Читать книгу Nine Lives - Waldemar Lotnik - Страница 7

In the late autumn of 1942 news reached us of the first massacres of Poles in our vicinity. Both had occurred about twenty miles to the south and south-west of Hrubieszow and were carried out by Ukrainians, now increasingly granted free rein by the Germans, who had burnt and razed two villages. These were the first of countless such massacres: Ukrainians slaughtered Poles and Poles responded by slaughtering Ukrainians in a blood-crazed sideshow to the main carnage to the east, and the extermination of Jews, which had begun to take place in our midst from the moment the Germans arrived.

My first attempt to fight ended ignominiously in the summer of 1942 as I was coming up to my seventeenth birthday. I returned home, crestfallen, a mere two weeks after setting off from my paternal grandfather’s estates in Zakzrouvek. At that time I still had an idea of war as an adventure because the little bits of action I had witnessed had been exciting. My cousin Marian, the son of my father’s favourite sister, Aunt Sophie, who had been walking with me the day we saw the German armoured column, agreed to come with me in search either of a partisan unit fighting behind German lines or General Berling’s Red Polish Army, which had been formed on Soviet territory. The idea of walking hundreds of miles to catch up with the German divisions, whose victorious progress had at last been halted, and then crossing their lines to join the Free Poles on the other side was – to say the very least – quite hare-brained. It would have been quixotic had we been two elderly men in a previous century, our heads filled with the patriotic nonsense of a Polish Golden Age, rather than a pair of stubbornly romantic adolescents.

Marian looked to me for leadership even though he was only six months younger than me. I showed him how to tie a few belongings into a bundle and attach them to sticks to carry over our shoulders. After stealing out of the house, we made our way to the local railway station, not knowing where on earth we were supposed to be heading and not really aware that we did not know. We travelled the first stretch of the journey by train. Because, unlike me, Marian did not have student identity papers, we stowed away on a goods train, which gave the appropriate flavour of daring to the start of our illicit and heroic escapade. We arrived safely in Lublin long before dusk.

Marian, like most Poles, had only a Kennkarte, a little grey identity card, which, although it had to be carried at all times, never impressed a German official. Failure to carry identity papers increasingly resulted in arrest as the Germans scoured the towns and cities for forced labour. Third-class train compartments, always overflowing with Polish passengers barred from travelling first or second class, were a favourite source of slave workers.

All that was needed to stow away was a cool head and a sense of timing. We stood on the opposite side of the track to the station platform, so as to be invisible from the station buildings once the train had pulled in, waited for the very last wagon as the train began to leave, which made it easier to slip away unnoticed at our destination, scrambled aboard before the train picked up speed and laid low for the duration of the journey. This much at least we managed with consummate professionalism.

From Lublin we proceeded on foot eastwards, getting lifts from horse-drawn carts, sleeping in barns and living off raw carrots we picked in fields and fruit we stole from orchards. Because it was summer, food was plentiful, the hedgerows were in bloom and the weather gave us no problems, but Marian soon started to complain.

‘We’ll never get there. I want to turn back. You didn’t tell me it would be like this,’ he wailed throughout the third day. We split two days later: I headed for Hrubieszow and he for Zakzrouvek.

His journey home must have taken him a full ten days because all told he was away for at least two weeks. His mother spent that entire time weeping, fainting and worrying herself to distraction because he had disappeared. When I saw my father again, he gave me an angry lecture, furious that I had endangered his sister’s son and, more to the point, got him into trouble on my behalf. As usual, he seemed unconcerned about my own welfare and what I might have been through.

‘If you want to live the life of a rogue and a mercenary,’ he fumed, ‘that’s up to you – go ahead. But don’t take anyone from the family with you next time. God only knows what I have done to deserve a son with no more common sense than a five-year-old.’

I did not tell him that we had wanted to fight for Poland and had set out to find the Red Polish Army. The whole idea suddenly seemed so stupid, though I was neither ashamed nor contrite, merely humiliated because I was still too young and too inexperienced to be taken seriously by my father. The next time would be different – I would go alone.

At the beginning of term in September 1942 I informed a sympathetic lecturer at college that I wanted to abandon classes because I felt that continuing with my studies amounted to collaboration after we had been put in the propaganda film about the lorries. I trusted him, knowing him to be anti-Nazi, like most of the college staff, and he understood why the film had shamed me. He asked me whether I had discussed the matter with my parents and advised me strongly against leaving, pointing out that far worse could lie in store for me. I took no notice of what he said and remained in my lodgings in Hrubieszow, wondering what I should do next. I was tough, strong and well-fed, proud and headstrong and fed up with being treated like a child.

My student papers did not save me when two Gestapo officers stopped me in the street at the beginning of October. On discovering my date of birth, they informed me that all Poles of my age were now required to join an Arbeiterabteilung, a forced labour brigade, and that I had no option but to accompany them. When I replied that my student status exempted me from forced labour and that I had lessons to attend, one of them curtly informed me that I was a student no longer. It was a chance arrest, not brought about because the college had informed them I had absconded, as I feared at first. Yet had I not finished my studies voluntarily, I would have been safely in the classroom at that time of day.

They took me first to a depot in Hrubieszow, where about twenty other boys of my age, some of whom I knew, were waiting. The following day they drove us to a labour camp on the eastern side of the Bug, close to the village of Krylow. It was here, not far from home, that they wanted us to work, rather than in Germany, as most of us had supposed. On arrival overseers issued us with grey-green uniforms: a tunic and pair of trousers made of rough cotton, which we put on over our other clothing. No one had a change of clothes because we had all been picked up on the street. All we had with us was what we happened to wearing at the time of arrest.

The camp was surrounded on all sides by double barbed wire and guarded by a single tower manned by two soldiers equipped with a swivel machine gun, which enabled them to shoot on all sides in cases of attempted escape. Over the six weeks I was there, several workers, who had either strayed too near to the fences, refused to obey an order or tried to run away while on a working party, were summarily shot. The fences, which measured roughly twelve to thirteen feet in height, bent inwards so that even with protective gloves and heavy clothing it was impossible to climb over them. The camp was small and had been erected at speed, containing only five or six prefabricated wooden huts that served as our barracks and conformed to the standard size for German camp buildings, which can nowadays be seen at the ‘museums’ at Dachau, Sachsenhausen and elsewhere. In Majdanek the size and design of the huts were the same, but they had inserted four rows of bunks rather than three, making conditions more cramped. A small group of prisoners with an overseer could construct and dismantle everything in a matter of hours and then take the barbed wire, tower and huts on to the next site. In the six weeks I was there we were moved only once to another camp built on exactly the same lines; there must have been dozens of similar ones in the area.

At first light, or even earlier as the days grew shorter, they would take us to places near the Bug where, under the supervision of German engineers, we dug foundations for concrete pillboxes. The fortifications all faced east, which meant that already in the autumn of Stalingrad the Germans were preparing for the defence of Poland. Less than a mile separated the line of pillboxes from the dug-outs and little forts facing west towards the Reich the Soviets had erected in similar haste and which they had quickly surrendered in June 1941. In my barracks I met boys who had spent time in other camps where they had been sent to build roads and ammunition bunkers as well as pillboxes. Some camps sounded better than ours, some worse, but no one reported that the Germans tortured the labourers as a matter of policy. Although some guards carried batons the shape of baseball bats and others hit prisoners with the butts of their rifles, our main enemies proved to be the weather and the work rather than the guards themselves.

As winter grew colder and wetter, we worked in gales and snow storms, often knee-deep in water, shovelling up sodden earth to carve out foundations for the military installations. Rain and snow penetrate clothing quickly; chest complaints that led to high fevers, pneumonia and hypothermia laid up a third of the workforce at any one time. A paramedic dispensed aspirins to the sick, as the barracks filled up with those too weak to move, let alone work. Although the conditions were atrocious and regard for our welfare minimal or non-existent, compared with what I later encountered in Majdanek these six weeks shifting earth were a holiday. In a concentration camp they have one object in mind: to kill you. Here at least they had a practical reason for wanting us to stay alive and they fed us enough to keep us going. No one died of hunger. In the evenings we could sometimes light a fire in the stove and the camaraderie of enforced proximity and shared hardship added to the hope that the misery would soon come to an end, kept our spirits from sinking. Yet when they told me that they wanted to keep us there for at least a year I knew I would not be able to take it and resolved to escape and return home come what may. It would take a bit more than this to break my spirit.

The only time that escape was remotely possible was on a work party outside the camp. Any other time would have been suicidal. My example from the beginning had been Uncle Edek, whom the Germans had abducted that summer, along with six of my grandfather’s prize cart-horses and best cart, ordering him to join a convoy carrying shells and ammunition to the front. We had no reason to suppose we would see him again, dead or alive, yet he returned within three weeks, which now made me think there was hope for me.

His account of his escape sounded incredibly simple and required nothing more than a touch of daring at the right moment. He had driven his cart as far as the Pripet Marshes, some 100 miles from Hrubieszow, when his convoy had come under attack from partisan artillery and Soviet aircraft. Edek abandoned his vehicle, dived for cover and, when the bombing had ended, simply slipped away into the bushes. His captors would have been in no mood to check what had happened to him. The conditions of war make possible such unlikely escapes, for after the guns have stopped firing and the sound of artillery ceased to ring in the guards’ ears, no one is inclined to organise a roll-call. Although I was unlikely to end up in the firing-line, I decided to seize my opportunity as soon as it presented itself. This required discretion, patience and at best a partner I could trust and who would not let me down once we had broken out. I approached a friend from Hrubieszow called Mietek and together we decided to make a run for it.

Towards the end of November two lorries with 40 to 50 prisoners between them took us to the western bank of the river, where we were ordered once more to dig into the hard frozen ground, a not quite impossible task since the deeper you dig the less frozen the earth actually is. The site was completely exposed and a fierce wind swept across the plain. As the time of departure drew nearer and the light grew dimmer, Mietek and I hid behind a concrete wall and listened to the others pack away their shovels and clamber into the lorries. This was the moment when success or failure would be decided. The guards usually counted how many of us got into the lorry and would have searched high and low once they had discovered anyone had disappeared. We knew this but had taken a chance because of the harsh weather and the darkness, and because we hoped the guards would think there was nowhere for anyone to hide on the open river bank. We continued to hold our breath as the engines started. They did not count their prisoners and did not come after us. Instead the lorries pulled away while we lay motionless, hardly daring to twitch until the rumble of the engines had died away.

Nearby we discovered an abandoned house where we slept, found warmer clothes and ate what little food the former inhabitants had left behind. In the morning we set off for Mirce, where Mietek’s family lived and where we intended to hide until the dust had settled. Then our objective was to find a partisan unit, either in the immediate area or further afield. I wanted revenge now more than ever. I also wanted to get home to my family, but realised that if the Germans decided to look for me that was the first place they would search.

The trudge to Mirce was not without its perils, and even though we tried to stick to the fields it was impossible to avoid the roads completely. That evening two Ukrainian militia stopped us and threatened to shoot us for leaving our houses after curfew. They both yelled at us, first in Ukrainian and subsequently in broken Polish, calling us dirty Lacki (from Polacki, a derogatory term for Poles). They debated loudly whether or not they should shoot us there and then. When I made a remark in Ukrainian one of them bellowed at me that I should not pretend to be Ukrainian when I was Polish.

‘But what do you know?’ I answered.

‘You’re a Haho [someone from western Ukraine], you don’t speak my language.’

I then tried to sing a song in the east Ukrainian dialect in the hope he would think I came from that region. They listened.

‘For God’s sake, say something in German to them! They won’t dare touch us then,’ I whispered to Mietek. He then gestured to the writing on his tunic, ‘Verstehen Sie Deutsch? Arbeiterabteilung ...’

By now we had succeeded in confusing them totally and the sergeant told his subordinate to let us go, adding that it did not matter what we were, he did not want any trouble with the Germans.

It was a lucky escape, more frightening than hiding from the guards the day before, and the second time, after the Hauptmann pointing his pistol at my head, that I felt I had eluded death by a whisker. We continued towards Mirce the next day and, just before dusk, found Mietek’s family who, while relieved to see their son alive, feared that their own security might be jeopardised by our presence. They told us that the SS had rounded up 80 Polish men the previous week after the shooting of a German soldier, that the hostages had been beaten and tortured before the SS had driven them to a forest and executed them. Mietek’s brother-in-law had been among them. I marvelled once more that the militia had not killed us the previous night.

This news made the walk to Hrubieszow all the trickier as the militia still patrolled in force on the look-out for the Polish assassins, even after the German revenge had been so swift and brutal. We decided to walk at night through woodlands and to zigzag our way forward, arriving in the town under the cover of darkness.

For most of December I stayed with Uncle Edek, rarely leaving the house for fear I would be enlisted into another brigade of forced labourers, or worse still be found out as an escapee. The only alternative to a life in hiding was to join the armed fight against the oppressors. This became my sole wish. I needed equipment, a rifle at the very least, before I could set out. My aunt and grandmother at the farm in Modryn steadfastly refused to tell me where they had buried the Polish army weaponry after the German invasion. They all still treated me as if I were a child.

By this time we knew that the German advance had been halted and that the Soviets and Germans were fighting a life-and-death battle at Stalingrad. In the autumn the German newsreels had predicted the imminent fall of Stalingrad and shown the bedraggled Soviet troops in control of a narrow stretch of the city in front of the Volga River. The film depicted divisions of stormtroopers and SS men in heroic poses and extolled the military virtues of the Master Race, which would soon crush the resistance of the motley mixture of Slavs and Asiatics who opposed it. Two years later I saw Soviet newsreels of the same battle that showed first a shot of elite troops goose-stepping past Hitler at a pre-war parade before flashing forward to images of hungry German infantry, heads and hands covered in thin rags, shod with boots made from plaited straw. Below them was the caption: ‘These are the men who reached Stalingrad.’

Stalingrad was the decisive battle of the Eastern Front: half a million German troops, the whole of the Sixth Army under General von Paulus, faced an even greater number of Soviet forces, replenished by troops from the Far East, many of whom had been transported from the Siberian steppes now that the Americans had entered the war against Japan and they were no longer needed to defend the eastern frontier. They fought for six whole months, through summer, autumn and winter, reducing everything in the city to rubble and then churning over the dust from the rubble with the power of renewed bombing. In November the Volga froze; three times the Soviet commander asked von Paulus to surrender; a third of the German troops suffered frostbite and two-thirds ultimately perished. Fewer than 100,000 out of an army originally numbering half a million eventually fell into Soviet hands. Hitler and Stalin had both staked all on Stalingrad; hatred on both sides had reached an intensity that transcended reason.

After the defeat German officers wore black armbands and their soldiers walked about as if in mourning. The spring had gone out of their step once and for all – they were no longer indomitable, but anyone tempted to think the fight had gone out of them was mistaken. In fact, they grew all the more dogged in their increasing desperation now that they had their backs to the wall. In the past they had been convinced of the invincibility of the Master Race and barked at Polish passers-by to take their hands out of their pockets when a German officer walked past; now they had red eyes from lack of sleep, maybe even from tears.

At the beginning of December, as the Battle of Stalingrad entered its final phase, I took a train south-east to Lwow, armed only with my student identity papers and what I hoped was a cast-iron excuse for travelling. When stopped, I was going to explain in Ukrainian that my uncle and aunt had been imprisoned by the Bolsheviks during the Soviet occupation and that I was going to track them down for my sick mother. As it turned out, I did not need to use the story, but having it prepared made me feel safer.

The third-class compartments were full of shabbily dressed Polish workers with dejected expressions, not talking much to each other, never laughing. They did not carry much baggage and there were hardly any children, in stark contrast to peacetime. This made the two women in my compartment, who were speaking a very elegant form of Polish, seem oddly out of place. I listened intently to their conversation.

‘My nephew speaks German without an accent,’ one boasted to the other, ‘you can’t tell he’s not German.’

‘My nieces and nephews speak it with a slight accent, but they are fluent too in French, Spanish and Italian. They are so gifted with languages, which is so important nowadays.’

At the doorway to the compartment stood a young Ukrainian in a black uniform, probably Gestapo I thought, although I recognised neither the sort of hat he was wearing nor the insignia that decorated it. He had a German parabellum at his side, encased in a triangular holster, and kept his gaze fixed on me while positioning himself so as to be able to see out on both sides of the track. He yelled periodically at passengers to get out of his way if they brushed past him or momentarily obscured his view. I did not utter a word to anyone and did my best to avoid his stare.

Lwow, with its opera house and wide streets, had been a beautiful city before the war, always outshining Lublin in terms of splendour and sophistication. The magnificent railway station, with its glass and wrought-iron roof that I had admired on school trips, was worth a visit in its own right. Some of the wealthier town houses were faced with marble up to the first floor. At one time the city had been called Lemberg, when it had been the capital of Austrian Galicia and before that capital of the Polish Ukraine under the rule of the Polish-Lithuanian kings. It now looked very dirty and unkempt, everything was coated with layers of grime and muck. The city had lost its self-respect, every street brimming with displaced persons, although nothing very much seemed to have been destroyed when the Germans captured it. It was like a once elegant man about town who had fallen on bad times and gone to seed, but still retained some of his old manners and gestures among the throng of his impoverished new companions. Its once thriving Jewish community was no more; its survivors awaited their fate in the ghetto, although I had no time to explore.

As I had little way of knowing how long the train was stopping and was uncertain where it was going afterwards, I decided to get off and think about what I should do to continue my journey. Another train seemed the best bet, especially after the first ride had been so easy, but the Ukrainian Gestapo man followed me down the platform and demanded, ‘Ausweis, bitte,’ before switching to his own language. I understood every word but pretended I only spoke Polish and could not follow him very well. He clearly thought I was up to something.

‘Are you a spy working for the filthy Bolsheviks?’

I vigorously denied this and repeated the reason for my journey. He called someone else for a second opinion and before letting me go said in loud clear voice, not knowing that I understood him, ‘We’ll have to keep an eye on this one, there’s something very fishy about him.’

I did not stray far from the station and in the evening jumped on a goods train headed north. This ride proved far less comfortable. I made myself a little nest in the corner of a converted cattle truck. Nobody disturbed me until a full day later when the train shunted into a siding at the small town of Brody and a voice rang out from the platform, ‘Alle raus!’ A few soldiers got out with me, but no one seemed at all bothered that there had been a stowaway on board.

Brody lay more or less on my route, which made me not too displeased with my progress in the first two days, but quite unprepared for the night which now lay ahead of me. Because of the curfew it would have been unwise to venture into the town itself, where I knew nobody and was unlikely to find shelter free of charge. I went into the station waiting-room and arranged myself on a wooden bench, hoping to find some sleep and wake up to continue the journeys.

I had never known such cold before, not even in the labour camp. I was wearing a three-quarter length overcoat and heavy boots, but they did not do much good and left my knees quite exposed. I never slept for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time, waking up to defrost my legs which felt as if they were going to fall off as a result of the cold. In future I decided to stick on a train at night or, failing that, find a quiet barn in the country where nobody would see me and I could burrow into the hay or straw.

At first light there was a ‘train east’ and I hopped aboard without a second thought, staying on it until the following morning and this time managing to get some rest. By the time it arrived in Zytoierz, some 150 miles east of Hrubieszow, my main problem was hunger rather than cold. I was longing for a good hot drink, the rations I had brought with me having run out long ago.

The people in the first house I knocked at refused to give me anything, but at the second I struck lucky and the three women who lived there greeted me like a lost son or nephew. Russian Ukrainians had a completely different outlook to those further west. As a Pole I had no reason to feel wary of them – anyway I was pretending to be Ukrainian myself at this time. These people had never been pro-Bolshevik, especially after the famines of the previous decade, but most of them had quickly become anti-German. Strategically and politically, this was one of Hitler’s big blunders: in the Soviet Ukraine he found a disaffected population who would have joined the Germans, as they did in great numbers in the Polish Ukraine, if only the Germans encouraged them to do so. Yet because partisan actions had run parallel to the German advance and underground units continued to operate hundreds of miles behind the German lines, the Germans showed no mercy to the local population and avenged partisan attacks on villagers and other civilians. When a bridge or installation was blown up or a detachment of German troops attacked, they retaliated by rounding up what they deemed to be an appropriate number of Ukrainians, usually but not always young men, and shooting them, displaying the bodies in public to teach others a lesson. The local people’s initially friendly reaction subsided.

Whether this family of women believed me or not when I explained I was looking for my brother and sister who I believed to the in the vicinity of Rostov, they gave me a bowl of steaming hot borscht and a plate of cooked potatoes with mouth-watering yoghurt, so thick that the top layer of cream could be sliced off. Such a feast was rare, to say the least, in these parts at this time and I could hardly believe that I was eating it. However my enjoyment was dampened by the knowledge that this was likely to be my last good meal for a long time. Thereafter I lived on bread and potatoes, happy if the potatoes were not raw and the bread not hard. The women’s charity can only be explained by the fact that their men had all disappeared, either dead, hundreds of miles to the east with the Red Army, or into German captivity. I could see that they were in distress, but did not ask the reason because at that time everyone had a long tale of pain.

When I had finished my meal, I asked if they knew the way to Rostov and they pointed me in the right direction. I was certainly not the only person on a long trek, but Rostov was at least 600 miles away. First I had a lift with some peasants on a horse-drawn sleigh. They dropped me not far from a railway line, where I clambered onto another German goods train that seemed to me to be going more or less where I wanted. It turned out to be carrying war supplies to the front and had only military personnel on board, but I did not realise that as I jumped into an empty wagon.

I found a warm place to sleep out of general view, or so I thought until I was woken by German voices. I was soon noticed and I thought it best to respond in Ukrainian and told the two guards that I was looking for my lost parents who had been abducted by the Bolsheviks two years ago. Perhaps because I looked so gaunt and weak they let me go, thinking I was too young or too worn out to be involved in anything subversive. Because the locals were by now far more likely to be with the partisans than collaborating with the occupiers, it was not quite so clever to claim Ukrainian nationality to German soldiers. On that occasion I got away with it.

The further I trudged the more suspicious people became of me, the more reluctant to talk to me or help me out with scraps of food – they had next to nothing for themselves and their last livestock had been slaughtered to feed German troops. If they were lucky they might still have a meagre stock of grain they had succeeded in hiding. Sometimes I managed to beg a hunk of bread or a potato, which is all I lived on for several weeks. I continued either on foot or by sleigh when someone would give me a lift, having decided that trains were too dangerous. I felt safer on main roads. As the days passed, I started to think how in practical terms I could join a Polish unit of the Red Army. I was not interested in seeking out local groups of Russians or Ukrainians operating behind the German lines. How was I to cross the front unarmed and all alone? How could I find out the best place to do so? I dared not ask anybody I met.

Kharkov was the first major city on my route and I thought it best to bypass it. I came to a village to the south which seemed to me at first to have been completely abandoned, until I saw the bodies of two dozen men hanging from makeshift scaffolds. Contrary to the custom, there were no signs saying why they had been killed. I approached a house which had wisps of smoke coiling from a crooked chimney and noticed a very old woman sitting with a young child in the doorway. I asked her who had done the killing. It was pointless to ask for food. She could not answer me, but the child simply said it was the Germans. I was only 100 miles from the front, still too far away to hear artillery fire, and 200 miles from Stalingrad.

Frightened, dispirited and hungry, I wasted no time in turning back. There seemed to be no point now that I had had enough time to think about what I was doing, had suffered so terribly on the long walk and seen so many bodies hanging in the village. I went back the way I came and somehow continued to survive on the bread and potatoes I begged from homesteads, just about managing to stay warm at night in barns. The journey again lasted many days and nights, slowly turning into weeks and becoming a blur in my memory. I cannot remember much, I suppose because of the monotony of the trudge. I did not really know where I was going until I got a lift in a German truck that finished up in a village called Stubunow, just a few miles from Kremenets where I had lived with my mother and father before the war.

I had not been consciously heading in that direction and suddenly realised that I recognised the silhouette of the onion-domed Orthodox church over the brow of a hill. The driver, a kindly looking fifty-year-old, nodded when I showed him my student papers. He gave me a cigarette which made me feel dizzy, but I thought it would have been rude to ask for food. I felt very excited and made my way directly to Kremenets where I knew I would be all right, as I had Ukrainian friends from the old days who would put me up. I got on a sleigh and was dropped near the old base and then saw the town I had known from all that time ago. It felt like a miracle to stumble across it in the way I had done.

A poor Ukrainian family that I had visited as a schoolboy had prospered, first under Soviet and subsequently German rule, and they told me they had never enjoyed as much food and clothing as since the war started. They remembered how I had been generous to them and now returned my favours. My two old schoolmates had grown up but they were all, even the little ones, as tough as tough: the smallest brother would let himself be picked up by his hair and dangled impassively for as long as his brothers could hold him and still not issue a sound. Pietro, who had been a tearaway, had joined the Communists and was now with the partisans. They told me proudly that he was already a junior sergeant.

I was taken to see some of the surviving Polish families who had fared far less well. Polish civil servants had all been shot or deported to Siberia by the time the Germans reached Kremenets at the beginning of August 1941. The town was surrounded by hills and initially it had been bypassed by the German panzer divisions on their rush forwards. They had taken it relatively late in the summer campaign. People told me that Herr Kacs, our Jewish butcher, had fled in broad daylight at their approach and set off across the fields on foot with Germans chasing him. He continued to run after a bullet hit him in the back; his screaming could be heard in the town. A few other Jews escaped for the time being, but there were none left now. The Germans had also shot four brothers who had arrived there in 1937 and established a lorry business. Because they were Volksdeutsche and the Soviets had not despatched them, the Germans reasoned they must be traitors and shot them in their house. Most other citizens, as long as they were not Jewish, had not yet been killed.

I was not allowed to stay free for very long and was stopped in the street after a few days by a Polish-speaking German sergeant and a Gestapo officer, who took me back to the military camp, now taken over by the Germans. They were convinced I spelt trouble, but their attitude softened once I showed them my papers. In that respect they were typical Germans: their respect for documentation was absolute. One of them said he had an aunt who lived near Hrubieszow and I escaped with nothing worse than a clip around the ear and a sharp reprimand for being so far from home. They then said that they needed country boys to help in the stables and that they would let me off this time, ‘out of the goodness of their hearts’, but that if I tried anything on them again they would shoot me. When I got to the stables, which I knew well from childhood, the overseer explained that there were 100 Ukrainian boys attending to the horses and that they would tell me what I had to do.

Luck was on my side again – the job turned out to be easy and I had no intention of escaping for the time being. The work was half indoors, half outside, and by no means as strenuous as the labour camp. Food was sufficient, accommodation warm from the body heat of so many horses and the regime almost lax: most of the Ukrainians were allowed home at night. Those of us who stayed overnight slept in the same barracks that the Ulanen, the elite cavalry regiment, had used before the war; the stables were the same stables, in fact everything was exactly the same as before the war, except there were now only half the number of horses. I had four stallions to look after and sometimes I even enjoyed the work. I fed them their oats first thing in the morning before mucking out the stable, groomed and brushed each of them in turn and then, unless it was too cold, took each one out for an hour’s exercise. I learnt how to get them to trot and to gallop at my command and tried not to let anyone notice I was not as used to this sort of work as the rest seemed to be.

The Germans let the Ukrainian boys go home at night because they knew they would never try to escape for fear their families would be punished. I happily did other people’s night duty in return for extra rations. There was no hunger here. On the contrary, there was plenty of good bread that was mixed far more favourably than that I was to eat later: 50 per cent flour, 20 per cent potato mash and only 30 per cent wood from saplings. We also had salami, potato soup, even real meat sometimes, and if I did an extra night shift then I could expect a few slices of backfat brought in from the boys’ families. The stables were not just warm, they constituted an oasis of heat in a desert of snow. After so many freezing nights spent huddled in a greatcoat, I appreciated that above all else. The only thing I wanted was a proper bath and a new set of clothes, but I had to make do with my old rags and washing in a basin of melted snow in the morning. ‘I can stay here,’ I thought to myself. It was an ideal place to recuperate after the ordeal of my journey through the Russian winter.

While on the whole we were treated well, there were some unpleasant incidents. When the officers wanted to impress their girlfriends with impromptu rodeo displays, they used us for sport. While they sat at the ringside, we were sent into the arena to ride untamed stallions, newly arrived in the stables. I was once the fifth or sixth in line and was tossed off immediately by the frightened animal and had to scurry to the side to avoid his kicks. None of us lasted more than five or ten seconds, but we all knew we should try to fall backwards, as it was safer. At one of these entertainments a Cossack suddenly appeared from nowhere after a dozen or so of us had already been thrown to the ground, all of us bruised, some kicked and concussed. He leapt on the stallion and rode him until he was foaming at the mouth, sweating and breathing heavily, then eased his grip on the reins, shouted at him and gave him a pat, at which his steed stood still and let himself be led meekly away. One of the old hands told me the secret was that you must never let the horse see that you are as afraid as he is. I once saw him first yell at and then punch an untamed horse, which then obeyed him.

It took me weeks to discover why we were looking after the stallions in this way and what the Germans intended to do with them. Their planning for the future was invariably meticulous. They had discovered that the condition of the roads in Russia, or sometimes the complete lack of roads, meant that horse-drawn transport was much more efficient in winter than motor vehicles, whose diesel could freeze at temperatures of minus 40 centigrade, as it did at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad in 1941. That was why Edek had been taken off the previous summer and why they were using Polish slave labour to build roads with clinker and logs. They were obviously intent, even now in the middle of the war, on ensuring a supply of high-quality horses. In the spring, starting at the end of February shortly after I arrived, they began to send out two or three stallions at a time, accompanied by as many keepers, to every part of the Ukraine and eastern Poland, where they would travel from village to village for the local farmers to bring their mares for insemination. That way they would not have to trust to chance or what the local population could provide but would have thousands of good young work horses each year.

The other boys talked of Kiev, Vilnius, Minsk and the Carpathian Mountains, and it was planned that the mating season should continue until July – thus next year’s foals would be born between February and June. In three years’ time there would be a regular and plentiful supply of horses for use in the east; no matter that three years later the Nazis would be beaten back into Germany, they planned for the long term. I began to count the days until I would be sent off and I hoped it would be somewhere near Hrubieszow. As it turned out I was not disappointed and they despatched me to a belt of villages 30 miles from my family town. No one was sent to a more westerly location; luck was still on my side, as the area east of the Bug was where the Germans had their main problems with transport and which they made the main focus of the breeding programme.

When we set off at the beginning of March, we trotted for two to three hours at a time, slowing down for a quarter of an hour to walking pace to let the horses rest a little. A lorry with basic provisions waited for us at appointed places along the route and checked that we were still on course. Before leaving, we were told that any attempt to escape would be punished by execution and I was not stupid enough to try anything until it was safer. The snow had all but melted, everywhere was dripping wet, and so the weather presented us with few problems, but the cheap leather saddle cut right through me and every muscle in my body began to ache. My legs were so sore that I could hardly walk at the end of the day and my backside felt as if it had no flesh left on it.

The German soldier in charge of us was in his late fifties – this was not a job for young, able-bodied men – and once we had got as far as Wlodizimierz he could not really care what we did. He just wanted to get back home to his family, like the driver who had given me a lift to Kremenets. He tried once to show me photographs of his grandchildren and clearly wanted someone to talk to, but I was not interested. There was widespread hunger in this region in 1943, as there had been the previous winter, because of German confiscation of goods and livestock. In the summer the peasants had been so hungry that they harvested wheat before it was ripe. This year they would be lucky if they managed to plant any at all. Nevertheless, from all the nearby villages they brought in their mares to be inseminated by the stallions.

Escape would be simple, I thought, as we were not guarded and all I had to do was wait until my legs had recovered enough to be able to walk and then I could set off. But escape to what? I had been away for a total of four months, the war had entered a new phase after Stalingrad and the Germans were now retreating on all fronts. For Poland that meant only that the violence was about to intensify. A Pole in the village told me of fresh Ukrainian massacres of Polish civilians east of the Bug. I had no idea whether massacres had already started, or were about to start, on the western side and neither did I have an idea of what to expect if I got back home, how many of my family would still be alive.

It was a journey of only about 30 miles and I thought I could do it in a couple of nights’ walking. The curfew never applied properly to rural areas and I was careful to travel at night and to stick to the fields and forests. I had a little suitcase I had picked up in the stables which contained not much more than a dirty towel and I tried to drop it to the ground if anyone saw me so as not to arouse suspicion and make them think I was just an agricultural worker plodding his way home. Once I reached the Bug, though, there was nothing for it but to cross the river by one of the bridges, and this meant confronting the German guards who were stationed on both banks.

‘Hands up!’ the first one shouted. My suitcase fell to the ground.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Hrubieszow,’ I replied and there followed a few more words in German that I did not understand. I knew he could shoot me there and then if he felt inclined to do so, but something told me he was not the sort to do that. Instead he led me into the barrack room to see the sergeant who was sitting at his desk fiddling with his papers and I prayed that my student card would do the trick yet again. The German respect for documents really is unfathomable. He stared at it, noted it was stamped in Hrubieszow, then stared at me, not quite believing that anyone, even a filthy Polack, could be quite as dirty as I was. I had several months’ grime ground into every pore of my face and no doubt I stank too; my clothes were black and threadbare; it had been four months since I had bathed or changed. He then opened my case and prodded around with his stick, evidently afraid of soiling his hands on what he found there. Apart from the blackened towel, I had a kilo or so of yellow tobacco leaves I had carried from Kremenets, hoping I could get some money for them somewhere. He seemed more bewildered than curious and reacted as if I represented a life-form he had not previously encountered, perhaps only read about in books.

After checking once more where I was heading, he asked where I had come from. I said I had been visiting an aunt whom no one in my family had seen since the Bolshevik invasion and retreat. He accepted this, perhaps reassured that I had relatives like other human beings, but still wanted to know why I was so filthy. He then gestured in the direction of the river and, calling me a ‘filthy Polish pig’, suggested that I wash myself. This made me seethe with anger. I thought that if he had slept rough for as long as I had and then walked and ridden as far as I had, then he too would be filthy. He then escorted me onto the bridge, picked up the phone and informed his comrades on the other side that they should let me pass. The cross-examination had been painless and much quicker than 1 had dared expect. I was free to move on and not far from home, but for some reason the insult hurt me and I had difficulty swallowing my pride and anger.

Back in Hrubieszow I had two choices of accommodation: my Polish landlady with her Ukrainian lover or Uncle Edek’s. My family had all survived: Kasimir, Stanislaw and Anthony were all still alive. The Germans had changed, though, and there were still lots of black armbands to mark the defeat at Stalingrad. Returning after a lengthy absence meant I noticed the decay and devastation more than I had previously. By this time there were very few Jews left in the ghetto; those who were left were too old and infirm to escape and they did not seem to be guarded properly any more.

In May my mother insisted I go to Zakrzowek to lie low after another batch of Poles had been taken hostage and shot. My grandmother gave me a suitcase full of meat to take to my father’s family, who, despite their estate, had far less to eat because of the German overseer. Ironically, peasants and small landowners had more food at their disposal than the owners of larger farms, say over 100 acres, which the Germans administered themselves. My maternal grandmother had plenty, as she could always declare fewer piglets to the German authorities than actually arrived in the litter. She wanted me to take my father’s family more than the five or six kilos of bacon that fitted into my case.

I took the train to Lublin, where I met Aunt Sophie who was setting off for her parents’ farm because of the danger posed by staying in Lublin. We found various members of the extended family in Zakzrouvek, including my five female cousins whose brother Peter had fled to join the RAF at the beginning of the var. Everyone was astounded at the quantities of fatty bacon I dumped on the kitchen table; there was enough to feed us all for more than a week. Apart from the shortages, life continued relatively peacefully in Zakzrouvek, except that the German overseer poked his nose into all our business and had effectively taken over the running of the farm, in particular the hydroelectric flour mill, from my uncles.

I returned to Hrubieszow later in the summer after partisan activity and the resultant reprisals made Zakzrouvek just as hot a place to be in as Lublin or the western Bug. I went first to Modryn and then stayed with my parents, who had moved to a hamlet on the other side of the river, away from the main road. They wanted me to stay with them, saying it was safer than anywhere else, but I could not stand my mother’s nagging of my father – I thought she humiliated him and felt humiliated in his place. My wish was the same as it had been a year ago: I wanted to fight and the opportunity to do so was now not far away. The fighting came to me; there was no need to go in search of it.