LITMIR.BIZ

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front and had only military personnel on board, but I did not realise that as I jumped into an empty wagon.

       I found a warm place to sleep out of general view, or so I thought until I was woken by German voices. I was soon noticed and I thought it best to respond in Ukrainian and told the two guards that I was looking for my lost parents who had been abducted by the Bolsheviks two years ago. Perhaps because I looked so gaunt and weak they let me go, thinking I was too young or too worn out to be involved in anything subversive. Because the locals were by now far more likely to be with the partisans than collaborating with the occupiers, it was not quite so clever to claim Ukrainian nationality to German soldiers. On that occasion I got away with it.

       The further I trudged the more suspicious people became of me, the more reluctant to talk to me or help me out with scraps of food – they had next to nothing for themselves and their last livestock had been slaughtered to feed German troops. If they were lucky they might still have a meagre stock of grain they had succeeded in hiding. Sometimes I managed to beg a hunk of bread or a potato, which is all I lived on for several weeks. I continued either on foot or by sleigh when someone would give me a lift, having decided that trains were too dangerous. I felt safer on main roads. As the days passed, I started to think how in practical terms I could join a Polish unit of the Red Army. I was not interested in seeking out local groups of Russians or Ukrainians operating behind the German lines. How was I to cross the front unarmed and all alone? How could I find out the best place to do so? I dared not ask anybody I met.

       Kharkov was the first major city on my route and I thought it best to bypass it. I came to a village to the south which seemed to me at first to have been completely abandoned, until I saw the bodies of two dozen men hanging from makeshift scaffolds. Contrary to the custom, there were no signs saying why they had been killed. I approached a house which had wisps of smoke coiling from a crooked chimney and noticed a very old woman sitting with a young child in the doorway. I asked her who had done the killing. It was pointless to ask for food. She could not answer me, but the child simply said it was the Germans. I was only 100 miles from the front, still too far away to hear artillery fire, and 200 miles from Stalingrad.

       Frightened, dispirited and hungry, I wasted no time in turning back. There seemed to be no point now that I had had enough time to think about what I was doing, had suffered so terribly on the long walk and seen so many bodies hanging in the village. I went back the way I came and somehow continued to survive on the bread and potatoes I begged from homesteads, just about managing to stay warm at night in barns. The journey again lasted many days and nights, slowly turning into weeks and becoming a blur in my memory. I cannot remember much, I suppose because of the monotony of the trudge. I did not really know where I was going until I got a lift in a German truck that finished up in a village called Stubunow, just a few miles from Kremenets where I had lived with my mother and father before the war.

       I had not been consciously heading in that direction and suddenly realised that I recognised the silhouette of the onion-domed Orthodox church over the brow of a hill. The driver, a kindly looking fifty-year-old, nodded when I showed him my student papers. He gave me a cigarette which made me feel dizzy, but I thought it would have been rude to ask for food. I felt very excited and made my way directly to Kremenets where I knew I would be all right, as I had Ukrainian friends from the old days who would put me up. I got on a sleigh and was dropped near the old base and then saw the town I had known from all that time ago. It felt like a miracle to stumble across it in the way I had done.

       A poor Ukrainian family that I had visited as a schoolboy had prospered, first under Soviet and subsequently German rule, and they told me they had never enjoyed as much food and clothing as since the war started. They remembered how I had been generous to them and now returned my favours. My two old schoolmates had grown up but they were all, even the little ones, as tough as tough: the smallest brother would let himself be picked up by his hair and dangled impassively for as long as his brothers could hold him and still not issue a sound. Pietro, who had been a tearaway, had joined the Communists and was now with the partisans. They told me proudly that he was already a junior sergeant.

       I was taken to see some of the surviving Polish families who had fared far less well. Polish civil servants had all been shot or deported to Siberia by the time the Germans reached Kremenets at the beginning of August 1941. The town was surrounded by hills and initially it had been bypassed by the German panzer divisions on their rush forwards. They had taken it relatively late in the summer campaign. People told me that Herr Kacs, our Jewish butcher, had fled in broad daylight at their approach and set off across the fields on foot with Germans chasing him. He continued to run after a bullet hit him in the back; his screaming could be heard in the town. A few other Jews escaped for the time being, but there were none left now. The Germans had also shot four brothers who had arrived there in 1937 and established a lorry business. Because they were Volksdeutsche and the Soviets had not despatched them, the Germans reasoned they must be traitors and shot them in their house. Most other citizens, as long as they were not Jewish, had not yet been killed.

       I was not allowed to stay free for very long and was stopped in the street after a few days by a Polish-speaking German sergeant and a Gestapo officer, who took me back to the military camp, now taken over by the Germans. They were convinced I spelt trouble, but their attitude softened once I showed them my papers. In that respect they were typical Germans: their respect for documentation was absolute. One of them said he had an aunt who lived near Hrubieszow and I escaped with nothing worse than a clip around the ear and a sharp reprimand for being so far from home. They then said that they needed country boys to help in the stables and that they would let me off this time, ‘out of the goodness of their hearts’, but that if I tried anything on them again they would shoot me. When I got to the stables, which I knew well from childhood, the overseer explained that there were 100 Ukrainian boys attending to the horses and that they would tell me what I had to do.

       Luck was on my side again – the job turned out to be easy and I had no intention of escaping for the time being. The work was half indoors, half outside, and by no means as strenuous as the labour camp. Food was sufficient, accommodation warm from the body heat of so many horses and the regime almost lax: most of the Ukrainians were allowed home at night. Those of us who stayed overnight slept in the same barracks that the Ulanen, the elite cavalry regiment, had used before the war; the stables were the same stables, in fact everything was exactly the same as before the war, except there were now only half the number of horses. I had four stallions to look after and sometimes I even enjoyed the work. I fed them their oats first thing in the morning before mucking out the stable, groomed and brushed each of them in turn and then, unless it was too cold, took each one out for an hour’s exercise. I learnt how to get them to trot and to gallop at my command and tried not to let anyone notice I was not as used to this sort of work as the rest seemed to be.

       The Germans let the Ukrainian boys go home at night because they knew they would never try to escape for fear their families would be punished. I happily did other people’s night duty in return for extra rations. There was no hunger here. On the contrary, there was plenty of good bread that was mixed far more favourably than that I was to eat later: 50 per cent flour, 20 per cent potato mash and only 30 per cent wood from saplings. We also had salami, potato soup, even real meat sometimes, and if I did an extra night shift then I could expect a few slices of backfat brought in from the boys’ families. The stables were not just warm, they constituted an oasis of heat in a desert of snow. After so many freezing nights spent huddled in a greatcoat, I appreciated that above all else. The only thing I wanted was a proper bath and a new set of clothes, but I had to make do with my old rags and washing in a basin of melted snow in the morning. ‘I can stay here,’ I thought to myself. It was an ideal place to recuperate after the ordeal of my journey through the Russian winter.

       While on the whole we were treated well, there were some unpleasant incidents. When the officers wanted to impress their girlfriends with impromptu rodeo displays, they used us for sport. While they sat at the ringside, we were sent into the arena to ride untamed stallions, newly arrived in the stables. I was once the fifth or sixth in line and was tossed off immediately by the frightened animal and had to scurry to the side to avoid his kicks. None of us lasted more than five or ten seconds, but we all knew we should try to fall backwards, as it was safer. At one of these entertainments a Cossack suddenly

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