all I have to remind me today of a partisan’s roadside bomb that shattered the truck and killed the driver and the armed guard, is a small star-shaped scar on my right buttock and as I grow older, a slight limp.
I have no idea what her real name is. She never tells us. To all of us who spent time in that tiny hole in the ground, she is simply Babunia, or sometimes Baba, which I eventually figured out, is Polish for old woman or grandma. I am told she escaped from Warsaw as the Nazis were jamming Jews into that infamous ghetto and that while she spent most of her life milking cows on a dairy farm, she had some training as a veterinarian.
Her experience may have been with animals, but she tends me with great care for much of that spring, changing my dressings, feeding me and brewing up a painkiller from the bark of surrounding birch trees. Morphine is far too valuable to waste on broken legs or injured flanks!
During the summer, several wounded partisans are brought into our zimlanka, which is what these concealed hiding places deep in the Belarusian forests are called. As quickly as the partisans are patched up and able to walk, they disappear back to whatever fighting units they are attached to. I never talk to any of them, the theory being that the less we know about each other, the less information the Nazis’ torture can extract.
One of the wounded is a young, quite attractive Polish woman whose right hand has been partially blown off by the premature exploding of a mine she was setting near a German checkpoint. One day as she and Babunia are chatting quietly in a corner, I notice them throwing amused glances in my direction. With a slight nod, Babunia stiffly clambers up the short ladder leading to the surface, leaving the two of us alone.
Babunia’s legs have barely disappeared from view when my little Polish partisan, without a word or warning, tears off her clothes, yanks down my blanket and with a fierce cry, mounts me with marvelous vigour!
Startled and fearful for the safety of my damaged limb, I try to push her off; then, realizing that my leg is as much up to the task as everything else, I quickly get into the spirit of things, and there on a sorry bed of rags in a Kurapaty forest zimlanka, surrounded by a world gone mad with death and destruction, we take of life what life can give. Finally exhausted, we clutch each other like desperate lovers. It’s not love, but it’s all we have.
Sadly, the opportunity never presents itself again and several days later she too disappears. I have often thought about her and on one occasion tried to track her down, but I suspect that she, as with many partisans, was eventually caught and killed by the Germans.
Belarusian partisan in a forest dugout (zimlanka) with his family, 1944
The Avengers
BY LATE MAY I am almost fully recovered. “Tell somebody I’m ready to fight the bastards,” I tell Babunia. The next day they come for me. Two armed and very dangerous looking women, who lead me, blindfolded, for several kilometres through the forest. “When we see what kind of stuff you are made of,” explains one of them, “then we may let you know how to find us.” I understand only too well how persuasive the Gestapo can be and I no longer have my thorn. It disappeared in the explosion that destroyed the truck and as yet I have nothing to replace the comfort that precious bit of stone provided.
Thus it is that in May of 1942, I join the Mstitel partisans. A loosely knit but surprisingly well trained group of about 100 men and women hiding in a small and scattered collection of zimlankas deep in the forest that pushes almost up to the Minsk City limits.
Some of the partisans are Jews who escaped from the ghettos of Minsk or Warsaw, but most are men and women like myself, who have refused to become slaves to the Nazis.
Food and other supplies come from nearby villages or Minsk itself—usually donated, but sometimes taken by force. Most of the guns, ammunition, knives and other military equipment, as well as whatever medical supplies we are able to round up, come from the Germans. Always by force!
I discover the reason for the high degree of training when we are joined by a member of the Red Army who has been ordered by Moscow to teach combat skills to several partisan groups operating in the Kurapaty forest. He is only one of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of professional soldiers carrying out similar training operations throughout Belarus, in particular in the Naarutz, Chinchivi and Belovezhskaya forests, as well as here in the Kurapaty where thousands of partisans are gradually taking control of large sections of territory as more and more German soldiers march eastward to confront the encroaching Red Army.
We learn how to use a gun and a knife, how to make and set mines and bombs, and how to throw a grenade, but most of our time is spent learning how to defend ourselves and attack without weapons. Our instructor is an expert in a highly refined and deadly Russian method of hand-to-hand combat called “spetsnaz.”
I learn the points on a man’s body that when pressed will render him unconscious. I learn how to destroy a man’s knee, break his arm or leg, and yes, it is here that I learn the skill that later saves my life in Ottawa: I learn how to kill a man with my bare hands!
My first combat operation is a relatively easy one, but a good test for my newly repaired leg and my fitness. Accompanied by our Russian trainer and following a woman who obviously knows these bush paths very well, we run and jog for the better part of six hours until we’re halted at the edge of an open field. We don’t see any Germans, but wait, concealed in underbrush until well after dark before darting across the field and throwing ourselves against the base of a railway embankment.
Fearful that the sound of our running has alerted the patrols that routinely check this part of the tracks leading from Minsk to the Eastern Front, we still our heavy breathing and listen. Nothing! At the all-clear signal, we clamber up the embankment, and keeping as close to the ground as possible to avoid silhouetting ourselves against the faint glow of a fire burning in distant Minsk, we lay more than twenty sticks of dynamite and fuse along the track, light the fuse, and then run for the welcoming forest with all the speed and strength we can muster.
I don’t quite make it and am knocked flat from the force of the blast that sends at least 100 metres of railway track and ties skyward. Thankfully unhurt, I bounce to my feet, join the rest of our “merry band,” and as dawn breaks we are back in our forest retreat where there is much joking about maybe overdoing it just a bit with the dynamite! “We could have blown up the Great Wall of China,” suggests one of my comrades. “Hell, we could have blown up Berlin,” I say, to much laughter. I am elated. At last, some payback!
For the rest of that year and well into the next, we carry out more than two dozen similar raids, blowing up railway tracks, a bridge and several truck convoys. On one occasion we stage a raid on a German roadblock as a distraction while another group of partisans rescues several Russian POWs about to be put to death. Only once do we get into a firefight with a German patrol. We escape with only one slightly wounded comrade, but it’s a close call. Most other partisan raids aren’t as fortunate. God must still be on my side!
Once in the fall and again in the winter when they think they can follow our tracks in the snow, the Germans make an attempt to locate our encampment and wipe us out. Unable to use tanks or any heavy armament in the deep woods, the Boche foot soldiers are less than enthusiastic in their pursuit. They don’t know the forest, but we do. Our tactic is to send a few snipers out to pick a few of them off and then melt back into the woods. Classic guerilla warfare.
On several occasions the Germans are able to locate partisan zimlankas in our forest and others, but by the time they arrive, the partisans are usually long gone, and more often than not the enemy pays a heavy price
