Nine Lives - Waldemar Lotnik

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in gales and snow storms, often knee-deep in water, shovelling up sodden earth to carve out foundations for the military installations. Rain and snow penetrate clothing quickly; chest complaints that led to high fevers, pneumonia and hypothermia laid up a third of the workforce at any one time. A paramedic dispensed aspirins to the sick, as the barracks filled up with those too weak to move, let alone work. Although the conditions were atrocious and regard for our welfare minimal or non-existent, compared with what I later encountered in Majdanek these six weeks shifting earth were a holiday. In a concentration camp they have one object in mind: to kill you. Here at least they had a practical reason for wanting us to stay alive and they fed us enough to keep us going. No one died of hunger. In the evenings we could sometimes light a fire in the stove and the camaraderie of enforced proximity and shared hardship added to the hope that the misery would soon come to an end, kept our spirits from sinking. Yet when they told me that they wanted to keep us there for at least a year I knew I would not be able to take it and resolved to escape and return home come what may. It would take a bit more than this to break my spirit.

       The only time that escape was remotely possible was on a work party outside the camp. Any other time would have been suicidal. My example from the beginning had been Uncle Edek, whom the Germans had abducted that summer, along with six of my grandfather’s prize cart-horses and best cart, ordering him to join a convoy carrying shells and ammunition to the front. We had no reason to suppose we would see him again, dead or alive, yet he returned within three weeks, which now made me think there was hope for me.

       His account of his escape sounded incredibly simple and required nothing more than a touch of daring at the right moment. He had driven his cart as far as the Pripet Marshes, some 100 miles from Hrubieszow, when his convoy had come under attack from partisan artillery and Soviet aircraft. Edek abandoned his vehicle, dived for cover and, when the bombing had ended, simply slipped away into the bushes. His captors would have been in no mood to check what had happened to him. The conditions of war make possible such unlikely escapes, for after the guns have stopped firing and the sound of artillery ceased to ring in the guards’ ears, no one is inclined to organise a roll-call. Although I was unlikely to end up in the firing-line, I decided to seize my opportunity as soon as it presented itself. This required discretion, patience and at best a partner I could trust and who would not let me down once we had broken out. I approached a friend from Hrubieszow called Mietek and together we decided to make a run for it.

       Towards the end of November two lorries with 40 to 50 prisoners between them took us to the western bank of the river, where we were ordered once more to dig into the hard frozen ground, a not quite impossible task since the deeper you dig the less frozen the earth actually is. The site was completely exposed and a fierce wind swept across the plain. As the time of departure drew nearer and the light grew dimmer, Mietek and I hid behind a concrete wall and listened to the others pack away their shovels and clamber into the lorries. This was the moment when success or failure would be decided. The guards usually counted how many of us got into the lorry and would have searched high and low once they had discovered anyone had disappeared. We knew this but had taken a chance because of the harsh weather and the darkness, and because we hoped the guards would think there was nowhere for anyone to hide on the open river bank. We continued to hold our breath as the engines started. They did not count their prisoners and did not come after us. Instead the lorries pulled away while we lay motionless, hardly daring to twitch until the rumble of the engines had died away.

       Nearby we discovered an abandoned house where we slept, found warmer clothes and ate what little food the former inhabitants had left behind. In the morning we set off for Mirce, where Mietek’s family lived and where we intended to hide until the dust had settled. Then our objective was to find a partisan unit, either in the immediate area or further afield. I wanted revenge now more than ever. I also wanted to get home to my family, but realised that if the Germans decided to look for me that was the first place they would search.

       The trudge to Mirce was not without its perils, and even though we tried to stick to the fields it was impossible to avoid the roads completely. That evening two Ukrainian militia stopped us and threatened to shoot us for leaving our houses after curfew. They both yelled at us, first in Ukrainian and subsequently in broken Polish, calling us dirty Lacki (from Polacki, a derogatory term for Poles). They debated loudly whether or not they should shoot us there and then. When I made a remark in Ukrainian one of them bellowed at me that I should not pretend to be Ukrainian when I was Polish.

       ‘But what do you know?’ I answered.

       ‘You’re a Haho [someone from western Ukraine], you don’t speak my language.’

       I then tried to sing a song in the east Ukrainian dialect in the hope he would think I came from that region. They listened.

       ‘For God’s sake, say something in German to them! They won’t dare touch us then,’ I whispered to Mietek. He then gestured to the writing on his tunic, ‘Verstehen Sie Deutsch? Arbeiterabteilung ...’

       By now we had succeeded in confusing them totally and the sergeant told his subordinate to let us go, adding that it did not matter what we were, he did not want any trouble with 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

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