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Continuation
Torn
If you look at a pre-war geographical map of
Europe you can find Torun in the area that was called the Polish
Corridor, a narrow strip of the Polish territory serving the boundary
between Germany and Eastern Prussia and providing Poland with an outlet to
the sea.
The town was built on the right bank of the Vistula, and the railroad with a freight terminal and a
passenger station – on the left bank, which was also built over with
warehouses of all kinds. Across the railroad, behind the station facilities
and the road running along them there towered low greenwood hills. At the
foot of one hill there was Fort 17 (I wonder if it is still there) – the
intact part of some fortifications erected in the last century. There were
a lot of such forts around the town, and some of them play a certain part
in my story.
Between the street and the fort buildings ran a
high stone wall with barb-wired metal bars built over it and sliding iron
gates. At the gates there was the warden’s office - a high medieval
building with lots of chimneys on its steep tiled roof. Behind the stone
wall was a large yard; a few grottos with arched ceilings and blind iron
doors had been tunneled deep into the sides of the hill. These had been
most likely used as warehouses. Plank beds covered with straw stood in
lines along the walls that met in a semi-circle right over your head. It
was into these grottos that we were driven upon our arrival.
After we were quartered and counted, and leaders
were appointed, we had a permission to go out. So I walked around and
looked at our new place of residence so far as it was permitted. Compared
to the Hohenstein camp this one looked much worse. The yard was a sanded
ground without a single blade of grass; fenced with high walls, it was too
narrow for so many people. At one end of the yard there was a web of wooden
stairs leading up to the locked iron doors placed at different heights. Old
residents of the camp sat on the stairs basking in the sun.
I started talking to those who had been put in
here before and learned the daily routine: it was just the same as we had
had back in Hohenstein. Only, the soup was not given out at a fixed hour,
but depending on the time the prisoners came back from work, and there was
no tea in the “diet”. That was a labour camp; the prisoners were sent to
the freight terminal to load and unload the cars. Occasionally other works
were to be done at other places. At times a prisoner was lucky to get hold
of something eatable, or filch a thing and then exchange it for food.
Brigades were regularly formed and sent to works on demand from factories
or farms. The latter was the most desirable for all.
Once, many years after the war, a booklet fell
into my hands with recollections of a former war prisoner of the Fort 17
camp. The camp and its customs as they were described in the booklet were
exactly what I experienced there. The author described an event from the
camp life that had happened not long before I was taken to the camp and
that the old residents also told me about, though in a slightly different
version.
The camp warden was an officer whom none of the
prisoners had ever seen; he governed the camp through his lance-corporals
and a fussy clamorous corporal who could speak very good Russian. Fussy as
he was, this corporal was remarkable for his peculiar sense of justice. I
remember two prisoners coming back from work and starting a fight over some
stolen goods. The corporal dragged the fighters apart and divided the
stolen between them though it would be very natural to simply take it to
himself.
So the event I was told about and later read in
the booklet was as follows. The warden had a big short-haired dog, kind of
Dane. He was let to walk out in the yard, and there he walked fawning upon
the prisoners. The prisoners had nothing to give to him, and even if they
saved some of their food - boiled turnip fished out of the soup or stale
bread baked before the war - he would not eat it. The prisoners were glad
to play with the dog, teased him as a joke, and he growled as if angry and
snapped at their hands without actually hurting.
Suddenly the dog disappeared. Some time later he
was noticed missing; for the first time the warden came out of his office,
called the dog, sent his lance-corporals in search for the dog, but all was
in vain.
The warden suspected there was something wrong. He
called out the prisoners in small groups for questioning. They were
tortured, beaten severely; some were locked up in the isolation ward. At
last someone let it out that the poor dog had been baited into one of the
barracks, murdered and eaten. Under unmerciful beating some prisoners were
forced to give evidence against those who had done that to the dog. They
were taken out somewhere, and later it was rumoured that they were shot in
attempted escape.
Another event took place when I already resided in
the camp. One day the gates slid open and a wheeled tractor dragging two
trailers full of bread loaves came into the yard! Before the Germans could
do anything about it, the starving prisoners crowded round the trailers and
started grabbing the loaves off them. The bread appeared to have grown
moldy all over. The Germans were too few, and they were unable to break up
the crowd by kicks and butts of the rifles, so they began firing at the
people. The crowd scattered, and only a few dozens of the killed and the
writhing wounded were left lying by the trailers.
I was
among those attacking the trailers, too, and was lucky to get two loaves.
They turned a good addition to the tins of stinking cod-liver oil that we had
stolen while unloading freight cars the day before. We tore the heels and
moldy bits off the loaves and ate up that bitter bread dipping it into the
stinking cod-liver oil.
On the following day the camp cooks made a thick
gruel-like soup out of that bread, which was quite edible.
While in Hohenstein the prisoners
permanently resided in the barracks in steady groups and soon all got
acquainted with each other, here in Torn new people were often brought to
replace some of the former residents. Every day began with a formation and
repeated counting of the prisoners that was always accompanied by prods and
shouts. Then the prisoners who were to form a brigade to be sent to other
labour camps were called out by their numbers. The suspense over which
brigade you would go to was unbearable and gave you the willies as your
life often depended on the kind of work you were to do. The brigades were
sent for works in factories and construction of defensive fortifications,
to mines where the prisoners had to work so intolerably hard that many of
them never came back alive. Vague rumours circulated that the brigades of
prisoners were also sent to construct some secret underground munitions
factories, and no one ever came back alive from there. To keep such
constructions a secret, special units of Todts
(Death) Organization in charge of it used to do away with the
prisoners on completion of the works. Quite often brigades were sent for
farm works (“to the Bauer”), and to be one of such a brigade was a
stroke of luck.
The newly formed brigades
were shortly driven away; new prisoners were brought to take their place:
many of them had just come back from “the Bauer”. We used to get
together round them and listen to their stories of the plentiful food they
had had there.
After the roll-call and brigade forming
came giving out the bread: the same allowance of one loaf for twelve men,
which was divided among them through the established procedure. Then the
guards came to escort the brigades to the town and the station where they
were to work on that day. There were a few permanent places of work, and a
regular brigade was usually assigned to such a place.
Some places of work were far from the
camp; then trucks or a wheeled tractor with a trailer were sent to bring
the prisoners there. We went through the town and on the bridge across the Vistula: I remember its high stone-faced banks
with plates indicating the river levels recorded in the years of floods.
Going through the central square near the bridge we saw a huge medieval
Roman-Catholic church and a monument to Kopernik in front of it. After so
many months of being at the front and in the camp I was amazed at watching
the town live its usual life: pedestrians going somewhere on their own
business; trams full of passengers; small groups of lovely-dressed girls
running to school, bags in their hands; housewives going out of the bakery
with tasty-looking long loaves of bread… Seeing all that I involuntarily
recalled the sights of wartime Kazan with haggard people
dressed in rags in its streets.
Once I happened to watch a strange scene: tall
sturdy-built young guys, about a company in number, dressed in new freshly
ironed khaki uniform of sport design were marching in step along the
street; an old Volkssturm guard bending under the weight of his
rifle was trudging after them, hardly able to keep up such rapid pace. The
young guys turned out to be English prisoners of war. Whereas we, skinny
Russians were usually escorted by one guard for ten prisoners, and the
guards were armed with submachine-guns and often had dogs on leashes.
In the outskirts of the town there were lots of
old fortress-like buildings that had been turned into warehouses. People
were constantly busy loading and unloading goods or carrying things from
one warehouse to another, while the vigilant German guards watched lest the
ever-hungry workers should filch something. Once we had great luck: the
warehouse packed with grey woolen stockings for German soldiers (they wore
them instead of foot wraps) was guarded by Romanian soldiers who had
already stuffed their bosoms with the stockings and pretended not to notice
how we were drawing them out of the packs. We brought the trophies back to
the camp but it was quite a while before we could sell them or exchange for
food.
Twice I was lucky to be taken to a regular
brigade. One of those brigades worked near an English prisoners’ camp. It
was situated not far from ours. The chain of the hills into one of which
our Fort 17 was tunneled ended with a hill housing Fort 14 that I got to
know in detail later. The Germans had armories and ammunition stores in
that Fort. Next to it there was a military camp: a few panel houses with a
wooden fence around. German recruits residing in the camp formed something
like our reserve regiment. They used to march with singing on a large
meadow stretching farther on. Still farther watch-towers behind the
barb-wire were seen; that was the English camp. Sewage collector was to be
laid around the camp so we were brought to the place to dig out pipe
trenches for that purpose. In the afternoon, after the camp had had their
dinner, we were given the leftovers: rice or mashed potatoes, bits of
bread, and a pan with a little pea- or bean-soup with tinned meat on the
bottom. Food fiesta was on! We brought the bread (and occasional slices of
cheese!) back to the camp, and the smokers exchanged those for tobacco.
Our senior guard was an aged stabsfeldwebel (staff
sergeant major) who spoke Polish. First time he and his subordinate guards
only watched us devour the English leftovers but then gave up their
embarrassment and joined our company. They were especially happy when we
got boiled rice: then they filled up their dixies with it.
The stabsfeldwebel told me about the
customs accepted in that camp. The camp had its own management, and the
Germans did not interfere in it. The relations between the camp management
and the German authorities were regulated by the rules worked out on the
basis of Geneva Convention. Those rules were observed by both the Germans
toward their war prisoners from the enemy countries and the allied
countries toward the German prisoners.
As an Armenian from France had told me before, English war prisoners were
regularly promoted, got new clothing and had bank accounts in their mother
countries. They received parcels from home and were paid benefits from the
Red Cross, so they did not only have regular meals but they ate so well
that even the German guards envied them.
These regulations were generally applied to all
except Soviet war prisoners. So the state of war prisoners from different
countries depended wholly on the welfare of those countries. Needless to
say that the English, Americans and, to a certain extent, the French had an
advantage over the others as their countries’ food producing industries
were not inflicted by the war that much. We felt bitterly ashamed before
the allies for our country that totally neglected its war prisoners.
I went to work at the English camp several times
before we finished digging out that pipe trench. While working there I
happened to watch a couple of times a trail being left at enormous speed by
a missile up in the sky. Fau-2 must have been launched somewhere to the
north-east of us: I could think of no other explanation to that vision.
Another time I was lucky to work at Fort 16. I was
taught a good lesson there but I’m going to tell about it a little later.
Fort 16 that was situated not far from ours was a
defensive fortification that had remained almost intact and looked rather
imposing – considering even the scale of the war. Deep down the hill there
were lots of underground passages between shelters and casemates, half-dug
into the ground. The hill with all its interior was surrounded by a
hexagonal fosse about six metres deep with brick-faced walls. At the inside
of the fosse, at the level of its bottom behind the walls, there were
several vaulted passages with narrow embrasures that gave the opportunity
of sweeping the whole area of the fosse with close-range fire in case of
need. Light wooden bridges were laid across the fosse.
The underground casemates across the fosse housed
a camp where English and French, and a few Canadian prisoners resided. We
started constructing a one-storey building of lime-sand bricks that abutted
on the fosse wall and was likely to be planned as an extension to the
previously built isolation ward. We carried bricks and sand and were kind
of hodmen for the bricklayers - the English prisoners.
A loud lance-corporal was our construction
manager; he was constantly yelling and shouting at us, “Los, los, Mensch,
Pfaulebande, Verfluchten Hunde! Schnell, schnell!”
Here we also had leftovers from the camp dinner –
bits of bread or biscuits, like some time before when we had worked at
another English camp. That was an advantage of the job.
Some prisoners were already serving their
sentences in the isolation ward, in its part that had been built before.
They did not starve: a cook in a white cap came down to them carrying
plates of hamburgers with garnish on a tray like in a restaurant. Only,
they were prohibited to smoke. Whenever I walked by they gave me signs
asking for a light. Once I could not resist passing a lit cigarette through
the window. The malignant lance-corporal saw it and gave me a box on the
ear. But that was only the beginning. As a punishment I was put into the
isolation ward; not to the Englishmen of course but to an underground
casemate whose embrasures faced the fosse. I met a few of my countrymen
there. Wooden cages for prisoners were installed inside the casemate at
such a distance from the walls that did not let the prisoner reach out for
the embrasure. The cage floor was a little higher that the concrete floor
of the casemate; and the cages were so small you could neither stretch
yourself nor stand up strait. In spite of the summertime it was damp and
cold in there. Lots of fleas into the bargain. If you lowered your hand
with the palm to the floor you could feel them tap into it as they jumped.
And there was a dreadful stench from the close-stool which had not been
emptied for ages.
Without food and water I spent three days there
which seemed an eternity. Through a narrow embrasure on the far wall I
could see my mates working. I tried to call them but even if they heard my
calls they could not come to me.
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