after Marshal Pilsudski, the Polish national hero, had pushed back the frontiers in 1920. He had seized his moment when the military giants of Russia and Germany both lay exhausted and captured land which the Soviets did not take back until 1945. Perhaps he thereby sowed the seeds of the future Polish-Ukrainian tragedy, as he succeeded while the Ukrainians under Petlura failed. The short-lived Free Ukraine was choked in the revolutionary battles between the Reds and the Whites, then crushed by Trotsky’s armies, as most of the Ukraine was turned into a Soviet republic. Instead of helping his Ukrainian neighbours, Pilsudski had invaded on his march to Russia, reaching as far as Kiev and alienating his supposed allies. The Bolsheviks then drove the Poles back to the banks of the Vistula on the very edge of Warsaw, but Pilsudski’s outnumbered legions repulsed them and recaptured large tracts of the western Ukraine, which were subsequently incorporated into the new, resurrected post-war Polish state.
The new Polish-Soviet border ran right through the Ukraine and demarcated a national and political boundary, the Iron Curtain of the inter-war years, separating the old from the new order, agrarian capitalism with its peasant smallholdings and seigneurial estates from the emerging world of communism and collectivisation. As a result the Bolsheviks were the bogeymen of my childhood. My teachers in Kremenets cast them in the role of the Mongol invaders who had swept through Poland many centuries before. If I was angry with my little brother or with a playmate at school, there was nothing meaner than to call him ‘a dirty Bolshevik’.
In the eyes of the local Ukrainian peasants, the Poles were the new colonisers. They regarded us as successors to the pre-war Tsarists and believed we had collaborated with the foreign occupiers during partition. For the first few years the Polish military struggled to put down marauding units of guerrillas and saboteurs. It was because of that danger and the general insecurity that my parents had originally left me with my mother’s family when my father was sent to his new posting. But it was with Ukrainians that I spent most of my childhood, learnt to read and write, skated on frozen lakes in winter and discovered shards of Russian and German ammunition, left over from the First World War, in the forests and fields round about Kremenets. We collected this debris with a passion, searched for it in the undergrowth, swapped treasured pieces with each other, sometimes discovering unexploded shells and even hand-grenades. We could tell at a glance what had come from which side, so great was our interest in weapons and soldiers. At the age of eight I had learnt the names and types of all the rifles, cannons and other military paraphernalia; at twelve I could throw a hand-grenade and dismantle a rifle blindfold, just as the new recruits were trained to do at the base.
Poles treated the locals with a suspicious respect, which was not always unwarranted. No Ukrainians, for instance, were permitted to work in government service, not even as train drivers or minor officials, for fear they might form a fifth column in the event of an invasion. Even our family maid was forced to return home every evening from the base. But the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian history were taught in schools, alongside the Polish language and Polish history. There was freedom in matters of religion. The Orthodox and the Catholics mixed easily, although the difference between Poles and Ukrainians was primarily religious, rather than linguistic or ethnic: if an Orthodox Ukrainian converted to Roman Catholicism then he automatically became Polish and vice versa. Across the border, where the large majority of Ukrainians lived, they suffered some of the worst of Stalin’s excesses: their churches were torched, their clergy and intelligentsia deported to Siberia and their land collectivised. They counted their dead in millions. The Ukrainians in Volhynia still resented Polish rule, however.
My initial excitement at the prospect of war had begun to ebb after I had seen the two Polish soldiers captured at Modryn and after two of my uncles, the fearless Anthony and Jack-the-lad Kasimir, who had been involved in the fighting on the River Bug, returned home in late October. They had ditched their uniforms and fled on foot, and their dejection now infected the mood at the farm. Anthony had been eager to join up, convinced he would be back by the New Year with a clutch of medals and a glorious war record. Only heroes would prosper in a victorious post-war Poland, he reasoned. Like his brothers, he was indeed home by Christmas, safe and sound for the moment, but footsore and bedraggled rather than bathed in glory. Three of my uncles, Anthony, Kasimir and Joseph, who was the smallest of the five and perhaps for that reason the most hot-headed, drifted towards the partisans. The other two, Stanislaw, who knew how to keep out of trouble, and Edek, the youngest, who was sent to work in a German factory, would be the only two to survive the war.
Other Polish soldiers arrived on our doorstep through the autumn. They dumped their weapons – bayonets, rifles and pistols – for my grandfather to bury in case of German searches, and continued their journey home after a night’s rest. Because the Polish army disbanded in this way and because later, once the fighting began in earnest on the Eastern Front and abandoned Soviet equipment became plentiful, the Polish Resistance never suffered from a severe shortage of arms. Butter, to paraphrase Goebbels, might have been in short supply, but not guns.
At the beginning of the war the Germans recruited workers for their factories as volunteers rather than deported them as slaves. They paid them too, not as much as a German worker but enough to send something home. Many Ukrainians volunteered at first, as well as some of the poorer Poles. A young man from a neighbouring village told me that he had never lived better than when working on a farm in Germany. He was permitted to return home once a year for a holiday, could write letters to relatives and after work was allowed to travel freely or go to the cinema. Home on leave, he might even be saluted by a German soldier checking his papers.
For the Ukrainians, the German presence signified change in a different sense. Initially, in that brief period in mid-September 1939, they had been tempted to help the Soviets, thinking, as disgruntled peoples down the ages have always thought, that their enemy’s enemy was their friend. I had recognised some who thought it their duty to round up defeated Polish soldiers and hand them over to the Soviets, but the welcome they extended to the Germans was much more jubilant. They brought them bread and salt, according to a time-honoured greeting. In return, the Germans replaced minor Polish officials with Ukrainians whenever possible. A village church, which in 1921 had been ‘polonised’, that is converted from the Orthodox to the Catholic faith, was handed back to the Ukrainians. Near Hrubieszow Poles and Ukrainians had lived in mixed communities for centuries: Polish villages bordered on Ukrainian villages and rivalry had rarely given cause for violence. Now suddenly the Ukrainian settlements became enemy territory and Polish villages our safe havens. The Ukrainian priest in Modryn angered my grandparents by inviting the Germans to graze their cart-horses in our fields, claiming they were his own. When my grandfather stopped him in the street, he announced that all Polish land in Modryn now belonged to his people. Yet this was an incongruous alliance, for the Master Race could barely disguise its contempt for the uncouth Ukrainian peasantry.
Of more use to the Germans than the Ukrainians were the Volksdeutsche, descendants of German settlers from past centuries (some of whom had arrived as long as six hundred years ago, only a little later than the Jews), whose farmsteads punctuated the plains of Eastern Europe. They sometimes spoke only rudimentary German but had retained their German names and a vestigial sense of their German origins. Many now flocked to serve their supposed liberators from the far-away Fatherland, who gave them Polish land and property and allotted them posts and responsibilities stripped from Poles. There were also Poles who claimed German ancestry in order to get hold of a German passport and the double or treble ration coupons, the good jobs, privileges and even houses which went with it. We hated them even more than we hated the Germans, and the partisans exacted ruthless revenge when they got hold of them. Two such Poles I knew claimed volksdeutsch status in order to act as double agents and pass on information to the Resistance.
At the beginning of the Occupation, in fact up to some time in 1942, the Germans made Polish farms provide so many tons of grain, gallons of milk or head of cattle, which they transported back to the Reich or used to feed their soldiers. All livestock had to be registered, marked with a clip attached to the ear of each animal, and permission was needed in order to slaughter even a single pig. Failure, to comply could result in summary execution. Within a year the Germans doubled the production quotas, which had to be handed over in exchange for ration coupons, soon to become far more valuable than the old Polish currency. A Polish-speaking official came to live on the estate owned by my father’s