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
