I passed my school leaving certificate in the summer of 1941, two months before my sixteenth birthday, in the same week that the German armies rolled east. Yet even after the invasion of Russia in June 1941 school did not cease for me, as I moved to a higher technical college, this time in Hrubieszow itself. I lodged with a beautiful but partially crippled landlady who entertained a Ukrainian lover, the commander of the local militia which by then had taken over policing duties. It was as if by associating with him that she got her revenge for the disappointments and the slights she must have suffered from Polish men on account of her disability. Now she found herself on the winning side.
At this new college we had lathes and machine tools, learnt how to weld and forge metals, calculate stress levels and measure the effects of temperature changes. When high-quality scrap became available from the Eastern Front, the lecturers set us an industrial task: the construction of two military lorries. The class rose to the challenge with enthusiasm and succeeded in making two workable vehicles – engines, drive shafts, gear boxes and bodywork. Once finished, we made no attempt to disguise our pride and even posed to be filmed for the German newsreels, which showed our beaming faces throughout occupied Europe. The commentary lauded our commitment to the German cause and held us up as an example of what Polish students could achieve under German supervision. At that point, some time in the summer of 1942, I decided that continuing with my studies amounted to collaboration and that I could have no more to do with it.
2 Escalation
The first time my family suffered an irredeemable loss was when my Uncle Joseph was shot some time before June 1941. Since from childhood he had been forced to compensate for his size, he was the most fearless of my uncles. Such qualities can be fatal, but I never discovered exactly what happened to him. My surviving uncles and grandparents refused to discuss dangerous subjects in my presence for fear I might blurt out something at the wrong moment. Everyone who knew what happened to Joseph is now dead. I believed for a long time that he had been present with his brother Kasimir at some sort of gathering in Hrubieszow which had involved Germans and Ukrainians, though why as Poles they should have been present I can’t say, and the question did not occur to me until I came to piece together this story, and that he had been stupid enough to shout out something to the effect that the Germans would not be in charge forever, or that one day they would be made to pay for their crimes. On reflection, it seems more likely that he and Kasimir had been asked to do something or other for the Germans and, refusing, had insulted the soldiers. Open dissent like that could lead to a quick killing. I know that the body arrived back at our house, that it was identified and that we held a funeral, which makes it highly unlikely that he was executed or died in combat. I do remember that his widow kept fainting at his funeral before trying to jump into the open grave and be buried with him.
Kasimir, who had broken so many girls’ hearts before the war, found himself on the run from this moment. He fled to the farm in Modryn, where my grandfather held frantic discussions with him out of my eager earshot. I remember my grandfather getting out his secret ‘treasure drawer’, which contained gold roubles saved up from long-gone Tsarist times, and saw Kasimir stuff his pockets with money before disappearing. By the time the Gestapo called, he had vanished. ‘You killed him,’ Grandfather said in response to their questions. Kasimir was to spend two and a half years in the underground, working as a messenger between various Polish units. On the few occasions when he turned up unexpectedly at the farm, he crept into the house after dark. My grandfather died a few months after his last such visit at Christmas 1943 when Kasimir was tortured to death by the Ukrainian militia.
Uncle Stanislaw was not interested in feats of bravery, nor was he the sort of man to cling to principles, which he did not possess anyway, if he might have to pay for them with his life. When the Germans first arrived, they sent him to work in a power station where he quickly picked up a working knowledge of German. By the summer of Joseph’s death he had landed a comfortable job in a club for German officers. Here he prospered for a couple of years, organising shifts for the Polish waiting staff while taking advantage of his all-night pass to smuggle out goods to sell on the black market. My other uncles teased him by calling him a collaborator and said that he would apply to be the next Führer.
I had my own first brush with death when I foolishly strayed into the centre of Modryn where a Wehrmacht company was billeted. ‘Brush with death’ is the wrong expression if taken to mean that I had merely been in some danger of dying: most people experience moments at some time in their lives when death seems a distinct possibility – perhaps for a split second, maybe for a little longer. What I recall was a distinct certainty rather than a possibility – the sure knowledge that in a few seconds I would cease to exist. The condemned man who is granted a reprieve moments before the sentence is due to be carried out knows this feeling and all who have experienced it agree that it concentrates the mind to an absolute degree. I can recall every second of the incident.
I was standing at the far end of the village square watching the German troops outside their HQ as they swigged vodka straight from the bottle. A very drunk Hauptmann suddenly noticed me and shouted at me to step towards him, brandishing a pistol in the air as he got to his feet and laughing at himself and his own bravado. The others watched him. When I reached him, he pointed his pistol at my forehead, repeatedly yelled ‘Polnische Schweine’ and started slowly to pull back the trigger. I could see the bullet inside as the drum began to revolve and I knew that these were the last seconds of my life. They lasted an eternity. Then there came a deafening crack followed by a ringing buzz in my left ear and the stench of cordite.
He had thought better of killing me, or maybe all along had just wanted the fun of scaring me, and had fired a fraction of an inch above my head, having jerked the pistol upwards just before pulling the trigger. I was deaf in my left ear for weeks. Many times since then I have been on the point of falling asleep when I have heard that bang and smelt that cordite.
Three Jewish families lived in Modryn. One was an elderly couple who had lived alone after their only son had moved to the city. What befell them, or when it befell them, I don’t know. Neither did I notice what happened to the second family and can only remember that they had owned some sort of business, as did the third, who, unusually for Jews, lived in the centre of the Ukrainian village. Their shop sold hardware and domestic utensils, pickled herrings, tobacco and eggs, but I remember them because of their beautiful daughter who swayed gently from side to side as she walked, her right hand held out in an infatuating gesture.
Before, the war she had started to see a Polish boy known as Baron, who was said to be related to me distantly – I think our grandmothers were second or third cousins. He was three or four years older than me and had been brought up by his mother on a remote farmstead on the edge of the forest.
People said it was because he had no father that he became a petty thief and a hoodlum, boasting a criminal record by his late teens when the war started. But he was also naturally charming and when he had got a job at the Jewish shop, shifting boxes and serving behind the counter, he fell in love with the daughter and she with him. When her parents discovered their, affair, they dismissed him and forbade the pair to see each other again. After that they met secretly in the fields and woods roundabout.
She had been lying with him in the grass one afternoon when her younger brother ran to tell her that their parents had been arrested. From that moment all three took to the forests where Baron had made himself a dug-out, carved from the earth beneath a large oak tree, in which he intended to hide if the police came after him. All three could sleep there comfortably in the summer and autumn and Baron had stored enough supplies to last a few weeks. For a while they lived in relative safety, coming out at night to light a fire at some distance from their hide-out and to cook food,