were his own. When my grandfather stopped him in the street, he announced that all Polish land in Modryn now belonged to his people. Yet this was an incongruous alliance, for the Master Race could barely disguise its contempt for the uncouth Ukrainian peasantry.
Of more use to the Germans than the Ukrainians were the Volksdeutsche, descendants of German settlers from past centuries (some of whom had arrived as long as six hundred years ago, only a little later than the Jews), whose farmsteads punctuated the plains of Eastern Europe. They sometimes spoke only rudimentary German but had retained their German names and a vestigial sense of their German origins. Many now flocked to serve their supposed liberators from the far-away Fatherland, who gave them Polish land and property and allotted them posts and responsibilities stripped from Poles. There were also Poles who claimed German ancestry in order to get hold of a German passport and the double or treble ration coupons, the good jobs, privileges and even houses which went with it. We hated them even more than we hated the Germans, and the partisans exacted ruthless revenge when they got hold of them. Two such Poles I knew claimed volksdeutsch status in order to act as double agents and pass on information to the Resistance.
At the beginning of the Occupation, in fact up to some time in 1942, the Germans made Polish farms provide so many tons of grain, gallons of milk or head of cattle, which they transported back to the Reich or used to feed their soldiers. All livestock had to be registered, marked with a clip attached to the ear of each animal, and permission was needed in order to slaughter even a single pig. Failure, to comply could result in summary execution. Within a year the Germans doubled the production quotas, which had to be handed over in exchange for ration coupons, soon to become far more valuable than the old Polish currency. A Polish-speaking official came to live on the estate owned by my father’s father in Zakrzowek, a village to the west of Zamosc, to supervise the provision of these goods. He was tongue-tied and aloof and we thought of him as a spy, even though he remained perfectly civil. At Zakrzrowek, where we had lakes chock-full of carp, a mill and a spanking new hydro-electric dam, we never managed more than a fifth of what they wanted – even a mechanised farm could not have produced goods and crops in such quantities. Yet no matter what the Germans took, they gave us a stamped receipt, as if the theft had been a business transaction and we had been paid rather than robbed. After 1942 this pretence ceased and they simply confiscated what they wanted.
I passed my school leaving certificate in the summer of 1941, two months before my sixteenth birthday, in the same week that the German armies rolled east. Yet even after the invasion of Russia in June 1941 school did not cease for me, as I moved to a higher technical college, this time in Hrubieszow itself. I lodged with a beautiful but partially crippled landlady who entertained a Ukrainian lover, the commander of the local militia which by then had taken over policing duties. It was as if by associating with him that she got her revenge for the disappointments and the slights she must have suffered from Polish men on account of her disability. Now she found herself on the winning side.
At this new college we had lathes and machine tools, learnt how to weld and forge metals, calculate stress levels and measure the effects of temperature changes. When high-quality scrap became available from the Eastern Front, the lecturers set us an industrial task: the construction of two military lorries. The class rose to the challenge with enthusiasm and succeeded in making two workable vehicles – engines, drive shafts, gear boxes and bodywork. Once finished, we made no attempt to disguise our pride and even posed to be filmed for the German newsreels, which showed our beaming faces throughout occupied Europe. The commentary lauded our commitment to the German cause and held us up as an example of what Polish students could achieve under German supervision. At that point, some time in the summer of 1942, I decided that continuing with my studies amounted to collaboration and that I could have no more to do with it.
2 Escalation
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
