us.’

They still had a language which was their own and which the Germans could not understand. That was their last and only site of freedom.

The marches continued throughout the winter, through the snow and the blizzards. Their only purpose, despite labour shortages in the Reich, was to kill off the greatest number of prisoners by the most economical means. Stalin had refused to sign the Geneva Convention, so Soviet prisoners did not have even a veneer of official protection.

Soviet POWs were joined on the road by similar columns of Jews. One which I saw consisted exclusively of men, some Litvaks in traditional dress, but mostly assimilated Jews, who from their appearance I guessed to have been city dwellers, middle-class merchants and professional people rather than small shopkeepers and scrap-iron dealers. They still looked reasonably healthy and their clothes, although dirty and torn, had not yet become threadbare. Edek muttered to my grandfather that surely they knew they were all going to be killed, as scores had already been shot along the way.

‘Why don’t they resist, why don’t they fight?’ he asked, hoping for an answer from his father, who had always done business with Jews, which would account for this apparent acceptance of death.

‘They’ve got no chance,’ my grandfather replied. ‘They all know it. Look in their eyes.’

It is true that there was only one guard, armed with a machine gun, for every forty or fifty Jews; it is also true that had they all acted in unison in response to a pre-arranged signal, they could have overpowered their guards, grabbed the guns and turned them on their captors.

Many people have asked the same question as Edek, wondering how millions of Jews could be destroyed in the space of few short years. The answer is that many did fight back when an opportunity presented itself, fighting like cornered tigers in the Warsaw Ghetto. Others took to the forests to sabotage the German war effort. But in a situation like the one Edek and I witnessed, a revolt needs to be planned if it is going to succeed. Any prisoner who stepped out of the column or aroused the faintest suspicion would have been shot on the spot. Anyone who had jumped on an individual guard would have been killed before others could get hold of the guard’s machine gun. It would have been impossible for would-be ring-leaders to communicate with others further down the line to get them to pounce at the same moment. A handful of armed soldiers can always subdue an unarmed crowd.

In my view what is more significant is that each individual still hoped that he alone out of all the others might survive and still harboured the thought that, even if all the rest perished, he would be the one, by some miracle or quirk of fortune, to get away. After repeated beatings and the indignities of a forced march, everyone concentrates on surviving for the next half an hour because everyone thinks that something might just happen in that half-hour which could change everything. This feeling was compounded by a sense that the Germans could not possibly intend to do away with everybody, that there must have been some sort of mistake or that there must be some purpose, other than the unthinkable, to their having been taken away. The Germans always did as much as they could to encourage that sort of thinking and invariably promised the people they herded onto trains and rounded up to march to their deaths that they were going to a work camp or to an industrial plant where they would be looked after and could use their professional skills. They never broadcast their plans to their victims.

To anyone who asks, ‘Why did the Jews let themselves be killed in that way?’ I would reply, ‘Why did the Poles who were led off to concentration camps let themselves be killed? Or the Soviet prisoners of war, who also counted their dead in millions?’

In Hrubieszow the Jewish ghetto consisted of a few streets fenced off with barbed wire, from which, as Hrubieszow had never had its own Jewish quarter, let alone ghetto, Polish families had been evacuated. From Edek’s upstairs window I could peer over the fence and see the hundreds of men, women and children crammed inside. I recognised several of the Ukrainian militia on patrol as some of them used to come to my lodgings to drink with my landlady.

Two of them were drinking one autumn afternoon in 1941 as they played a life-and-death game with the prisoners. Each took turns to aim pot-shots at the petrified human targets who scurried from house to house to avoid the bullets, crouching behind walls and any other structure that could afford them some protection. The rules of the game were simple: if someone scored a direct hit and the other missed, the first won the bet and pocketed the money each had staked on the round. I witnessed these games three or four times that autumn and saw them kill at least thirty Jews in this way, leaving the bodies where they lay. Once it had finished, survivors dragged off the corpses for a makeshift burial. There were up to 8,000 Jews in the ghetto at that time. By the summer of 1943 it had been emptied.

When I passed very early one morning in November 1942 there were no guards to be seen, though the barbed wire was still in place. One of the few remaining Jewish prisoners called to me to ask if I had anything to eat. At first I took him to be an old man of at least seventy, but as I drew closer and looked at his features, I saw that he had aged prematurely and was probably still in his forties. From his accent I knew he came from one of the eastern counties, Volhynia or Podolia. As I always carried a crust of bread in my pocket wrapped in newspaper, I threw the small package to him over the fence. He stuffed it quickly into his coat to eat when the danger of others seeing him with food had passed, then thanked me profusely and indicated that he wanted to repay or reward me with something. As there was an abandoned boot lying nearby, an ankle-high man’s boot with strong elastic instead of shoelaces, he lobbed this over to me. Somewhat baffled, I took it, nodding my thanks in return, and wandered away.

The boot was not in bad condition, and if he had given me a pair it would certainly have been worth a bit of money. It was made of good quality leather. I took it to a boy a couple of years older than me who always seemed to know how to make money from unlikely transactions and asked him how much he could give me for it. He offered me a few groschen, which I accepted. He in turn took it to his cousin who paid him two whole zlotys, ten times more than I had received, because he needed the elastic. As he was preparing to dismantle the shoe, he discovered that the heel turned. When he twisted it, out fell two gold roubles. My friend, who had been pleased with his two zlotys a moment earlier, demanded one of the roubles and, when his demand was refused, he came back to me to ask where I had found it and whether I knew where the other boot was. I saw him later pacing up and down the ghetto fence, his eyes rooted to the ground. Edek called me an idiot for getting rid of it, but I replied, ‘Why didn’t you take it, then? I offered it to you for nothing but you said it was worthless.’

It was either at this time or shortly afterwards that I witnessed an atrocity committed against a group of Jewish children, the only one I saw apart from the columns of marching men, or those in Majdanek where they happened all day and night. A four-wheeled cart passed me in the street, pulled by a single horse and carrying sixteen Jewish children, aged anything from eighteen months to fourteen or fifteen. There were no adults among them and the older ones held the babies in their arms. They were all standing up and looking out from between the uprights of the wooden cart; the life had gone out of their eyes and it was a dull stare that met my gaze. They were skinny but not emaciated, as pale as death but not dropping from exhaustion or cut from beatings. It was their last journey and from the vacant expression on their faces they must have known it. They had been discovered in a bricked-up section of a house, connected to the outside world by a tunnel through which their protectors, who seemed not to have been caught, passed them food and water. They had been there for many months, which meant the people who had looked after them must have been both dedicated to them and well organised – one person acting alone could not have supported them in this way. I watched the SS captain directing the procession, accompanied by his smartly-dressed, adoring Polish girlfriend, who gazed into his eyes with smiles of admiration. A few minutes after they had passed I heard pistol shots and then wandered down to the Jewish cemetery where they had been taken. Someone standing outside told me that three uniformed Germans had fired a couple of dozen shots and killed every single child.