granted free rein by the Germans, who had burnt and razed two villages. These were the first of countless such massacres: Ukrainians slaughtered Poles and Poles responded by slaughtering Ukrainians in a blood-crazed sideshow to the main carnage to the east, and the extermination of Jews, which had begun to take place in our midst from the moment the Germans arrived.
My first attempt to fight ended ignominiously in the summer of 1942 as I was coming up to my seventeenth birthday. I returned home, crestfallen, a mere two weeks after setting off from my paternal grandfather’s estates in Zakzrouvek. At that time I still had an idea of war as an adventure because the little bits of action I had witnessed had been exciting. My cousin Marian, the son of my father’s favourite sister, Aunt Sophie, who had been walking with me the day we saw the German armoured column, agreed to come with me in search either of a partisan unit fighting behind German lines or General Berling’s Red Polish Army, which had been formed on Soviet territory. The idea of walking hundreds of miles to catch up with the German divisions, whose victorious progress had at last been halted, and then crossing their lines to join the Free Poles on the other side was – to say the very least – quite hare-brained. It would have been quixotic had we been two elderly men in a previous century, our heads filled with the patriotic nonsense of a Polish Golden Age, rather than a pair of stubbornly romantic adolescents.
Marian looked to me for leadership even though he was only six months younger than me. I showed him how to tie a few belongings into a bundle and attach them to sticks to carry over our shoulders. After stealing out of the house, we made our way to the local railway station, not knowing where on earth we were supposed to be heading and not really aware that we did not know. We travelled the first stretch of the journey by train. Because, unlike me, Marian did not have student identity papers, we stowed away on a goods train, which gave the appropriate flavour of daring to the start of our illicit and heroic escapade. We arrived safely in Lublin long before dusk.
Marian, like most Poles, had only a Kennkarte, a little grey identity card, which, although it had to be carried at all times, never impressed a German official. Failure to carry identity papers increasingly resulted in arrest as the Germans scoured the towns and cities for forced labour. Third-class train compartments, always overflowing with Polish passengers barred from travelling first or second class, were a favourite source of slave workers.
All that was needed to stow away was a cool head and a sense of timing. We stood on the opposite side of the track to the station platform, so as to be invisible from the station buildings once the train had pulled in, waited for the very last wagon as the train began to leave, which made it easier to slip away unnoticed at our destination, scrambled aboard before the train picked up speed and laid low for the duration of the journey. This much at least we managed with consummate professionalism.
From Lublin we proceeded on foot eastwards, getting lifts from horse-drawn carts, sleeping in barns and living off raw carrots we picked in fields and fruit we stole from orchards. Because it was summer, food was plentiful, the hedgerows were in bloom and the weather gave us no problems, but Marian soon started to complain.
‘We’ll never get there. I want to turn back. You didn’t tell me it would be like this,’ he wailed throughout the third day. We split two days later: I headed for Hrubieszow and he for Zakzrouvek.
His journey home must have taken him a full ten days because all told he was away for at least two weeks. His mother spent that entire time weeping, fainting and worrying herself to distraction because he had disappeared. When I saw my father again, he gave me an angry lecture, furious that I had endangered his sister’s son and, more to the point, got him into trouble on my behalf. As usual, he seemed unconcerned about my own welfare and what I might have been through.
‘If you want to live the life of a rogue and a mercenary,’ he fumed, ‘that’s up to you – go ahead. But don’t take anyone from the family with you next time. God only knows what I have done to deserve a son with no more common sense than a five-year-old.’
I did not tell him that we had wanted to fight for Poland and had set out to find the Red Polish Army. The whole idea suddenly seemed so stupid, though I was neither ashamed nor contrite, merely humiliated because I was still too young and too inexperienced to be taken seriously by my father. The next time would be different – I would go alone.
At the beginning of term in September 1942 I informed a sympathetic lecturer at college that I wanted to abandon classes because I felt that continuing with my studies amounted to collaboration after we had been put in the propaganda film about the lorries. I trusted him, knowing him to be anti-Nazi, like most of the college staff, and he understood why the film had shamed me. He asked me whether I had discussed the matter with my parents and advised me strongly against leaving, pointing out that far worse could lie in store for me. I took no notice of what he said and remained in my lodgings in Hrubieszow, wondering what I should do next. I was tough, strong and well-fed, proud and headstrong and fed up with being treated like a child.
My student papers did not save me when two Gestapo officers stopped me in the street at the beginning of October. On discovering my date of birth, they informed me that all Poles of my age were now required to join an Arbeiterabteilung, a forced labour brigade, and that I had no option but to accompany them. When I replied that my student status exempted me from forced labour and that I had lessons to attend, one of them curtly informed me that I was a student no longer. It was a chance arrest, not brought about because the college had informed them I had absconded, as I feared at first. Yet had I not finished my studies voluntarily, I would have been safely in the classroom at that time of day.
They took me first to a depot in Hrubieszow, where about twenty other boys of my age, some of whom I knew, were waiting. The following day they drove us to a labour camp on the eastern side of the Bug, close to the village of Krylow. It was here, not far from home, that they wanted us to work, rather than in Germany, as most of us had supposed. On arrival overseers issued us with grey-green uniforms: a tunic and pair of trousers made of rough cotton, which we put on over our other clothing. No one had a change of clothes because we had all been picked up on the street. All we had with us was what we happened to wearing at the time of arrest.
The camp was surrounded on all sides by double barbed wire and guarded by a single tower manned by two soldiers equipped with a swivel machine gun, which enabled them to shoot on all sides in cases of attempted escape. Over the six weeks I was there, several workers, who had either strayed too near to the fences, refused to obey an order or tried to run away while on a working party, were summarily shot. The fences, which measured roughly twelve to thirteen feet in height, bent inwards so that even with protective gloves and heavy clothing it was impossible to climb over them. The camp was small and had been erected at speed, containing only five or six prefabricated wooden huts that served as our barracks and conformed to the standard size for German camp buildings, which can nowadays be seen at the ‘museums’ at Dachau, Sachsenhausen and elsewhere. In Majdanek the size and design of the huts were the same, but they had inserted four rows of bunks rather than three, making conditions more cramped. A small group of prisoners with an overseer could construct and dismantle everything in a matter of hours and then take the barbed wire, tower and huts on to the next site. In the six weeks I was there we were moved only once to another camp built on exactly the same lines; there must have been dozens of similar ones in the area.
At first light, or even earlier as the days grew shorter, they would take us to places near the Bug where, under the supervision of German engineers, we dug foundations for concrete pillboxes. The fortifications all faced east, which meant that already in the autumn of Stalingrad the Germans were preparing for the defence of Poland. Less than a mile separated the line of pillboxes from the dug-outs and little forts facing west towards the Reich the Soviets had erected in similar haste and which they had quickly surrendered in June 1941. In my barracks I met boys who had spent time in other camps where they had been sent to build roads and ammunition bunkers as well as pillboxes. Some camps sounded better than ours, some worse, but no one reported that the Germans tortured the labourers as a matter of policy. Although some guards carried batons the shape of baseball bats and others hit prisoners with the butts of their rifles, our main enemies proved to be the weather and the work rather than the guards themselves.
As winter