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Captivity. The Autobiographical Story.
Translation from Russian � the Bureau of translations �Prima Vista�
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�������������� 1.The
Beginning of The Road.
���� I have already told you about
the episode of my last battle at the river Pripyat to the west of Mozyr
where I was wounded and contused. Now - I will continue. So I am turning
back to January 14, 1944. I opened my eyes and found myself sitting among
some sacks on the cart that was moving along. The right part of my head was
entire swelling, one of my eyes got bloated. Things around are perceived
like in somnolence, because sounds did not penetrate through noise and fog
that surrounded me. Next to the cart there walked a huge man - �ambal� -
dressed in the German uniform. Having seen that I regained my
consciousness, he asked me something but I did not hear and did not
understand what he wanted from me. On the front of the cart there was
another soldier in the German uniform with a German rifle sitting with his
back to me.
I started listening to myself and looking around. Trying to take a more
comfortable posture, I felt as if my leg was in chains, so that I could not
move. I felt a dull throbbing pain in my leg. No headache but I felt like
my head was filled with cotton-wool and the sounds of outward life could
not reach me, things around seemed to be like in a silent picture.
��� The cart that carried me, was
moving in the column of a string of carts. All the way through there were
people in the German uniform with marks of the �RLA� on their right sleeves
(Russian Liberation Army) - Vlasov's soldiers. Parallel to the string of
carts, there was a column of armed people dressed in white fur overalls.
Among them, dressed in bluish-gray great-coats with fur collars there could
be seen officers in peak-caps with high bent-up brims and pulled out
earlaps.
��� Having realized that I
was taken prisoner, I could not recall how I could get there. The last
thing I remembered were figures of retreated soldiers lost in the darkness.
Later on, next day when my hearing slightly came through, I was explained
to that the Vlasov�s soldiers who were playing the role of a trophy team,
picked me up, brought to the village and when retreating in the morning
they put me into the cart.
��� It was a long way. We
stopped in a big village for a halt. The same huge �ambal� carried me over
to a stocky one-storied building, probably a barrack, and put me on a plank
bed, located along the walls of a large room. A badly wounded fainted
Russian soldier was lying on the same plank bed and sometimes moaned. I
thought he was at his death's door. �Ambal" fetched me a plate with
thick pancakes and a glass of tea. I enjoyed tea but could not even touch
the pancakes because the only glance at the food made me sick.
��� I do not remember how
much time I spent in that room. The Vlasov�s soldiers and the Germans were
coming in and out, having no notice of me. Sometimes they sat down to table
to drink and eat.
��� Some time later they
began to bustle about and I understood that they were leaving. It has
become quiet. I got an idea and a hope that they decided to leave me and
that dying wounded man. But suddenly again my huge guardian shouldered me
to his back and dragged to the same horsed cart. After he had seated me, he
tried to contact me but I could not hear him at all. He explained with
gestures repeating words many times so that I began understanding some
things by the move of his lips. He told me that like me he was once wounded,
picked up at a battlefield and got to the German hospital. He was cured
there and he joined the Vlasov�s Army. He also wanted to put me to the
German hospital.
��� By the evening we stopped
in a small forest village. I was pulled in a shed, put on a bottle of hay
where they left me with a door unlocked. I looked around, got convinced
that there was no guard and thought that if I could get out of the shed and
creep away to the forest, it would be possible to wait, hidden, for our
army to come. But as it turned out I became so weak because of bleeding
that I could not even rise to my feet. And how could I step on my wounded
leg?
��� I was brought a mug of
hot rich broth from a house and it was for the first time for several days
when I could eat something.
��� In the morning a truck stopped
in the yard, in the body of which wounded Germans were sitting along the
boards. I was plunged in to them. Having seated on the floor, I
accidentally leaned against the bandaged � probably frost-bitten - legs of
a German who was sitting on a seat. When I saw that, I shrinked back from
him, because I was afraid to hurt him.. He took me over my shoulders and
leaned me against his feet.
��� The truck was running
along a wide highway, both sides of which were deforested for a width of
300-400 meters in order to avoid a hidden approach of Partisans. We have
arrived to the German hospital. The Germans were taken right away, and I
was left in the truck, because they refused to take me. The Germans � a
truck�s driver and a soldier who accompanied the wounded - have been
discussing some matter for some time, obviously having no idea what to do
with me. Two armed Germans wearing helmets approached in the motorcycle
with a machine-gun, one of them had an oval metal plate on his chest. I
supposed it was a patrol. The truck moved, probably according to the
direction that they showed and brought me to the outskirts where a brigade
of Russian prisoners-of-war had been working under the surveillance of
escort.
��� They were accommodated in
the round collective barrack that was like a reservoir for oil products
surrounded by the fence of barbed wire. A stove was heated in the centre of
the barrack, plank beds were located along the perimeter. A senior man and
a medical attendant, also prisoners of war, were accommodated in a separate
corner of the barrack. The medical attendant lanced my valenok and unreeled
with difficulty, while I was groaning and moaning, my shrinked bloody foot
bindings that stucked together. My shot leg looked horrible. On the left
side below my knee there was a perforating bullet wound, on the right side
instead of a calf there was a hole with ragged edges thick with green pus.
Having no disinfectants within easy reach, the medical attendant cleansed
the wound with boiled water and bandaged it with cotton fabric which was
previously inserted between a clean rag. There was no bleeding from the
wound but gradually the bandage got soaked with blood.
��� Prisoners of war were
occupied in a slaughter, stocking carcasses which had been delivered to
Germany. They were fed with slop made of low quality giblets - lungs,
kidneys, legs and heads. The slop was quite edible and high-calorie. I was
also brought a tin of this slop.
�
������������������������������ 2.
Luninetz.
�
��� Next day - I do not remember for
sure - it seemed to be a horse cart in which I was driven off to the place
named Luninetz where in the centre of the city in a two-storied building
over a metal forged fence there was an assembly point for wounded prisoners
of war. There were about 100-150 of us - people from different sectors of
front and of various ranks (there was even a colonel among us). Two Russian
prisoner-of-war doctors rendered medical care to the wounded. I cannot but
admire their self-sacrificing work. Having no medical instruments at hand,
operating with knifes and saws of various sizes and using a grout of
yellowish liquid (seems to be called "revanol") instead of
disinfectants, they cleansed fuzzy carrion wounds from early morning till
late at night. They cut open without anesthesia, sewed up and even
amputated, made bandages out of German crepe paper which stretched like a
rubber.
Daily food allowance consisted of pica of stale bread - which is worth
telling a separate story - and a half-liter of skilly, made of turnip and
dried vegetables that were cut in figures called for some reasons
"colerabia" - it might have been kohlrabi. Sodden in water, these
vegetables got transparent and could hardly remain nutritious. The presence
of fats in skilly was not at all disclosed. As for bread, it was a loaf of
2,4 kg weight, wrapped in numerous layers of impregnated paper. On paper
there were printed a place and a year of baking. As a rule, it was either
1939 or 1940. Bread was baked from a stiff dough on a sawdust bedding and
was meant for long-term storage. Since the date of its expiry, as I
suppose, was over, it was fed to prisoners of war. A loaf of bread was
meant for 10 people. It was given out in the morning along with
"tea" - a cistern of boiling water, slightly sweetened with
saccharine and serviced with some herb. The skilly was given out for dinner
and after that no food was supposed to be given till the next morning. It
is clear that people starved under such food allowance. People of massive
build suffered more than others. All conversations added up to gastronomic
recollections. There were discussions on methods of cooking of various
dishes, which were the subjects of much controversy that often ended in
fights. Finally some of prisoners of war tried to stop it demanding to
change this subject.
��� By mutual consent doctors and
medical attendants who volunteered to carry out defecations from under
bed-patients were given an additional portion of skilly.
Days after days have been passing so monotonously that I do not remember
how much time I spent in Luninetz. In this period the swelling in my head
fell down, my eye turned out to be uninjured. Only under my right brow for
a long time there was a hard to the touch painful moving knot of muscle. Evidently
it was something blunt that striked me, not a fragment. I do not know what
actually happened, I can only suppose, recollecting a battle situation,
that I got a blow by a wooden hilt of a German trench bomb which exploded
at some distance. I began to hear quite well on my left ear again, but the
right one remained deaf as before. Since that time in conversations I got
used to look at the mouth of my interlocutor but not in his eyes,
compensating the lack of hearing by guessing the words at his lips moving.
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