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
