He was a powerful, short, thick-set fellow with a magnificent black beard. ‘Gentlemen,’ he announced, ‘I shall eat handfuls of gold dust with my black bread, run like hell for Kamchatka, cross to Japan. I shall s—t Russian gold and live happily ever after on the proceeds.’ We laughed at the absurdity of it, laughed loud and long, without restraint, as men near despair will laugh.
There was a bitter, hard edge to their humour when they watched the Russians stripping the trousers and blouses off the pathetic corpses before they shovelled the snow on them. ‘After all,’ said one, ‘Father Stalin only loaned the poor bastard the clothes for the duration of his stay in the U.S.S.R. He won’t need any for the next journey; he goes out as he came in…’
Men, bound together by common misfortune, were talking together more freely. The outcome was not always comradely. Nerves were often taut and it needed only the wrong topic to start a violent flare-up. Politics were dynamite. I heard two men start arguing the role of Polish Foreign Minister Beck in the events leading to the German invasion of Poland. The argument simmered with barely suppressed passion and then one exploded the word ‘traitor’ to describe Beck. In a moment they were screaming with rage that knew no bounds. As other voices called to them to ‘cut it out’, they impotently struggled to raise their hands, tried vainly to use knees and feet, and then attacked each other with teeth. Somehow, the mass heaved itself to separate them. One man had the lobe of his ear almost bitten off, the other had deep teeth marks in his cheek. Tears of frustration rolled down their cheeks. For some time afterwards they mouthed threats. Then they were quiet and forgot all about it.
Once, in the dark, the train stopped and all was quiet. Most of us were in that dozing, half-awake state which comes with long hours of travelling. A voice started speaking, in a dreaming tone, slightly above ordinary conversational level. Men stirred, shifted, began, in spite of themselves, to listen.
‘My wife,’ said the voice, ‘was quite a small woman. A happy little lady, she was. We got on very well, we two. She was a wonderful cook. Her mother was, too, you know, and she taught her. Let me tell you about the cake she baked for my birthday, this wife of mine. She knew I was crazy about her cakes…’
The voice went on. It was throaty, the words came slowly and very clearly. We were fascinated, listening in on another man’s waking dream. He described it all exactly and lovingly. We followed the mixing of that cake in the big white earthenware bowl, the breaking of the eggs, the care of the whisking, the precise quantity of flour and baking powder and all those extra touches of candied peel and raisins and God knows what, the art that went into the rich almond icing. ‘It was,’ said the man, ‘a most beautiful, beautiful, rare, wonderful cake, this cake my wife baked for me. The smell of it cooking was like something from heaven.’
Suddenly another voice howled — yes, it was a howl that shocked us, like the douche of freezing water that awakens a dreamer from his sleep. ‘Stop it, stop it! For the love of Jesus Christ Almighty, stop it!’ Other voices joined it. ‘Do you want to make us insane? Shut up, you bloody fool.’ The man with the dream cake said no more. I longed for that damned wonderful cake for days afterwards. I just could not remember what cake tasted like.
4.
THERE WAS time and to spare for a powerful amount of individual thinking as the endless-seeming ride entered its third week, with the train well into Western Siberia. We had been losing interest in the names of stations, each with their white-painted bust of Stalin prominently displayed. The stopping-places all looked alike, stretches of bleak, snow-covered country sometimes wooded and sometimes not. They varied only in the degree of cold they offered. The further east we went, the lower became the temperature. We debouched on more than one occasion into the teeth of a shrieking, snow-laden north-easter and were not sorry to huddle back into the communal half-warmth of the truck.
We went on gleaning things about one another. I discovered that no one in this crowd had a lighter sentence than ten years hard labour. My own sentence of twenty-five years was fairly common and there were a few even longer. Quite half of the men had one crime in common: they had served in the Polish armed forces. They talked, as soldiers will the world over, of their experiences and the places they had served in, of their regiments and their friends. It set me thinking back and to taking stock of myself. I did not want particularly to bring my mind back to Poland, but there was nothing else to do. I think it was an escape backwards to the memory of freedom.
It was the little Jew who started me recalling it all. He posed me an odd question — for a Jew, a most odd question. When the Germans came through in the West and the Russians in the East, this little man with his little shop in Beloyostok realized on his stock and bought diamonds. He had relatives in Zyrardow, the textile centre near Warsaw, and a shoemaker friend who made him a special pair of boots into which he built the diamonds. So, his preparations made, he set out to flee Poland. Where was he going? Why,
By going home to Pinsk after the collapse of Polish Army resistance to the Germans, I had virtually chosen to let myself fall into the hands of the Russians. Would I have fared better as a prisoner-of-war of the Nazis? It was an unanswerable question now, but it got me thinking of the Germans and the futile fighting of cavalry against tanks, the chaos, the bravery of a foredoomed army in those crowded, desperate weeks of September 1939.
I was originally called up in 1937 while I was studying for my certificate as an architect and surveyor at the Wawelberea and Rotwanda Technical School in Warsaw, and served for twelve months at the infantry training school at Brest Litovsk. After seven months they asked for volunteers for training as cavalry reconnaissance. I could ride well and leapt at the chance. At the end of the year I passed out in the highest cadet rank. I went back to college and passed my finals in 1938, returning the same year to the Army for the big six-weeks manoeuvres in the Wolyn area near the Russian Ukrainian border. I became a second lieutenant and went home, fit, bronzed and pleased with myself, to help my mother run the estate at Pinsk. Mother was the bright and practical element in our family. My father thought the function of the estate was to provide the means for him to pursue his hobby — landscape painting. The house was full of his canvases, none of which he ever allowed to be sold, although dealers had made approaches to him.
I followed my calling as estate manager for only a few months. On 1 March 1939, I was called up under an order of ‘unofficial mobilization’. Just six months later, on 31 August, on the eve of my twenty-fourth birthday, as I sat reading letters from my wife and my mother and was preparing to open the parcels they had sent me, a messenger rode into our cavalry camp near Ozharov to announce that the Germans were on the move. It was war.
My active service lasted just about three weeks but they were weeks packed with movement and incident. I went through again, in that rocking Russian railway van, my impressions of those days. I remembered ducking for cover with my horse as the Stukas screamed on their road-strafing missions, the blocked roads, the baulked horse-drawn Polish artillery toiling to get within gun range of the enemy. Often we were shelled and no one seemed to be quite sure where the Germans were. Near Kutno we found the main force of the Polish Cavalry, nearly ten thousand horses and their riders, their main retreat route to Modlan blocked by well-positioned and dug-in Germans.
Here, at least there was some kind of unified command. The order went down the lines that we were to break through. Between us and the Germans were woods about a mile and a half in depth. From unit to unit the bugles sounded the advance and we moved off. Men who were unhorsed in the first wave never got up again, horses went down squealing and the mounts behind jumped over them. As I broke cover I saw horses staked on the steel barbed-wire supporting stakes, horses disembowelled on the wire. A cavalry charge induces a form of madness. Riders and horses alike are infected. Its fury, its weight and its pounding impetus can only be stopped by the most awful and concentrated heavy gunfire. The Germans who stood up to surrender were mown down. The cavalry in a charge cannot take prisoners.
Harassed by dive-bombers, threading our way along the choked roads, we fell back on Warsaw to reorganize, as we were told, for the defence of the capital. Foot soldiers climbed on to our riderless horses and rode back with us — there was even a Polish sailor on horseback as we straggled into the outskirts of Warsaw.
