the Germans.
It was a lucky escape, more frightening than hiding from the guards the day before, and the second time, after the Hauptmann pointing his pistol at my head, that I felt I had eluded death by a whisker. We continued towards Mirce the next day and, just before dusk, found Mietek’s family who, while relieved to see their son alive, feared that their own security might be jeopardised by our presence. They told us that the SS had rounded up 80 Polish men the previous week after the shooting of a German soldier, that the hostages had been beaten and tortured before the SS had driven them to a forest and executed them. Mietek’s brother-in-law had been among them. I marvelled once more that the militia had not killed us the previous night.
This news made the walk to Hrubieszow all the trickier as the militia still patrolled in force on the look-out for the Polish assassins, even after the German revenge had been so swift and brutal. We decided to walk at night through woodlands and to zigzag our way forward, arriving in the town under the cover of darkness.
For most of December I stayed with Uncle Edek, rarely leaving the house for fear I would be enlisted into another brigade of forced labourers, or worse still be found out as an escapee. The only alternative to a life in hiding was to join the armed fight against the oppressors. This became my sole wish. I needed equipment, a rifle at the very least, before I could set out. My aunt and grandmother at the farm in Modryn steadfastly refused to tell me where they had buried the Polish army weaponry after the German invasion. They all still treated me as if I were a child.
By this time we knew that the German advance had been halted and that the Soviets and Germans were fighting a life-and-death battle at Stalingrad. In the autumn the German newsreels had predicted the imminent fall of Stalingrad and shown the bedraggled Soviet troops in control of a narrow stretch of the city in front of the Volga River. The film depicted divisions of stormtroopers and SS men in heroic poses and extolled the military virtues of the Master Race, which would soon crush the resistance of the motley mixture of Slavs and Asiatics who opposed it. Two years later I saw Soviet newsreels of the same battle that showed first a shot of elite troops goose-stepping past Hitler at a pre-war parade before flashing forward to images of hungry German infantry, heads and hands covered in thin rags, shod with boots made from plaited straw. Below them was the caption: ‘These are the men who reached Stalingrad.’
Stalingrad was the decisive battle of the Eastern Front: half a million German troops, the whole of the Sixth Army under General von Paulus, faced an even greater number of Soviet forces, replenished by troops from the Far East, many of whom had been transported from the Siberian steppes now that the Americans had entered the war against Japan and they were no longer needed to defend the eastern frontier. They fought for six whole months, through summer, autumn and winter, reducing everything in the city to rubble and then churning over the dust from the rubble with the power of renewed bombing. In November the Volga froze; three times the Soviet commander asked von Paulus to surrender; a third of the German troops suffered frostbite and two-thirds ultimately perished. Fewer than 100,000 out of an army originally numbering half a million eventually fell into Soviet hands. Hitler and Stalin had both staked all on Stalingrad; hatred on both sides had reached an intensity that transcended reason.
After the defeat German officers wore black armbands and their soldiers walked about as if in mourning. The spring had gone out of their step once and for all – they were no longer indomitable, but anyone tempted to think the fight had gone out of them was mistaken. In fact, they grew all the more dogged in their increasing desperation now that they had their backs to the wall. In the past they had been convinced of the invincibility of the Master Race and barked at Polish passers-by to take their hands out of their pockets when a German officer walked past; now they had red eyes from lack of sleep, maybe even from tears.
At the beginning of December, as the Battle of Stalingrad entered its final phase, I took a train south-east to Lwow, armed only with my student identity papers and what I hoped was a cast-iron excuse for travelling. When stopped, I was going to explain in Ukrainian that my uncle and aunt had been imprisoned by the Bolsheviks during the Soviet occupation and that I was going to track them down for my sick mother. As it turned out, I did not need to use the story, but having it prepared made me feel safer.
The third-class compartments were full of shabbily dressed Polish workers with dejected expressions, not talking much to each other, never laughing. They did not carry much baggage and there were hardly any children, in stark contrast to peacetime. This made the two women in my compartment, who were speaking a very elegant form of Polish, seem oddly out of place. I listened intently to their conversation.
‘My nephew speaks German without an accent,’ one boasted to the other, ‘you can’t tell he’s not German.’
‘My nieces and nephews speak it with a slight accent, but they are fluent too in French, Spanish and Italian. They are so gifted with languages, which is so important nowadays.’
At the doorway to the compartment stood a young Ukrainian in a black uniform, probably Gestapo I thought, although I recognised neither the sort of hat he was wearing nor the insignia that decorated it. He had a German parabellum at his side, encased in a triangular holster, and kept his gaze fixed on me while positioning himself so as to be able to see out on both sides of the track. He yelled periodically at passengers to get out of his way if they brushed past him or momentarily obscured his view. I did not utter a word to anyone and did my best to avoid his stare.
Lwow, with its opera house and wide streets, had been a beautiful city before the war, always outshining Lublin in terms of splendour and sophistication. The magnificent railway station, with its glass and wrought-iron roof that I had admired on school trips, was worth a visit in its own right. Some of the wealthier town houses were faced with marble up to the first floor. At one time the city had been called Lemberg, when it had been the capital of Austrian Galicia and before that capital of the Polish Ukraine under the rule of the Polish-Lithuanian kings. It now looked very dirty and unkempt, everything was coated with layers of grime and muck. The city had lost its self-respect, every street brimming with displaced persons, although nothing very much seemed to have been destroyed when the Germans captured it. It was like a once elegant man about town who had fallen on bad times and gone to seed, but still retained some of his old manners and gestures among the throng of his impoverished new companions. Its once thriving Jewish community was no more; its survivors awaited their fate in the ghetto, although I had no time to explore.
As I had little way of knowing how long the train was stopping and was uncertain where it was going afterwards, I decided to get off and think about what I should do to continue my journey. Another train seemed the best bet, especially after the first ride had been so easy, but the Ukrainian Gestapo man followed me down the platform and demanded, ‘Ausweis, bitte,’ before switching to his own language. I understood every word but pretended I only spoke Polish and could not follow him very well. He clearly thought I was up to something.
‘Are you a spy working for the filthy Bolsheviks?’
I vigorously denied this and repeated the reason for my journey. He called someone else for a second opinion and before letting me go said in loud clear voice, not knowing that I understood him, ‘We’ll have to keep an eye on this one, there’s something very fishy about him.’
I did not stray far from the station and in the evening jumped on a goods train headed north. This ride proved far less comfortable. I made myself a little nest in the corner of a converted cattle truck. Nobody disturbed me until a full day later when the train shunted into a siding at the small town of Brody and a voice rang out from the platform, ‘Alle raus!’ A few soldiers got out with me, but no one seemed at all bothered that there had been a stowaway on board.
Brody lay more or less on my route, which made me not too displeased with my progress in the first two days, but quite unprepared for the night which now lay ahead of me. Because of the curfew it
