The Lancers were cavalry, trained to use armoured cars and to operate as a fast-moving reconnaissance unit, but for the battle they had become infantrymen, foot-sloggers like almost every other soldier that had fought across this damnable piece of land for the past four months. The armoured cars now waited for them miles behind the line with the rear echelons. Only once the battle was won, and the men were out of the mountains and into the valleys below, would they get their vehicles back.
For the vast majority of Polish troops now lying in wait on the mountain, their journey there had been long and tortuous – an epic trek that had seen them travel thousands of miles, crossing continents and enduring terrible losses and hardship – and Wladek was no exception. It was a miracle that he was alive at all.
The blitzkrieg that followed the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 had lasted just twenty-eight days and on 29 September, the country was carved in two by the month-old allies, Germany and the Soviet Union. What had been a beacon of democracy was now subjugated under fascism in one half and Stalinist communism in the other. Its cities and towns lay in ruins, while its stunned people wondered how this apocalypse could have happened in such a short space of time.
Wladek, then a cadet with the Polish Army, had been wounded in the shoulder in the final days before the surrender. Left behind in a disused schoolhouse, he was helped by some local girls who tended him and brought him food and water and, once fit enough to walk, he began the long journey back home to Glebokie, a small town in what had been northeast Poland, but which had now been consumed by the Soviet Union.
His older brother had been killed in the fighting, leaving a wife and two small children, while his home town had been devastated by the war. ‘I could see that every thing that made life worthwhile had come to standstill,’ Wladek recalled. Nor could he stay at home. Russian troops were everywhere, arresting Poles in their droves. He eventually managed to get to Warsaw after travelling most of the way by clutching to the buffers of a train in temperatures well below freezing, and despite being arrested at the German–Russian border. Temporarily locked in a barn, he quickly escaped and made his way through the snow into the German-occupied half of Poland.
For a while Wladek worked for the Polish resistance movement, but on a mission back into Russian-occupied Poland, he was arrested at the border once again. This time he did not escape.
For thirteen long months, Wladek was held at Bialystok prison. He was one of fifty-six prisoners crammed into an eight-man cell. Occasionally he would be interrogated and beaten. Eventually he was sentenced to three years in a Siberian labour camp. In June 1941, he and 500 others were loaded onto a goods train, fifty to a wagon, and sent to a labour camp in the Arctic Circle.
Ventilation for the wagon came from a small, barred hole and an opening in the floor used as a toilet. There was not enough air and they all struggled to breathe properly. Each prisoner received 400 grammes of bread and one herring at the start of the journey, but the salty herring made them thirstier. They were eventually given a small cup of water each, which, they were told, had to last until the following day. Dysentery soon gripped many men, and most had fever. A number died, their bodies remaining where they lay amongst the living. ‘Can you imagine?’ says Wladek. ‘We didn’t realise then that of course the Soviets hoped these conditions would kill off many of us on the way.’
The journey lasted two weeks. The further they travelled the more bleak and desolate the surrounding country became. Eventually they halted at a railhead on the Pechora River. Staggering off their wagon, they were herded towards a transit camp before continuing their journey by paddle steamer. This took them a further 700 miles north. They disembarked a week later at Niryan-Mar Gulag, in one of the most northern parts of Russia.
Conditions had been bad at Bialystok, but Niryan-Mar reached new depths of deprivation. The men were housed in large marquee-like summer tents, each sheltering around 180 men, and although they each had a rough wooden bunk to sleep on, there were neither mattresses nor blankets and the prisoners slept fully clothed at all times. They kept their clothes stuffed with cotton wool and although they just about managed to keep warm, they were soon plagued by lice.
Every day the prisoners were put to work at the nearby port on the mouth of the Pechora for twelve-hour days of physically demanding labour, sustained only by meagre rations of water and hard bread. As Wladek says: ‘We worked as slaves.’
The camp was surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers, but there was nowhere a prisoner could go even if he did escape: they were miles from anywhere and the surrounding forests and marshes were home to wolves. Even so, Wladek did make one bid for freedom. A Swedish vessel came into port and thinking the crew seemed friendly and sympathetic, he managed to slip away and hide in the hold. He misjudged them, however. Soon discovered, he was handed back to the Soviets. ‘The punishment I received I shall never forget,’ he says; Wladek was beaten to within an inch of his life.
Inevitably, many prisoners succumbed to disease. Illness, however, was no excuse not to work. Despite high fevers and crippling dysentery, prisoners had to keep going, as ‘the alternative to working was death’. Wladek’s malnutrition caused him to start to go blind. His affliction was worse in the evening and to ensure that he did not step out of line and that he made it safely back to camp each night, he depended on others to guide him.
This hell did eventually come to an end, however. Months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, he and his fellow prisoners were released and, armed with a free rail pass and some meagre rations, were told to head south. As they did so, Stalin had already begun to renege on his promises and large numbers, Wladek included, were forcibly detained on collective farms. He and several others managed to escape by stealing and pilfering, and, weeks later, they finally reached the Polish camp at Guzar in Uzbekistan, one of the most southerly points in the Soviet Union.
Even before Wladek had left the gulag and set out on the journey that would take him eventually from the Arctic Circle to the edge of Persia, he had been in a weakened physical state – and just a fraction of his normal body weight. Several thousand miles later, having travelled by rail, boat, and on sore and bloody feet, he was seriously ill. Struggling with a high fever, he staggered to the Polish camp’s registration office and was then sent to the first aid station, where he was told he had contracted typhoid.
Meanwhile, General Wladyslaw Anders in the southern Soviet Union, and General Sikorski, the Commander-in-Chief of the Free Polish Forces, in London, had been having a difficult time with the Soviet leaders. It had been the Poles’ hope and intention that the reconstituted Polish Army should fight as a whole against Germany on the Eastern Front, which would send out a strong signal to the world about Polish solidarity and their fighting spirit. Stalin, however, who had designs on Poland if and when Germany was beaten, had no intention of allowing this to happen, and so had been making life as difficult as possible, giving the Poles mustering areas and camps in inhospitable parts of the Soviet Union where disease – such as typhoid – was rife, and waylaying potential Polish troops by forcing them to work on collective farms.
Eventually, however, Stalin decided he wanted to free himself of any obligations to arm and provide for the Polish Army, no matter how useful they might one day be. Churchill had let it be known that he wanted Polish forces fighting alongside the Allies in the Middle East, and so under pressure from both Britain and America, Sikorski agreed that Anders’ Polish Army should be evacuated to Persia, from where they would train under British guidance.
Wladek Rubnikowicz was still making his miraculous recovery from typhoid when the first evacuation to Persia was made, but he joined the next one a few months later, only to contract malaria. After a couple of weeks the fever subsided leaving him with recurrences of the disease that would plague