of troops marched through the town in mid-June it became clear that they only had one purpose and that was attack.
The other school in Mirce had finished two weeks early because the Germans had requisitioned the building for use as a Divisional HQ and it was from the headmaster’s son, a classmate of mine, that I first heard that the invasion had begun. I raced home to tell my grandfather that German troops had crossed the Soviet border from East Prussia. My friend’s father had heard officers discussing it, so it must be true, I told him, but my grandfather made little sign of taking the news seriously, since it came from me via a second-hand source. The following day the radio announced that panzer divisions had advanced on all fronts.
In that last week of June we watched column after column of German troops marching east. A little later there were human columns of a rather different sort being marched in the other direction. These barefoot prisoners quickly became a common sight on all the roads, as they trudged in the direction of Germany. If Polish civilians threw the prisoners scraps of food, they scrambled to pick them up, pausing only to nod thanks, knowing that should their guards see them the penalty for eating the merest morsel was death.
I remember one typical column, which, walking in twos and threes, took an hour and a half to pass me, meaning there must have been upwards of 15,000 men. When they fell from exhaustion or because the pain from their bloody feet had become unbearable, guards shot them in the head or ran a bayonet through their stomachs. Human remains littered the countryside.
One September afternoon I was driving a cart of potatoes and sugar beet with my grandfather when we overtook a straggling line of Soviet POWs. Several of them, believing themselves to be out of sight of the guards, dived towards the raw vegetables and started to devour them in a hectic frenzy which ended abruptly with a burst of gunfire. Two or three were killed and the others stopped eating. What has stuck in my mind ever since is the way a young captain yelled to the survivors.
‘Fall in! Quick march!’ he ordered, as if he was still on the parade ground, and then added in a voice full of anger, wounded pride and defiance, ‘We shall carry on for as long as we can. The day shall come when these murdering bastards will pay with their blood for what they have done to us.’
They still had a language which was their own and which the Germans could not understand. That was their last and only site of freedom.
The marches continued throughout the winter, through the snow and the blizzards. Their only purpose, despite labour shortages in the Reich, was to kill off the greatest number of prisoners by the most economical means. Stalin had refused to sign the Geneva Convention, so Soviet prisoners did not have even a veneer of official protection.
Soviet POWs were joined on the road by similar columns of Jews. One which I saw consisted exclusively of men, some Litvaks in traditional dress, but mostly assimilated Jews, who from their appearance I guessed to have been city dwellers, middle-class merchants and professional people rather than small shopkeepers and scrap-iron dealers. They still looked reasonably healthy and their clothes, although dirty and torn, had not yet become threadbare. Edek muttered to my grandfather that surely they knew they were all going to be killed, as scores had already been shot along the way.
‘Why don’t they resist, why don’t they fight?’ he asked, hoping for an answer from his father, who had always done business with Jews, which would account for this apparent acceptance of death.
‘They’ve got no chance,’ my grandfather replied. ‘They all know it. Look in their eyes.’
It is true that there was only one guard, armed with a machine gun, for every forty or fifty Jews; it is also true that had they all acted in unison in response to a pre-arranged signal, they could have overpowered their guards, grabbed the guns and turned them on their captors.
Many people have asked the same question as Edek, wondering how millions of Jews could be destroyed in the space of few short years. The answer is that many did fight back when an opportunity presented itself, fighting like cornered tigers in the Warsaw Ghetto. Others took to the forests to sabotage the German war effort. But in a situation like the one Edek and I witnessed, a revolt needs to be planned if it is going to succeed. Any prisoner who stepped out of the column or aroused the faintest suspicion would have been shot on the spot. Anyone who had jumped on an individual guard would have been killed before others could get hold of the guard’s machine gun. It would have been impossible for would-be ring-leaders to communicate with others further down the line to get them to pounce at the same moment. A handful of armed soldiers can always subdue an unarmed crowd.
In my view what is more significant is that each individual still hoped that he alone out of all the others might survive and still harboured the thought that, even if all the rest perished, he would be the one, by some miracle or quirk of fortune, to get away. After repeated beatings and the indignities of a forced march, everyone concentrates on surviving for the next half an hour because everyone thinks that something might just happen in that half-hour which could change everything. This feeling was compounded by a sense that the Germans could not possibly intend to do away with everybody, that there must have been some sort of mistake or that there must be some purpose, other than the unthinkable, to their having been taken away. The Germans always did as much as they could to encourage that sort of thinking and invariably promised the people they herded onto trains and rounded up to march to their deaths that they were going to a work camp or to an industrial plant where they would be looked after and could use their professional skills. They never broadcast their plans to their victims.
To anyone who asks, ‘Why did the Jews let themselves be killed in that way?’ I would reply, ‘Why did the Poles who were led off to concentration camps let themselves be killed? Or the Soviet prisoners of war, who also counted their dead in millions?’
In Hrubieszow the Jewish ghetto consisted of a few streets fenced off with barbed wire, from which, as Hrubieszow had never had its own Jewish quarter, let alone ghetto, Polish families had been evacuated. From Edek’s upstairs window I could peer over the fence and see the hundreds of men, women and children crammed inside. I recognised several of the Ukrainian militia on patrol as some of them used to come to my lodgings to drink with my landlady.
Two of them were drinking one autumn afternoon in 1941 as they played a life-and-death game with the prisoners. Each took turns to aim pot-shots at the petrified human targets who scurried from house to house to avoid the bullets, crouching behind walls and any other structure that could afford them some protection. The rules of the game were simple: if someone scored a direct hit and the other missed, the first won the bet and pocketed the money each had staked on the round. I witnessed these games three or four times that autumn and saw them kill at least thirty Jews in this way, leaving the bodies where they lay. Once it had finished, survivors dragged off the corpses for a makeshift burial. There were up to 8,000 Jews in the ghetto at that time. By the summer of 1943 it had been emptied.
When I passed very early one morning in November 1942 there were no guards to be seen, though the barbed wire was still in place. One of the few remaining Jewish prisoners called to me to ask if I had anything to eat. At first I took him to be an old man of at least seventy, but as I drew closer and looked at his features, I saw that he had aged prematurely and was probably still in his forties. From his accent I knew he came from one of the eastern counties, Volhynia or Podolia. As I always carried a crust of bread in my pocket wrapped in newspaper, I threw the small package to him over the fence. He stuffed it quickly into his coat to eat when the danger of others seeing him with food had passed, then thanked me profusely and indicated that he wanted to repay or reward me with something. As there was an abandoned boot lying nearby, an ankle-high man’s boot with strong elastic instead of shoelaces, he lobbed this over to me. Somewhat baffled, I took it, nodding my thanks in return, and wandered away.
The boot was not in bad condition, and if he had given me a pair
