Nine Lives. Waldemar Lotnik

relatively peacefully in Zakzrouvek, except that the German overseer poked his nose into all our business and had effectively taken over the running of the farm, in particular the hydroelectric flour mill, from my uncles.

       I returned to Hrubieszow later in the summer after partisan activity and the resultant reprisals made Zakzrouvek just as hot a place to be in as Lublin or the western Bug. I went first to Modryn and then stayed with my parents, who had moved to a hamlet on the other side of the river, away from the main road. They wanted me to stay with them, saying it was safer than anywhere else, but I could not stand my mother’s nagging of my father – I thought she humiliated him and felt humiliated in his place. My wish was the same as it had been a year ago: I wanted to fight and the opportunity to do so was now not far away. The fighting came to me; there was no need to go in search of it.

      4 The Ukrainian Massacres

      In the forests where Baron had dug his hide-out I had a friend named Karma, a poet and an idealist, who organised a few local youngsters to attack German buildings after dark. He put me in touch with the local Peasants’ Battalion, who at first told me that I was too young to fight with them. Had I had my own weapon, the story might have been different, and I cursed my aunt for refusing to tell me where the arms were buried. Instead I joined Karma’s small group in order to prove what I could do. Armed with five rifles and a couple of dozen hand-grenades, we attacked a German storage depot, scaring off the sentry with a few pot-shots. We blasted off the locks and then tossed in the grenades but, although we damaged the stores of food and equipment, we failed to open a heavy safe we came across inside. That was my first taste of real action. It had been easy and I wanted more.

       The next month Karma again proposed me to the local unit and they reacted more positively, quizzing me on military tactics and equipment. During the summer they sent me back to the technical college so that I would have a cover for collecting information on German troop movements in Hrubieszow. My student ID still served as a passe-partout and, despite my height, I still managed to look younger than my age. Yet I was still furious that they would not let me fight with them and took the rebuff as a personal slight. A sergeant heard me complaining and took me aside.

       ‘Look, young fellow,’ he said, ‘we need every available man, also on the inside, working in the towns. You have the perfect documentation, the perfect cover. You can walk the streets without fear of arrest. That’s why we’re sending you to Hrubieszow. It’s a vitally important job.’

       His comments made me feel slightly better.

       They wanted to know everything: the number of military trains, passing through the station; their, cargo; what insignia were painted on the military vehicles they unloaded; the nationality of the troops (German, Ukrainian, Lithuanian or Latvian) and whether they belonged to the Wehrmacht or the SS. I identified Lithuanian. and Ukrainian troops by the colour of their shoulder flashes. The skull and crossbones on the SS uniforms made them unmistakable.

       If I could get within earshot, without arousing suspicion, I attempted to understand what the soldiers were saying to each other. The Slav languages presented me with no problems and I memorised all the details by repeating them over and over to myself. Only when there was something I did not understand, German lettering or symbols, for instance, did I make a note to show to someone afterwards. In these cases I always scribbled in the back of a school exercise book and, if stopped and questioned, planned to say that it was homework. It was imperative never to jot anything on a separate piece of paper and always to write in a rough code if I had anything urgent to report, I jumped on a bicycle to reach the unit fifteen miles away in Laskuv. If there was a danger of running into a convoy, I did the journey on foot, weaving my way through, the woods past Ukrainian villages.