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
