without warning, sending troops from the north, the south and the west. We weren’t prepared, and none of our allies came to help us. As the Germans advanced closer and closer to our village, my parents decided we had no choice but to abandon our home and flee to safety.
I remember my mother being very firm with me when we left the house. I wanted to take all my toys but she’d said that I could take only one, a brown knitted squirrel named Ernst. I carried him myself in my tapestry carpet bag, along with a change of clothes. My mother and father carried everything else. Because I had my hands free, I was entrusted with taking care of Olaf. He was our family dog, a strapping great hunting hound, not at all like our little Rolfie here. And there was me, just a skinny nine-year-old, trying to hang on to him. It took all my strength to keep him from pulling away from me on the leash when we set off, but after we had left the village behind and we were on the open road my father said I could safely let Olaf off the leash and, sure enough, he trotted along obediently, staying close to me.
On the road, our ranks swelled and other villagers joined us, all heading towards the river. The River Bug marked the border into Romania, and if we could make it across the bridge, then we’d be out of Poland and away from the German danger.
We walked alongside all these other families, hundreds of us making our way to the river. I know it sounds awful to say, but I remember that day as a rather exciting one. There was a sense of adventure about it all. We were all banded together on this journey, and that night the families gathered round an open fire, and we grilled sausages and cooked potatoes in the embers and there was singing. My father had a koza with him – you have probably never seen one and the closest thing I can compare it to is a Scottish bagpipe. My father played it well. He was an academic, a professor of Polish studies, and in Janów Podlaski he was very respected as a member of the Gmina – the district council. Often he would have meetings at our house. As I said, he was very well educated and my mother was too, so I think this made it even harder for them that I couldn’t learn to read or write.
Anyway, I am straying away from the story. My father played the koza that night and we sang. There were couples dancing and we were all singing along and it was only after the embers in the fire had died away to nothing that I went to sleep.
In the morning, we rose early and began walking again, the mood uplifted by the night before. There was talk on the road that day about the river, how it was not far now. We were almost at the border and the sides of the road were dense with forest.
As the day passed by, bands of travellers who were moving faster than we were would catch us up from time to time and our ranks would swell briefly. Sometimes they’d stay with our group, but other times they were too quick to keep our pace and they would leave us behind and disappear into the distance. So I knew that there were people on the road ahead of us, I suppose. All the same, it came as a total shock when, at the end of that second day, in the late afternoon, when we still had miles ahead of us to cover, we saw them all coming back towards us.
It was everyone that had passed us by, and a few others besides! They were heading back with as much urgency as we were going forward! As soon as we saw the looks on their faces, we knew things were very bad. My father ran forward to meet the group, and his face when he returned to us – it was very grave.
“We’re going back,” he said. “We must turn at once for home.”
“But that is crazy, Pavel!” My mother was stunned. “For all we know, the Nazis have already arrived in Janów Podlaski. We can’t go back!”
“We can’t go forward either,” my father replied. “Magda, look up ahead! Do you see the smoke?”
Now that my father said this, we could all see smoke billowing on the horizon. “The Red Army have bombed the village of Kovol,” my father said. “They’re coming, Magda. They’re on the road, and they are heading straight for us.”
“The Russians?” My mother was horrified. “How close?’
“They march nearer the longer we hesitate,” my father said. “We must turn and go home.”
If the mood on the road up until this point had been one of buoyed spirits and camaraderie, now it could be summed up in one word: fear. We were on a road in the middle of nowhere, unarmed, defenceless and trapped between two unstoppable armies. Instead of running from Janów Podlaski, we were now heading home and back into the clutches of Adolf Hitler.
“Mama?” I asked anxiously. “Will the Nazis be there? Will they treat us better than the Russians?”
My mother managed to summon a thin-lipped smile and she took my hand in hers and squeezed it tight. “They can hardly be worse!” she said.
“Why do they want Poland?” I asked.
“Hitler is flexing his muscles and expanding his empire,” Mama replied. “He wants more Lebensraum: living space for the German race.”
Mama stroked my hair with her hand. “The Germans come to rule us, but there is no reason to believe that they will harm us.”
Later, when things had turned truly bad for my family, I would think about what my mama said to me that day and wonder if she knew the true evil of Hitler’s vision and was keeping it from me because she didn’t want to scare me. In this new world, Hitler would rule Poland, the Germans would occupy it and the Polish people would be their slaves. But then, slavery was not even the worst that Hitler had in store for us.
***
We’d been on the road heading back for home for several hours when we heard a sound ahead, rumbling through the forest. As the rumble grew nearer, the earth beneath us trembled as if there was thunder under our feet. My friend Agata, who was walking nearby with her parents, and who until now had been very quiet, suddenly burst into floods of tears.
“It’s the Germans!” she sobbed. “They are coming for us!”
It wasn’t just Agata – others were crying too, and as the thunder grew closer, people began running in all directions.
“We must escape into the trees!” Mama cried.
“No!” my father said. “It is too late now. They will shoot us if we try and run from them. Stay behind me. I will wave the white flag and they will know that we are unarmed.”
My father had his white pocket handkerchief in his hand, ready to wave as he stepped to the front of the cavalcade to face the Nazis. I felt my whole body shaking now as the thunder grew and grew, until at last they came into view.
I have never in my life seen such a sight as I saw that day.
What came at us round the bend in the road wasn’t the Nazis at all. It was horses – almost a hundred of them. Wild and loose, running together as a herd, so many of them jammed on the road that they were pressed up shoulder to shoulder. It was the pounding of their hooves, overwhelming in unison, that shook the ground under us!
Flanking this wild herd, mounted on horseback, were a dozen men. Each of them carried a rope and a whip, and they were attempting to keep the horses moving forward together, which was not easy. They might as well have been trying to herd cats! The most difficult were the young ones, tiny foals who ran, bewildered, at their mother’s side, flagging with exhaustion. Then there were the yearling colts and fillies, who kept breaking loose so that the men on horseback had to ride out in wide loops to bring them back to the herd again. Every time they rode out to rescue one of the colts who had bolted away, they would lose control of the rest of
