of money. It was made of good quality leather. I took it to a boy a couple of years older than me who always seemed to know how to make money from unlikely transactions and asked him how much he could give me for it. He offered me a few groschen, which I accepted. He in turn took it to his cousin who paid him two whole zlotys, ten times more than I had received, because he needed the elastic. As he was preparing to dismantle the shoe, he discovered that the heel turned. When he twisted it, out fell two gold roubles. My friend, who had been pleased with his two zlotys a moment earlier, demanded one of the roubles and, when his demand was refused, he came back to me to ask where I had found it and whether I knew where the other boot was. I saw him later pacing up and down the ghetto fence, his eyes rooted to the ground. Edek called me an idiot for getting rid of it, but I replied, ‘Why didn’t you take it, then? I offered it to you for nothing but you said it was worthless.’
It was either at this time or shortly afterwards that I witnessed an atrocity committed against a group of Jewish children, the only one I saw apart from the columns of marching men, or those in Majdanek where they happened all day and night. A four-wheeled cart passed me in the street, pulled by a single horse and carrying sixteen Jewish children, aged anything from eighteen months to fourteen or fifteen. There were no adults among them and the older ones held the babies in their arms. They were all standing up and looking out from between the uprights of the wooden cart; the life had gone out of their eyes and it was a dull stare that met my gaze. They were skinny but not emaciated, as pale as death but not dropping from exhaustion or cut from beatings. It was their last journey and from the vacant expression on their faces they must have known it. They had been discovered in a bricked-up section of a house, connected to the outside world by a tunnel through which their protectors, who seemed not to have been caught, passed them food and water. They had been there for many months, which meant the people who had looked after them must have been both dedicated to them and well organised – one person acting alone could not have supported them in this way. I watched the SS captain directing the procession, accompanied by his smartly-dressed, adoring Polish girlfriend, who gazed into his eyes with smiles of admiration. A few minutes after they had passed I heard pistol shots and then wandered down to the Jewish cemetery where they had been taken. Someone standing outside told me that three uniformed Germans had fired a couple of dozen shots and killed every single child.
3 Capture and Flight
In the late autumn of 1942 news reached us of the first massacres of Poles in our vicinity. Both had occurred about twenty miles to the south and south-west of Hrubieszow and were carried out by Ukrainians, now increasingly granted free rein by the Germans, who had burnt and razed two villages. These were the first of countless such massacres: Ukrainians slaughtered Poles and Poles responded by slaughtering Ukrainians in a blood-crazed sideshow to the main carnage to the east, and the extermination of Jews, which had begun to take place in our midst from the moment the Germans arrived.
My first attempt to fight ended ignominiously in the summer of 1942 as I was coming up to my seventeenth birthday. I returned home, crestfallen, a mere two weeks after setting off from my paternal grandfather’s estates in Zakzrouvek. At that time I still had an idea of war as an adventure because the little bits of action I had witnessed had been exciting. My cousin Marian, the son of my father’s favourite sister, Aunt Sophie, who had been walking with me the day we saw the German armoured column, agreed to come with me in search either of a partisan unit fighting behind German lines or General Berling’s Red Polish Army, which had been formed on Soviet territory. The idea of walking hundreds of miles to catch up with the German divisions, whose victorious progress had at last been halted, and then crossing their lines to join the Free Poles on the other side was – to say the very least – quite hare-brained. It would have been quixotic had we been two elderly men in a previous century, our heads filled with the patriotic nonsense of a Polish Golden Age, rather than a pair of stubbornly romantic adolescents.
Marian looked to me for leadership even though he was only six months younger than me. I showed him how to tie a few belongings into a bundle and attach them to sticks to carry over our shoulders. After stealing out of the house, we made our way to the local railway station, not knowing where on earth we were supposed to be heading and not really aware that we did not know. We travelled the first stretch of the journey by train. Because, unlike me, Marian did not have student identity papers, we stowed away on a goods train, which gave the appropriate flavour of daring to the start of our illicit and heroic escapade. We arrived safely in Lublin long before dusk.
Marian, like most Poles, had only a Kennkarte, a little grey identity card, which, although it had to be carried at all times, never impressed a German official. Failure to carry identity papers increasingly resulted in arrest as the Germans scoured the towns and cities for forced labour. Third-class train compartments, always overflowing with Polish passengers barred from travelling first or second class, were a favourite source of slave workers.
All that was needed to stow away was a cool head and a sense of timing. We stood on the opposite side of the track to the station platform, so as to be invisible from the station buildings once the train had pulled in, waited for the very last wagon as the train began to leave, which made it easier to slip away unnoticed at our destination, scrambled aboard before the train picked up speed and laid low for the duration of the journey. This much at least we managed with consummate professionalism.
From Lublin we proceeded on foot eastwards, getting lifts from horse-drawn carts, sleeping in barns and living off raw carrots we picked in fields and fruit we stole from orchards. Because it was summer, food was plentiful, the hedgerows were in bloom and the weather gave us no problems, but Marian soon started to complain.
‘We’ll never get there. I want to turn back. You didn’t tell me it would be like this,’ he wailed throughout the third day. We split two days later: I headed for Hrubieszow and he for Zakzrouvek.
His journey home must have taken him a full ten days because all told he was away for at least two weeks. His mother spent that entire time weeping, fainting and worrying herself to distraction because he had disappeared. When I saw my father again, he gave me an angry lecture, furious that I had endangered his sister’s son and, more to the point, got him into trouble on my behalf. As usual, he seemed unconcerned about my own welfare and what I might have been through.
‘If you want to live the life of a rogue and a mercenary,’ he fumed, ‘that’s up to you – go ahead. But don’t take anyone from the family with you next time. God only knows what I have done to deserve a son with no more common sense than a five-year-old.’
I did not tell him that we had wanted to fight for Poland and had set out to find the Red Polish Army. The whole idea suddenly seemed so stupid, though I was neither ashamed nor contrite, merely humiliated because I was still too young and too inexperienced to be taken seriously by my father. The next time would be different – I would go alone.
At the beginning of term in September 1942 I informed a sympathetic lecturer at college that I wanted to abandon classes because I felt that continuing with my studies amounted to collaboration after we had been put in the propaganda film about the lorries. I trusted him, knowing him to be anti-Nazi, like most of the college staff, and he understood why the film had shamed me. He asked me whether I had discussed the matter with my parents and advised me strongly against leaving, pointing out that far worse could lie in store for me. I took no notice of what he said and remained in my lodgings in Hrubieszow, wondering what I should do next. I was tough, strong and well-fed, proud and headstrong and fed up with being treated like a child.
My student papers did not save me when two Gestapo officers stopped me in the street at the beginning of October. On discovering my date of birth, they informed me that all Poles of my age were now required to join an Arbeiterabteilung, a forced labour brigade, and that I had no option but to accompany them. When I replied that my student status exempted me from forced labour and that I had lessons to attend, one of them curtly informed me that I was a student no longer.
