more afraid; I was six and he was seven. Finally, perhaps out of spite at not finding my father there, the NKVD men stick their bayonets through a reproduction of Matejko’s painting Batory at the Battle of Pskov, which is hanging on the wall. They leave Mama in peace. Next day we discover that my father was in Pińsk that night, because he and Olek missed the train. Luckily he spent the night at his friend’s place.’
Several of them burst in, Red Army men and civilians, they barge in nervously and with such lightning speed, as if enraged wolves were chasing them. Rifles immediately leveled at us. A great fear: What if they fire? And what if they kill? . . . And to Mother: Muz kuda? (Where’s your husband?) And Mother, pale as a sheet, spreads her trembling arms and says that she doesn’t know . . . What are they searching for? They say that it’s weapons. But what kind of weapons could we have? My toy gun, which I used to fight the Indians with? . . . They want to take Mother away. Why, as a punishment?
[O]ne of the Red Army men, probably the eldest, probably the commander, hesitates for a moment, then puts on his cap, fastens the holster of his pistol, and says to his people: ‘Pashli!’ (‘Let’s go!’)6
‘For the next few nights we didn’t sleep – we were waiting for the NKVD to come back again.
‘Deportations of entire families began. That fate befell the family of my friend from next door, Sabina, whose father was a policeman. At five in the morning a wagon full of soldiers drove up to their house. The soldiers loaded their things onto the wagon, and allowed Sabina’s mother to cook a little buckwheat for the journey. I heard the noise and asked Mama if I could go to their place. Mama probably didn’t realize the danger I was in, and said yes.
‘The train they were using to deport them consisted of at least a dozen coaches, and loading them with people took several days. With our nanny Masia, Rysiek and I managed to smuggle in cooked buckwheat several times. It was winter and terribly cold, about thirty degrees below. Before the train set off, Sabina’s younger sister froze to death.’
In school, during breaks, or when we are returning home in a group, the talk is of deportations. There is now no subject more interesting.7
‘I remember that the whole time people talked about food, that something had to be obtained, or when would something be brought. One night it was my turn, and I had to stand in a queue for broken eggs. People pushed me out of the crowd, I didn’t get anything, and on top of that I broke the clay pot.’
Once, hungry and desperate, we approached the soldiers guarding the entrance to the barracks. Tovarishch, said Hubert, day pokushat, and mimed putting a piece of bread into his mouth . . . Finally one of the sentries reached into his pocket and instead of bread pulled out a little linen sack and handed it to us without a word. Inside were dark brown, almost black, finely chopped stems of tobacco leaves. The Red Army man also gave us a piece of newspaper, showed us how to twist it into a cone and pour into it the damp, foul-smelling tobacco gruel . . .
We began to smoke. The smoke scratched our throats and stung our eyes. The world started to swirl, rock, and was turned upside down. I vomited, and my skull was splitting from pain. But the all-consuming, gnawing sensation of hunger eased, weakened.8
‘Our Mama was lovely, we were never spanked, but just one time when she came back from the broken egg queue she hit us. Maybe she was feeling desperate and frustrated because she hadn’t got anything? It was about cigarettes. While she was out, Rysiek and I had found a box and smoked them all – about a hundred of them. We threw the dog ends and ash behind the bed, thinking Mama wouldn’t notice. She was really angry with us – I can’t remember her ever being like that again.’
‘It was warmer by then, probably the start of spring 1940, and we left Pińsk for good. They announced that anyone who wanted could go across to the German side, taking thirty kilos of luggage with them. Mama didn’t hesitate for a moment, despite the fact that she was leaving a fully furnished house, surely realizing she would never return to it. She put me and Rysiek on the wagon and we set off on our way. I remember a train ride after that. Before we crossed the border, first we went to Przemyśl, where my father’s parents lived. My grandfather was fairly fit, but for years my grandmother had suffered from paralysis in both arms and needed to be looked after on the arduous journey.
‘On the Soviet–German border we had to hand over money, jewellery and any valuables. On the German side they shaved our heads, because the Germans thought everyone coming from the East had lice. First they smeared some white paste on our heads, then they cut our hair. The boys were shaved bald, and the girls had their hair cut short.
‘I cannot remember how we met up with my father, but in any case we all went to live together in Sieraków outside Warsaw. It was a two-storey house, with one room downstairs, where my father ran a one-class school; he was the only teacher. Up thirteen stairs, there were two rooms with sloping walls under the roof. My grandparents, Rysiek and I slept in one, and my parents in the other.
‘My father was a strict teacher, and used to whack the pupils on the hands with a ruler; he told me to write a word out twenty times which I had written wrongly.
‘Did we suffer from hunger? Not at that point, but it was tough, and we were all pretty thin. At home there was a large cast-iron pot in which Mama used to make soup. There was soup every day – after all, we were living in the countryside. The children used to bring something as “payment” for school, a litre of milk, or some potatoes . . . Sometimes there wasn’t enough soup for everyone, and then Mama would say she wasn’t hungry.’
Hunger followed us here from Pińsk, and I was always looking for something to eat, a crust of bread, a carrot, anything at all. Once my father, having no alternative, said in class: ‘Children, anyone who wants to come to school tomorrow must bring one potato’ . . . The next day half the class did not come at all. Some of the children brought half, others a quarter of a potato. A whole potato was a great treasure.9
‘Rysiek and his friends invented a game which involved sprinkling gunpowder into a small metal pipe, and then throwing the pipe as hard as you could at the ceiling – that’s how I remembered it. There was a fiery explosion – luckily it didn’t burn our faces, or our eyes; there could have been a tragedy.
‘After about a year living in Sieraków we moved to Izabelin, where we had fabulous conditions for those days: a house with two rooms, a kitchen, hall and veranda. We also had a garden, where we grew vegetables, a few fruit trees – apples and plums – and in a wooden outbuilding there were rabbits and hens, which meant we had eggs on a daily basis. Dad rode a bike to the school in Sieraków, and Mama babysat the local children, for which she got jam and honey. Rysiek and I went to school in Izabelin.’
‘There were often at least a dozen bikes “parked” outside our house. Underground meetings were held there – my father was in the Home Army [Armia Krajowa, or AK – the Polish resistance] – which unfortunately was evident to all. And dangerous. Our neighbour Grothe, the shop owner, was Volksdeutsch [an ethnic German]. He had a wife and three daughters, one of whom, Iza, I befriended. One day, when I had come home from seeing her, an operation began at Grothe’s house. The AK had passed a death sentence on him, though luckily they hadn’t appointed my father to carry it out. We heard shouting and cries for help. There was nothing we could do. Later we found out that in trying to defend himself, Grothe had thrown acid at one of his attackers and barricaded himself into the shop. They had shot him through the door.
‘The next day a nightmare began. A lorry full of gendarmes drove into the village. There were cars, motorbikes, dogs – a general uproar. They dragged out our neighbour Wojtek Borzęcki, who was someone in the area, a handsome man who went about in jodhpurs and knee-high riding boots; I think he was a count. They started torturing him in full view of everyone. They stuck nails under his fingernails, and he howled so loud I can still hear that howling now. Rysiek and I are watching this, glued to the window. Then they drag out the teacher, Franciszek Pięta. They drive him about the village by car, strip the skin off his face and sprinkle salt on it. Mama and I kneel down and pray at an accelerated rate, as if a rapid prayer were going to bring him aid faster.
‘We were afraid for my father. He had gone to Sieraków that