LITMIR.BIZ

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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 would have been unwise to venture into the town itself, where I knew nobody and was unlikely to find shelter free of charge. I went into the station waiting-room and arranged myself on a wooden bench, hoping to find some sleep and wake up to continue the journeys.

       I had never known such cold before, not even in the labour camp. I was wearing a three-quarter length overcoat and heavy boots, but they did not do much good and left my knees quite exposed. I never slept for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time, waking up to defrost my legs which felt as if they were going to fall off as a result of the cold. In future I decided to stick on a train at night or, failing that, find a quiet barn in the country where nobody would see me and I could burrow into the hay or straw.

       At first light there was a ‘train east’ and I hopped aboard without a second thought, staying on it until the following morning and this time managing to get some rest. By the time it arrived in Zytoierz, some 150 miles east of Hrubieszow, my main problem was hunger rather than cold. I was longing for a good hot drink, the rations I had brought with me having run out long ago.

       The people in the first house I knocked at refused to give me anything, but at the second I struck lucky and the three women who lived there greeted me like a lost son or nephew. Russian Ukrainians had a completely different outlook to those further west. As a Pole I had no reason to feel wary of them – anyway I was pretending to be Ukrainian myself at this time. These people had never been pro-Bolshevik, especially after the famines of the previous decade, but most of them had quickly become anti-German. Strategically and politically, this was one of Hitler’s big blunders: in the Soviet Ukraine he found a disaffected population who would have joined the Germans, as they did in great numbers in the Polish Ukraine, if only the Germans encouraged them to do so. Yet because partisan actions had run parallel to the German advance and underground units continued to operate hundreds of miles behind the German lines, the Germans showed no mercy to the local population and avenged partisan attacks on villagers and other civilians. When a bridge or installation was blown up or a detachment of German troops attacked, they retaliated by rounding up what they deemed to be an appropriate number of Ukrainians, usually but not always young men, and shooting them, displaying the bodies in public to teach others a lesson. The local people’s initially friendly reaction subsided.

       Whether this family of women believed me or not when I explained I was looking for my brother and sister who I believed to the in the vicinity of Rostov, they gave me a bowl of steaming hot borscht and a plate of cooked potatoes with mouth-watering yoghurt, so thick that the top layer of cream could be sliced off. Such a feast was rare, to say the least, in these parts at this time and I could hardly believe that I was eating it. However my enjoyment was dampened by the knowledge that this was likely to be my last good meal for a long time. Thereafter I lived on bread and potatoes, happy if the potatoes were not raw and the bread not hard. The women’s charity can only be explained by the fact that their men had all disappeared, either dead, hundreds of miles to the east with the Red Army, or into German captivity. I could see that they were in distress, but did not ask the reason because at that time everyone had a long tale of pain.

       When I had finished my meal, I asked if they knew the way to Rostov and they pointed me in the right direction. I was certainly not the only person on a long trek, but Rostov was at least 600 miles away. First I had a lift with some peasants on a horse-drawn sleigh. They dropped me not far from a railway line, where I clambered onto another German goods train that seemed to me to be going more or less where I wanted. It turned out to be carrying war

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