|
Continuation
Now
the situation had changed, the article said: the Red Army was assaulting
the German boundaries showing itself as an
aggressor; the Russian troops were turning into occupants. However, German
people had enough strength to resist the aggression. Besides, new high
technology weapon that had no equal was about to be used; as soon as the Führer gave an order to put it into use Germany
would be bound to win. As many times before, the article was permeated with
light irony.
As the harvest time was over, the Boss thought it was unreasonable to have
the prisoners stay at the farm as the living expenses were no longer
repaid. We were ordered to pack up for the way back. We had little time yet
we managed to make some flapjacks out of the stolen flour and put them into
our knapsacks. Some more guards had come to help the ones we had been with
all this time, and they escorted us back to Torn by the same route.
It was
not Fort 17 but another camp that we were brought to. While we were away,
Fort 17 got so overcrowded that the Germans had to make a new one: they
built it on to a large international camp which was situated behind the
northwestern boundaries of the town on the right bank of the Vistula. The camp housed Englishmen, Belgians, Poles,
Italians, Yugoslavs, even a few Americans. They
all lived in one-storey stone barracks in separate zones.
A large
area was added on to the camp, and a few barracks were hurriedly built of
wooden panels. This part of the camp was meant for Russian war prisoners
and was separated from the Allies’ camp by a narrow barb-wired road ending
with the main entrance gates. The road had several access lanes to
different zones of the Russian camp.
Every
morning began in the same way as elsewhere in the camps, from giving out
the bread ration to sending brigades to works. On coming back from works we
went to the common cook-house where after standing in a long line to the
hatch we got a bowl of watery soup. We drank up the soup right away even
before we were escorted to our zones. There were no more of the flapjacks
that we had brought from the Bauer left; I also quickly lost that nice
weight I had put on there and soon returned back to the usual half-starved
state. The living conditions in the camp were poor: it was cold in the
barracks as the stoves that were stoked up on coal-dust bricks were too few
to warm the rooms that were blown through by all winds. For some reason
there were double-deck wooden beds instead of usual plank-beds in the
barracks.
The most
worry of the camp residents was to be taken to such a place of work where
they could snatch some foodstuff. After we had had the morning bread, those
able to work were driven in a crowd out to the road that ran between the
Allies’ and our camps and lead to the entrance gates. The crowd was
constantly moving and jostling. Everybody’s aim was to take such a position
before the guards came as to be able to jump out of the crowd when a good
job was announced and to step back and mix with the crowd when the job was
unlikely to bring any profit. As soon as the guards appeared – and we
already knew which guard would escort to which place – the crowd turned
into a scramble. The sentries and the police interfered by bludgeoning upon
the prisoners’ heads and backs but it did not help much.
As the
climate in Poland was warm compared to Russia the potatoes were stored in long clamps at the
field edges and along the roads. Those clamps were covered with straw and
earth and had air holes left at equal distances. While digging such clamps
you had a chance to filch a couple of potatoes and hide them in the folds
of your clothes, and on coming back to the barrack boil or bake them in the
stove. Clamp digging, and also loading goods cars with vegetables or
unloading them into trucks and carts demanded a lot of hands. Everyone was
eager to be sent out to these jobs; and as soon as the guards who were in
charge of bringing the prisoners there came, the crowd rushed forward. Then
came the guards who were to escort to such
unprofitable workplaces as the sand-pit or building sites or for digging
dugouts, and the crowd rushed too, but this time backwards. Our foreign neighbours – well-fed and in neat warm clothes - always
watched this scene from behind the barb-wired fence smoking their
cigarettes or pipes. And the scene was certainly worth watching, especially
if you fancy what our Russian prisoners looked like: haggard people in
forage caps pulled down over their ears, in dirty and shabby overcoats with
half-belts torn off and the letters SU in white paint upon the backs, dixies dangling on their belts. At times the bored
Englishmen threw a tin of oatmeal porridge over the fence, and then had fun
watching the Russians fighting over it.
For
another time I was lucky to be taken to a regular brigade that worked at
the airport. We were to dig caponiers for
airplanes, and dugouts and slit trenches. We had a little food there: at
lunch-time a Pole with moustache brought a can of ersatz-coffee and some
bread on a small cart, and we were given a cup of slightly sugared coffee
and a piece of bread each. Because that Pole provided us with food, we
called him Mikoyan, which was the name of the
biggest supplier of food to the Kremlin. However, this did not last long:
either the works were over or the prisoners were no longer needed to
perform them as there were also civil workers, mostly women, who had been
brought to Torun from Russia; we saw them only
from afar.
Our
relationships with the allies are worth saying a few words. They were
always friendly to us. When they had a chance they gave us some food though
this was left from their meals and was meant to be thrown anyway. They
willingly exchanged food for the handicrafts made by our disabled masters.
The French and Italians showed more sympathy: when we happened to be
working together they often gave us their packed lunch that they had
brought from the camp. But only Serbians, among a number of nations
residing in the camps, were always eager to share the last crust of bread.
When I read in papers and listened to the news about the military
operations in Yugoslavia some time ago I could not but think of those
Serbians with deep gratitude.
Winter
set in, and the first frosts made it difficult to dig in the upper layer of
the ground. Meanwhile we had to do more digging than ever: the Germans
started building defensive fortifications around the town.
The New
Year of 1945 came. In the morning we got a nice surprise: a loaf of bread
was given out to be divided between six prisoners and not twelve as before!
We took it as a kind of a new-year gift and ate up the bread, but then it
turned out that it was the ration for two days. Too much for the new-year
gift!
The
sounds of the war cannonade were heard from the east again. The front line
was drawing closer. We were anxiously waiting for another evacuation. Day
by day fewer prisoners were left in the neighbouring
camp behind the barb-wire: the Englishmen were being taken away.
Mysterious are the ways of the Lord! I should never have thought
that at that very time my former brother-soldiers, cavalrymen, were
advancing on Torun and Bydgoszcz from the other side of the front. I got to know
about it many years after the war looking at the maps of our corps’s directions
of advance.
On the Way to the Styx
At
last the important day came. On one of the first ten days of January, after
having our daily bread we were driven together out to the square before the
cook-house and counted several times. Then it was announced we would make a
foot passage. Those who felt their legs were too bad to walk long distances
were told to come out and form a new line. It was rumoured
that the Germans would not leave the sick in the camp alive but gas or
shoot them. Still, many prisoners who were apparently unable to walk
because of their wounds or diseases went over to another place. God knows
what happened to them. I thought it was quite possible that the Germans
would do away with those left in the camp. They realized that as soon as
the sick were released and treated for the wounds they would become the
bravest of soldiers and would be taking vengeance on their enemies for
being humiliated, tortured and starved. Besides, our soldiers did the same to
their prisoners in similar circumstances. Old soldiers who had taken part
in raids as early as the first years of the war told me that the prisoners
had been shot as there had been no possibility of sending them back to the
rear areas.
Very
quickly they divided us into hundreds (ten lines of ten people), put guards round each hundred and drove us in the
opposite from the town direction along a wide road running through a sparse
pine grove. The column must have numbered two or three thousand prisoners
and stretched for about two kilometers. The English war prisoners, also
under the escort, were walking after our column. Unlike us who had nothing
else to carry except dixies and thin knapsacks
they were bending under the weight of their huge rucksacks.
Our
guards, too, had heavy rucksacks jacketed with veal skin upon their backs.
First they made us carry those but it did not work: after a few meters the
prisoner who was carrying this additional weight simply fell down. So after
a while the Germans found or, more likely, took away from some Poles a big
horse-van upon which they put their things and sat for a short rest from
time to time.
Sounds
of shooting and bombing came from a distance. I turned back and saw that
Soviet attack aircrafts were flying over the deserted camp shelling and
bombing it. A perfect objective for an attack!
Driven
by the guards who were tired and angry we walked all day till it got dark,
at times sitting down right in the snow on the road for a short rest.
Judging by the direction signs the road we were walking on lead to Bromberg
(the German name for the Polish town Bydgoszcz). We were just approaching the town when they
drove us into a factory shop. It had been already stopped but it was still
warm inside and there were some tanks filled with water there. Dead tired
and hungry as we had had nothing to eat since the morning, we could only
fall down on the wooden floor.
It
was still dark when we were awakened and driven out into the frosty air.
With the help of kicks and shouts the guards broke us down into hundreds
again and counted a lot of times. I saw small fires burning outside the
shop and the Englishmen sitting around them and drinking hot coffee. Hungry
and sleepy, we were driven further on. We saw a German mining party doing
their job, evidently in a hurry, along the road we were walking on. Our
guards who were hungry and tired too vented their anger on us; they kept
urging us on by cursing and pushing with the butts of their rifles and
sub-machine guns.
I was to
be walking in the center of the column. At times sudden bursts of
sub-machine gun fire were heard somewhere at the head of the column; then
the column stopped and after awhile walked on past the bodies of the
prisoners who had just been shot. This happened when a cart loaded with
vegetables – mangold or turnip - appeared ahead
of the column: the starving prisoners rushed for it and were at once swept
off with the bursts of fire. However, those walking in the front lines
sometimes managed to grab a rutabaga or a turnip (the latter tastes like
radish); without stopping they peeled and ate it and threw the peels under
their feet, and the ones who were walking in the back lines picked up the
peels and ate them too.
Occasionally,
when the column walked past a clamp full of potatoes or beet covered with
earth, it turned into a scramble: the hungry prisoners dashed to the clamp
and started fishing the vegetables out through the air holes. First the
guards tried to drive them away by pushes and kicks, then, losing patience,
by shooting at them. So the column went on dragging along, the dead and
wounded left at the roadside. One of the guards with a bicycle stayed with
the wounded for awhile; a little later bursts of sub-machine gun fire were
heard from behind, and the guard who had just finished off with the wounded
came up with the head of the column.
Thus we
were walking all day long occasionally falling right down the road for
short rests. By the end of the day we came to a village and were put into a
huge barn with hay and straw. We got neither food nor water, so we had to
start looking for something to eat by ourselves. The best of luck was to
find an ear of wheat in the straw. Rubbing the ear between your palms you
could get some grains out of it, and rubbing those you peeled the darnels
off them. When being chewed the grains turned into a sweetish mass that was
very nourishing. Besides, there was a thick layer of dust on the floor of
the barn, and scooping up a handful of dust and pouring it from one hand to
the other slightly blowing at it was another chance to find a few grains.
At times you could find a pea or even a more substantial beet or turnip in
the dust.
However
deep we tried to bury ourselves into the hay it was of little help on that
frosty night. In the morning, feeling sleepy and cold, we were driven out
of the barn, put into lines and counted a number of times. Meanwhile in the
barn the guards were scrupulously checking if any of the prisoners had
hidden in the hay piercing it through with their bayonets and pitchforks.
Thus we
walked on and on for several days. Having neither food nor water the
prisoners were exhausted, and those who had not enough strength to go on
just gave up and lay down on the road. We all knew, and they knew very well
too that they were doomed to die: another burst of fire behind, and the
guard on his bicycle coming up with the column. This picture of the
inevitable end made the others summon the last strength to drag on.
During
one of the passages I saw what was left from the English group. But what
happened to their huge rucksacks, to their fat and healthy look? Unshaven
and worn out, in dirty overcoats hanging loosely on their bodies, they
looked even more haggard than us. Their guards were waiting for a cart or a
truck to arrive to transport them further.
A few
days later we were given a loaf of bread each. My mate Misha
and I (we were walking together all the way) could not resist eating the
whole loaf at once and for the first time in many days felt we had had
enough. But this nice feeling did not last long…
|
