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Continuation
���������������������������� ����������3. Holm
�� �Soon we heard the sounds of war cannonade and prepared for
transportation. It started a few minutes later. We were urged into trucks
which were too few for such a crowd of people, transported to the station
and put into freight cars whose doors were then slid shut. The train
started but you could not tell where it was taking us: a little hole high
up in the wall was nailed up, and only the sky was seen between the planks.
We spent a day and a night in the cars.
��� Finally the car doors
opened, and we were put side by side on the floor of a truck body which
started for someplace. We went across a town, most likely Polish, judging
by its signboards, and then arrived at the gates of a camp. There were long
lines of barracks, half-sunken in the ground; each of them was barb-wired.
Our truck stopped at a building with a Nazi flag beating in the wind at the
entry. In front of the building there was a little square where German
soldiers dashed about with a busy air; not far apart a small group of young
women in a Soviet uniform sang a patriotic song, as if waiting for
something. The guard armed with rifles took no notice of this singing. I
thought these women were from a field hospital occupied by the Germans.
After a while the truck took us to one of the barracks where some
Russian-speaking people were waiting. They might have been wardens of some
kind, with the red tabs which looked odd on their German uniform; and they
started dragging us into the barrack one by one.
��� A dreadful stench hit my
nose. I found myself in a dark aisle between two rows of plank-beds. Then I
was pulled to the lower bed where there was some room.
��� The man on the left was
mumbling something, half-conscious, and did not answer my questions. But
the one on the right was willing to talk and put me in the picture.
��� The camp appeared to be a hospital where
the wounded were to be brought. The name of the town was Holm, or Helm as
the Polish called it. The feeding was as disgusting as everywhere else � a
ration of 250 grams of bread and a watery soup once a day provided by the
Germans. At the end of the barrack there was a dressing room behind the
door with the Arzt sign on it. There was a shortage of dressing materials,
however, and you could only have your wounds dressed in exchange for the
daily bread ration. Therefore the whole barrack was reeking: the old wounds
were festering.
��� Later on, I got a bowl of turnip soup that
was watery and bad-smelling, though I was lucky to find a tiny meat fiber
in it.
��� The night came. The man on the left was
apparently delirious; he was whispering, mumbling, calling out some names.
Early in the morning he went quiet. We found he was dead. The man on the
right said, �Don�t tell anyone so far. If they don�t know he�s already
dead, we�ll have his bread and soup.� So we had his ration. After �lunch�
we called hospital attendants, and they dragged him out.
��� On the following day when I got my bread I
crawled up to the dressing room and knocked at the door. The door opened
and I saw a young guy dressed in a German tunic with the red tabs with the
word �Arzt� on them. He looked at the bread in my hand, let me in, took the
bread in a casual manner, put it into a little cabinet and started
preparing for the dressing. He poured some yellowish antiseptic solution
into a bowl, and while putting a skilful bandage on my wound asked me
questions like where I served and where I got wounded. I should come after
three days� time, he said; he would not have dressing materials before that
time.
��� There was no wash-stand in the barrack, and
I was not yet strong enough to go out. I was depressed by a sense of my
filthy body, and my wound was itching unbearably: there appeared worms in
it. My mate told me it was good: the worms would make the wound close up
sooner.
��� Through the little window on the opposite
wall of the barrack I could see a bit of the sky and a guard in a helmet
with a rifle on his back walking along the line of the barb-wire.
��� People in the barrack died every day, but
the bodies were never taken away at once: their mates kept it secret to be
able to have their bread and soup.
��� Sometimes �merchants�
came to the barrack; they brought food and changed it for money or clothes.
Once, tortured by hunger (as I had to pay for my dressings with the bread I
got), I could not resist a piece of boiled meat, so I gave for it my
soldier�s blouse that still looked quite good, and was given a shabby dirty
shirt in exchange. My mate immediately asked me for a bite. I could not say
no, and he bit off a big piece. I still seem to remember what that meat
tasted like.
��� Days were dragging on, one after another,
and I could not say how much time had passed. Finally a few of us,
including me, were called to be transported to another camp. I don�t know
why the wardens made such a choice. Probably the reason was that I was less
emaciated than the others. I was skinny by nature so I did not suffer from
hunger that much.
�� ������������������������������������4.
Hohenstein
��� This
time they put us on a horsed sleigh driven by a young civil Pole who must
have been mobilized for this occasion. We slowly moved down the streets of
the small town under the escort of the soldiers who went on foot, and the
people standing on the roadsides looked at us. From time to time some of
them ran up to the sleigh and put a piece of bread, or an apple, or a
boiled potato into our hands. The German escort shouted at them but without
much spirit, mostly for the sake of appearance.
��� We arrived at the station
and were put into the cars where the floor was covered with a thick layer
of straw. Again we left for someplace. The way took a long time, about two
or three days; we suffered from hunger and thirst: only a couple of times
they gave us a piece of dried bread and a ladle of soup each. Finally the
train stopped, the car doors slid apart, and right in front of us we saw a
station building with a sign �Allenstein� on it.
��� Then we were put into a few horsed carts
which stood waiting for us at the station, and they took us to our new
residence. Spring was already in the air, the snow had almost melted away,
and fresh green grass was seen on the thawed patches. Our carts drove past
a neat little German town of one- and two-storeyed houses with high tiled
roofs and small front gardens. From a distance they looked like
match-boxes. Soon there appeared a camp: lines of barb-wire, the gates, and
rows of barracks that also looked like dug-outs, each barb-wired. They took
us first to the bathhouse � a one-storeyed brick barrack with a high
smoking chimney on the top. We undressed, bundled up the clothes, fastened
our registration tags on the bundles and handed them over to the captive
Italians who were waiting behind the wood partition wall. The German
lance-corporal who was in charge of �the washing procedure�, gave out a
chunk of some strange stuff that looked like clay but meant to be soap to
each of us. When put under water, it gave some slime-like foam so you could
scrap some grime off your body with it.
��� Hopping on my good leg, I got to a large
room where hot water was pouring from the showers, and enjoyed washing
myself trying to protect my bandage from the water. When I hopped back into
the changing room, an Italian gave me two cross-armed boards that were to
be my crutches.
��� We had to wait a long
time in the changing room before our clothes were brought in from the
steam-chamber. The Italians handed out hot steaming bundles, pronouncing
numbers in the Russian language in a brisk way. We got dressed.
��� The German lance-corporal (I had already
learned many of the German lower ranks) wrote down everyone�s personal data
on a record card: first and second names, military rank, nationality and
religion, then assigned each a personal number and ordered us to remember
the way this number sounded in German. We were to be called by numbers and
not by names at the roll-calls.
��� After this registration procedure we were
taken to the barracks. While I was waiting for my clothes in the changing
room, I learned that the name of the camp was Hohenstein and that it was on
the lists as Stalag I-A (now its name is Olsztynek, and it belongs to the
territory of Poland). The camp was intended for disabled war prisoners who
were ineligible for physical work.
��� The barrack I was to live in was a huge
half-dug-out with four rows of plank beds inside. The two outer and two
inner rows were separated from each other by wide aisles. Between the inner
rows of the double-deck beds there was a low wall; and there were also
cross aisles where small iron stoves, tables and benches stood. At both
ends of the barrack there were entrance doors. The door that was supposed
to be front opened on the wide street that ran through the whole camp and
was separated from the barracks by just one line of barb-wire. The other
door opened on the outward fence of four lines of barb-wire with Bruno�s
spiral between each line. Between the barrack and the outward fence there
was a sanitary zone: a toilet with a concreted cesspit that was not so foul
as you could expect, and a wash-stand � water taps above a concrete pan.
Behind the fence, at a distance of about 100 metres from one another,
watch-towers rose above the camp, and you could discern silhouettes of the
sentries and barrels of machine-guns on them. You could also see a
strange-looking construction that rested on a low hill: a pyramid-shaped
brick tower decorated with some kind of merlons. It turned out a monument
to the victory won by the German over General Samsonov�s Russian army in
World War I. On both sides of the street the same barracks stood in lines,
separated by barb-wire from one another.
Next to the front door of the barrack there was a small room for the warden
and the interpreter. The German lance-corporal in charge of our barrack was
always on day watch at this room.
��� The warden pointed to my place on the bed
thus making me one of the brigade. My neighbour on the right was a young
good-looking Tajik who was nursing his aged countryman in a very touching
way. The latter had ulcer and was suffering from constant pain. On my left
was a Ukrainian of about forty from someplace near Mariupol. I had a lot of
fun listening to his stories in the Ukrainian language. Each of them began
in a similar way and was about his relations with �a gorgeous one� who
�stuffed� him with food, to say the least of satisfying his other
appetites.
��� The men were grouped into brigades in the
following way: a group of twelve got one loaf of bread, four such groups
were given one pan of soup or tea.
��� Another period of my life
in captivity started.
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