"People inflicted this fate on people"
(Zofia Nałkowska)
These are only disconnected fragments of childhood memories. Without literary fiction or embellishment. A document of a bygone era. An era of hatred and contempt for human beings. A cry of despair, a warning and a caution—but not an account of wrongs to be righted: they cannot be repaid. One can only forgive at the end of one’s days. But forget?
I was born in the heart of a virgin wilderness, deep in the Białowieża Forest. For me, there is no more beautiful place on earth: it is my small and great Homeland, most magnificent in the splendor of summer, captivating in the colors of autumn, wonderful in the bloom of spring, when it enchants with carpets of blue liverworts amid the gray of fallen pine needles, dried leaves and green mosses, tempting with the fragrance of mezereon—and then erupting in a true orgy of colors in the dignified company of ancient oaks and moss-covered pines and spruces. So much teeming, overflowing life is impossible to find elsewhere; perhaps only the generous nature of the tropics can rival it. This true wonder of nature was my possession for several beautiful years of childhood
I remember my father bringing home frostbitten wild apples, cranberries and hazelnuts after the first frosts. He knew and loved that old, ancient forest, which fed us constantly with mushrooms and berries. It was enough to plunge with our dog Dunaj into the nearest groves to gather boletes and bay boletes and pile them into tall heaps on the forest floor because they would not fit in the basket. Then our dependable father, tracking our woodland trail, would bring them home. The wooden cabin always smelled of the forest; hollyhocks bloomed in front of it, butterflies settled on them, swarms of wild bees buzzed, and the chirping of birds never stopped, even in winter. Snow often buried the house up to the roof; it was difficult to open the door to the outside. In the fine powder, my brother and I dug passageways and tunnels, while the trees resembled a land from Japanese fairy tales.
The war burst brutally into our family history. First, we were terrified by planes flying low over the forest, which I saw for the first time. The gloomy roar of their engines was an incredible dissonance in the virgin song of the primeval forest. Then, unexpectedly, a group of soldiers entered a forest clearing warmed by the sun. They drank water from the well. One had been shot through the throat, and water mixed with blood ran down onto his uniform. A terrible shock for a small child. So this was war? Our parents protected us from its cruelty for another two years. They could not do so any longer.
They hid a crystal radio somewhere; it was our only link to the outside world. Then they buried it in the forest—just before their arrest. It was never found after the war, which decimated and destroyed the family and was a chain of suffering, hunger, pain and humiliation. Why, for what? The agony in installments lasted for years because the sentence had been passed in the deranged minds of German Nazi ideologues: to biologically destroy the Poles, expand living space for the chosen nation and the superior Germanic race. We did not know this yet. Life retained the appearance of calm; our parents did not share the echoes of extermination and persecution with us. Tears in our mother’s eyes, sadness on our father’s face—these were increasingly frequent and deeply painful facts for children of just a few years. Why? The answer came in the tragic days that followed.
I do not know whether it was imagination or a real event, but on the clear, starry sky, a burning cross appeared beside the moon. We were traveling among rows of forest trees on a narrow-gauge forest railway, on a kind of wooden platform mounted on the axles of two pairs of locomotive wheels and pushed while standing with long poles—a kind of mechanically unpowered rail trolley. Our astonished parents pointed to the startling phenomenon, which struck everyone with terror.
“It is an omen of misfortune,” my father whispered, making the sign of the cross broadly, because he was a deeply religious man. My mother’s face turned pale, but she did not show her fear outwardly.
“Don’t frighten the children,” she said soothingly. “Strange, but we are at war, after all; perhaps they are some kind of anti-aircraft searchlights...”
We soon forgot this episode. It was already 1942 when the Gestapo and gendarmes unexpectedly arrived from Hajnówka by forest railway. A foreign language, shouting, a search, the shoving of our terrified parents and their arrest. Earlier, they had forcibly torn us from their arms, brutally separating us and sparing no blows. The Germans beat us on the head and back, without mercy, compassion or restraint, two small, weeping boys—the older of us, I was one year older than my brother. We screamed and sobbed convulsively, clinging to their arms and clothes, not fully realizing the tragedy of the situation. We felt only the wrong being done to us and the brutal violence. We did not defend the loved ones who had always cared for us, because how can a child stand up to cruelty and strength?
We were left alone for the night in a cold, frozen and empty house. Instead of the everyday order and tidiness, there was cruel chaos: damaged furniture, fragments of dishes, a pathetically shattered étagère made from round white birch trunks, which Dad had made himself for books—a unique forest bookshelf that they still recalled with emotion to this day... The modest possessions of a not-wealthy family trampled into the ground: clothes and aprons scattered across the floor, blankets, pillows spilling their feathers... A screaming helplessness and injustice, violence committed against the defenseless, a fading impulse to rebel—so this is the syndrome of war that I still carry within me today?
A terribly long and empty night, which we spent huddled tightly together, sobbing desperately until merciful sleep arrived. We woke cold and even more frightened, feeling no hunger, although Mother had always greeted us with a smile and a plate of steaming soup fragrant with herbs and flowers. It was the unforgettable warm scent of childhood that was no more. Alone deep in the wilderness, completely unprepared for the course of wartime events and the cruelty of fate. Bread rusks, prepared by our mother prudently “for a rainy day,” hung in canvas sacks. So we ate rusks washed down with water from the well. One day, then another. Loneliness was most terrifying; at night, owls and the cries of wild birds frightened us, because the forest lives after dark as well. After a week, our uncle found us. It was our salvation, because our parents were still trapped in the Gestapo dungeons in Białowieża, where they were “interrogated”: beatings, starvation, provocations, questions about the addresses of forest partisans and the names of underground leaders.
Physically and psychologically abused—I will spare the details; hundreds of weighty books and memoirs have been written on the subject—they did not break, but remained steadfast together in silence. Years later, only one name would be mentioned: Wireniuk, along with my mother’s terse account of aid provided to the partisans, an information and contact point, nighttime visits by “uncles,” and weapons hidden in wetlands and marshes. Nothing more—except a warning: “Remember not to profit from this. Father and I were not heroes; we were simply Poles. We do not need honors, and no one and nothing can compensate for the deaths of our loved ones. God gave us this fate; His will must be accepted with humility...”
My youth inclined me to rebel against such a philosophy. Today I recognize the wisdom and reasoning of my mother, who understood more beautifully and fully the meaning of patriotism and national service, Polish identity and homeland, human solidarity and the meaning of organic work. She received no honors, distinctions or medals; she lived quietly and with dignity, giving her heart to her children and transforming her dreams, shattered beyond repair, into the gray daily toil of an ant-like effort behind a railway office desk. A beautiful woman with a strong personality, she remained alone and faithful to the ethical principles she professed. She did not live to see her husband return from the wartime front near Berlin, and she never forgot or overcame the death of her younger son, whom she buried with her own hands in the frozen soil of Pomerania just before liberation, without a coffin or a priest, only in the presence of fellow prisoners walking an unknown route. These chords of an inhuman odyssey, like milestones of fate, sank into the consciousness and weighed upon the rest of their lives. This is the true cruelty of war, without embellishment—brutal, tragic and deeply personal.
The Gestapo did not release its victims without consequence. A sentence was passed: forced labor in East Prussia, the family’s deportation meaning a prolonged agony in installments, working for the Third Reich. It was 1942. Another sad chapter of wartime wandering was beginning—a road into the unknown, a slow death among strangers. The biography of the children of war was gaining new content, as if borrowed whole from a nightmare. The executioners had no mercy for the conquered Poles...