|
Continuation
��� I have a dream to go to Poland one
day: to visit Torun and Fort 16, and other memorable places that I will
describe later in the book, and to look at the walls of the cell where I
had to serve a short term of my imprisonment. The point is that, because I
had nothing else to do while I was staying there, I carefully scratched
upon the wall a poem by Mikhail Lermontov, a famous Russian poet, by a nail
that I had found on the floor. The poem goes as follows:
�
���� Here
I sit in silence by the window of my dungeon
��� Looking at the blue sky above.
��� Birds are flying freely up
there;
��� This makes me feel pain and
shame.
��� No longer can I pray to God,
��� No longer can I sing praises to
my beloved;
��� Just the battles of the old days
are in my mind
��� And my sword and my armour of
steel.
��� Now I am put into armour of
stone,
��� And stone helmet feels heavy on
my head;
��� Someone cast a spell on my
shield against a sword and an arrow;
��� My horse is trotting but no one
astride.
��� Now my faithful horse is the
flying time,
��� My visor is bars upon the
embrasure,
��� My armour is high stone walls,
��� My shield is iron doors of the
dungeon.
��� So go at full gallop, don�t you
drag, troublous times!
��� I labour for breath in my new
armour.
��� When we arrive, Death will help
me dismount;
��� And the visor will go off my
face!
�� I have reproduced these
lines from memory so I cannot be sure they are exactly as in the original
recognizing that many tens of years have passed since that time. Still, I
don�t feel like checking it: let the lines be as I have them in my memory.
I don�t think the great poet would have minded that. After I was released
from the cell I had no other chance of visiting that hapless Fort 16.
��� Autumn was drawing near.
And the front line was drawing nearer from the east, too; more and more war
prisoners were removed to our camp from those left on the territories that
were being liberated by the Soviet troops. New prisoners also arrived. Thus,
a large group of the newly captured was brought from somewhere near Warsaw
in August.
��� The camp territory was
extended at the expense of the neighbouring areas where new barracks were
hurriedly built. The daily routine was always the same: calling the roll,
counting the prisoners, brigade forming, and sending the brigades to works.
After working at the foreign camps I had no other chance to get to such a
good place, though. One day I was called out by my number: a new brigade
was being formed. Trembling all over as none of us knew where we were going
we picked up our belongings and gathered in the yard. We were taken to a
shed and told to choose some clothes that looked more or less good out of a
heap of rags lying there. I chose an almost new jacket of a soldier who
must have been serving in one of the armies - whether Greek or Czech - that
no longer existed, trousers of the same uniform and quite good boots. There
were two large letters SU (Soviet Union) in white paint on the back of the
jacket and the knees of the trousers, as the custom was. We stood there in
the yard for quite a while speculating about where we would go. At last,
six guards came to us - fully fitted out, armed with rifles, carrying
rucksacks jacketed with veal skin. They counted us once again checking with
the list and escorted to the station. We were put on a passenger train
where one compartment had been prepared for us, and the train started. The
car was full of passengers; they spoke German stealing curious looks at us.
I should make a digression here to explain that the whole territory of the
former Polish Corridor was made part of Germany and the towns were given
German names: Torun � Torn, Gdansk � Danzig, Szczecin � Stettin, Bydgoszcz
� Bromberg, and so on; and the people were prohibited to speak Polish. All
signboards and plates in the streets of Torun were in the German language;
and the Poles spoke German to each other even when nobody heard them.
��� So in the car where we
were travelling only German speech was heard. One of us addressed a young
guy asking him a question in Polish, and he answered in Polish too. A young
Polish woman said something too, and one by one other fellow passengers
joined the conversation. Our German guards did not mind that. The Poles
asked us where we were from and where and when we had been taken prisoners.
One of the passengers who looked like a clergyman in his white stand-up
collar, started inquiring about Yegorov and Tukhachevsky and the reasons
for their arrest. We answered by the accepted formula: they had been spying
for foreign intelligence services, which evoked our Polish fellow
passengers� ironic smiles.
��� At Deutsch Eilau station
we were to change trains. After a short while in the waiting room we got on
another train and less than an hour later got off at a small station named
Gabelndorf (Gablowycy in Polish). We knew by then that we were lucky to be
going to the Bauer.
��� We were escorted down a
wide road on both sides of which grew apple-trees with pink-coloured apples
hanging on their branches. We wished we could have had a few of them: our
stomachs had been empty for a long time. But our guards curtly checked any
attempts at going off the line to the edge of the road, drawing the rifles.
Soon we saw a typical German Fachwerk fenced with stone walls with some
farm buildings behind them. A little farther there was a small village: a
few squat one-storey houses roofed with reed and straw with gardens,
stables and sheds in the back yards.
��� We entered the gates and found ourselves standing
on a small square in front of a big brick two-storey house with a portico
upon half-columns, wide stairs leading to the front door. On both sides of
the square there were some non-residential premises, and a little farther a
two-storey building with a storehouse on its ground floor. A wooden
staircase railed with barbwire from both sides lead to the first floor and
ended with a small landing, also barb-wired; the door facing the landing
was armoured, and the windows had iron bars from outside. That was the
place we were to live in.
��� We were passed over to other guards who
were to stay there with us, and to the owner of the farm � the Boss � a fat
pink-cheeked German. He was dressed in peg-top trousers, boots, a civilian
jacket with a round badge of NSDAP member shining in its buttonhole, and a
feathered hat. He had a thick polished walking-stick of some yellowish wood
with a bent handle.
��� The new guards brought us
to our quarters upstairs. There were two large rooms there. One was a
through-pass room where we found a big oven with a walled-in pot full of
steaming boiled potatoes. In one corner of the room there was a huge heap
of unpeeled potatoes, in another corner - a close-stool, and the center of
the room was taken up by a big table with benches. The other room was kind
of a bedroom: double-deck plank beds covered with straw and sackcloth,
linen bags stuffed with straw for pillows, and blankets. An aged Pole went
up with us and was introduced to us as our interpreter. His name was Kinzel
and he spoke Polish mispronouncing the words so that they sounded like
Russian, but we could understand him. One of the phrases he used to say
was, �Panove, tsheba robit, ale pshinde shef ta bende kshichal� (Start
working guys, or the Boss will be angry).
��� The first thing we did
was to pounce on the food: the boiled potatoes were enough for all, and we
also got a piece of margarine and a glass of watery milk each.
��� While we were eating the guards were
sitting next to us: one of them who apparently was senior was a corporal,
the other was a rather old private soldier.
�� With Kinzel�s help whose manner of speaking
was rather amusing we were told about the daily routine. We were to get up
at 6, have breakfast and go to work. The type of work was assigned by the
Boss and announced by his Polish assistant. At 7 in the evening the work
stopped and we were to come back. There was a lunch break in the afternoon
so we were told to take some food with us: a piece of bread and boiled
potatoes.
We were told to appoint a cook and a brigade-leader among us. We decided
that the cook would be the leader at the same time.
��� On the day of our arrival
they did not drive us to work, so after we crammed ourselves with potatoes
and peeled potatoes for the following day we went to sleep hoping for
better days. Thus our work for the Bauer began.
��� We
had to do different jobs. Using a steam thrashing-mill we thrashed
bread-grain that had been harvested before our arrival: we dragged the
sheaves to the mill and took away the straw and sacks full of grain. We
also dug potatoes with spades while the Boss was walking behind and
scrutinized the upturned furrows picking them with his stick. If he
happened to find a potato left he called the guard and scolded him. The
guard, in his turn, took to task the one who had left the potato in his
furrow.
��� We
felt sorry for the guards. They appeared very kind and friendly. The
corporal was an Austrian, and the other one who soon started speaking
broken Russian turned out to be a Volksdeutsch � a Pole with some German
blood. Once I had a terrible toothache, and the Austrian corporal took me
to a neighbouring town named Graudenz in the German way where a private
dentist successfully pulled out my bad tooth.
��� We didn�t want the Boss to lecture at the
guards so we did our best to pick up all the potatoes carefully. We put
them into big baskets and carried the baskets to a horse-cart.
��� Digging out sugar-beet was the
hardest job of all. The beet was stuck very tight in the ground. You had to
pull it by the top digging out the root with a special double-tooth fork at
the same time. The fork would not go into the hard clay soil; we hammered
it in with all might and occasionally pierced the roots or cut them so that
their part was left in the ground. Seeing that the Boss flew into a rage
and shouted at the guards swishing his stick.
Polish aged women and young girls and boys worked side by side with us
doing the same job. If the Boss found faults in their job like a potato
left in the furrow or a beet-cut he struck with his stick on the back of
the one whose fault it was.
��� During the lunch break we used to sit down
round the fire and talk to the Poles. They were very friendly; asked us
about our life in Russia and complained about their life which the German
occupation had made unbearable for them. They had worked for our Boss
before as his day-labourers: he had been the owner of a large land and
treated them much better then. He paid them money and gave part of the
harvest for their job so they could afford having some cattle in their own
farms. The German occupation turned them into serfs, and they had to work
for the Boss for a definite number of days without inquiring about the
payment. He did pay them but very little.
��� A few women brought from Lithuania also
worked in the field. One of them who was very pretty was the Boss�s
concubine apart from working together with the others.
�� Once our cook who was also the
brigade-leader slipped up: he fell asleep at night so the oven went out and
all the potatoes that were being boiled in the pot went hard and inedible.
We had to dismiss him and choose another one whose name I don�t remember
unfortunately. He was a wonderful person. Still young, he had been a barber
and lived somewhere in the Ukraine before the war. Taking up the duties of
a cook, he started showing concern for us which was almost maternal. He
shaved us and cut our hair, tried to treat the injuries that we had
received while working in the field, kept the rooms and our clothes clean. He
made the Boss set cleanup days on which we could wash our clothes as well
as ourselves.
��� As we ate enormous amounts of potatoes
every day it was impossible for one to do the peeling. So every evening
before going to bed we sat in a circle and peeled the potatoes all together
singing songs. We sang both Russian folk and Soviet patriotic songs. The
guards used to sit and listen to us joining in a song from time to time.
Listening to the lines where the poet cursed the Fascist army and inspired
his compatriots to fight against it they pretended not to understand the
meaning. Our Polish mates gathered outside under the windows and also
listened to our singing.
��� I made friends with Mikhail who said his
surname was Khodzhaev. He was taken prisoner somewhere near Warsaw as late
as summer 1944. Before he joined the army he lived in Uzbekistan where his
family had been evacuated from Kharkov. He had a gift for languages and
soon learned to speak Uzbek. He claimed himself a Moslem, and the Uzbeks
from our brigade treated him as one of them and spoke Uzbek to him. In
fact, he was a Jew as he told me. He was very smart and well-read, and we
appeared to have a lot in common in out view on life. We kept together
almost till the end of my captivity.
��� The Boss thought our guards treated us too
kindly which he didn�t like, so he insisted on their replacing. The new
ones, however, were not any better. One of them was an Austrian, too � a
Kleinbauer as he called himself. He was a great womanizer: chased after the
Polish girls, and they simply could not get away from him. As soon as a
woman made a break and went away to the bushes to satisfy her physical
needs, he rushed there after her.
��� �The
other one was a disabled veteran. He had been badly wounded several times so
he could only trail after us and fell down on the grass the moment we
reached the field. While he was escorting us, however, he exercised quite a
vigilance: snatching at his rifle, and at times even striking blows with
its butt he required that we should go straight in the proper direction
without minding the puddles. We asked Kinzel to tell the Boss that unless
that psycho was replaced he would simply kill someone. That had a certain
effect, and both guards were soon replaced.
��� Meanwhile
autumn was setting in. Harvest time was almost over; horse carts delivered
grain, potatoes and beet to the station. The Germans showed anxiety: the
battle-front was steadily drawing westward. Our allies that had landed in
Normandie were also slowly moving forward into the heart of Germany
conducting massed air strikes on the German towns at the same time. There
appeared an amazing article in The Sunrise saying that the German troops
had crushed the Red Army, occupied the whole European part of Russia, the
Ukraine and Byelorussia and destroyed Russia�s industrial potential.
However, Russian people did their utmost to throw Wehrmacht back behind the
boundaries of Russia.
|
