The horrific sanitary conditions make it impossible to provide any help to the dying or allow convalescence; there are no medicines, nurses or medical assistance. They load us onto carts and keep driving us westward. Why, what for? Cold, frost, the sounds of bombardments. We spend the nights in deserted villages of German Pomerania. No one has any hardtack left or access to food. Older boys dig frozen potatoes out from beneath the snow in the fields; in the cellars of former German homes, a few fruit jellies and homemade jams remain, so at last we have access to sweets. But only for a while: sappers have mined some of the houses; grenades hang from wires, and an explosion simply blew two siblings to pieces.
We encounter the first traces of bombardments, the ruins of burned houses, although these are areas deep inside Germany, in Western Pomerania. The inevitable end of our journey is approaching: entire stretches of forest, towns and individual houses in the fields are burning. A sign informs us that Kamień Pomorski (Kamin) and Szczecin are several dozen kilometres away, but disoriented German escorts lock us up in Sztutowo, in an abandoned palace whose upper floors have been partly demolished. Everywhere there are signs of the owners' panicked flight: papers, rubbish, feathers and broken furniture. The gendarmes talk among themselves about Russian “cauldrons” (encirclements), fast “tanks” and Katyusha salvos (truck-mounted rocket launchers). They are preparing one more surprise for us, about which we know nothing: they mine the entire palace and prepare a mass grave for the 12 families of displaced persons housed there, transported from East Prussia, after blowing up the building. No one is allowed to leave the building; we can, however, light a fire in the fireplace and feed it with papers, newspapers, mattresses and broken furniture scattered throughout all the rooms... Tension can be felt; terror hangs in the air, fear chokes our throats. We lie on straw-stuffed mattresses (where did our parents get them?), while beside me my younger brother, seriously ill and burning with fever, is slowly dying. Quietly, without complaint or moan, he passed away during the night while I slept. Our parents pleaded with the gendarmes for permission to bury him in the frozen ground, wrapped in a sheet, beneath some park tree. I never saw the place. I remember only tears, bitter and helpless crying, an entire sea of tears.
In front of the palace avenue, walnuts that had fallen from the trees were frozen into the ice. I dug them out with sticks and sharp shards of stone. I had never known their taste before. We were all terribly hungry and emaciated. Living skeletons. Across the street, German gendarmes were preparing to detonate the mines and evacuate the post they occupied. They did not make it in time. A motorcyclist in a sheepskin coat sped along the road. Some liquid was pouring from the sidecar's container. Then came a scene straight from a film: a wall of flames shot high into the air, and the road caught fire. Almost simultaneously, grenades thrown by Russian scouts riding horses—the so-called razvedka—struck the windows of the post. Then another burst of automatic fire and a silence buzzing in our ears. We sat almost motionless, afraid to look outside the building. We heard Russian speech and calls: “Germans—surrender! Hände hoch! Ruki v verkh! Hands up!” And immediately the reply: “Don't shoot, we're our own people, there are no Germans here!”
A “pepesha” and the head of a soldier in a fur hat with earflaps appeared in the doorway. “I am a Red Army soldier,” he introduced himself somewhat awkwardly, “and who are you?” And that was freedom, its first day. Freedom that my brother did not live to see. Freedom for which my father would later pay with his soldier's death. Freedom came in the winter of 1945 to what is now Polish Pomerania, near Kamień.
But the wartime odyssey was not yet over. The liberators' Slavic soul prompted them to share with us their soldier's rations, the famous canned “tushonka,” and a homemade delicacy from their native regions—potatoes fried in slices with lard in a huge frying pan. The dish was delicious and remains my favourite to this day. Except that on that winter evening, my starving stomach reacted to the treat with total rebellion. I survived with difficulty and was ill for many weeks. On our way back to our family home in Podlasie, I still experienced flight from the retreating front, artillery fire, bombardments and fires. I also lived through my father's forced and ruthless conscription into the army, confirmed by a “spravka”—a receipt signed by Captain Majboroda. He cried as he left for the front; he was only 40 years old. He wrote two letters from near Berlin, sent in triangular field-post envelopes stamped “Checked by the censor.” For many years we waited for our father to return from the war; every knock at the door heralded hope. In his letters he mentioned heavy fighting, hell on earth—flying metal and fire. He had no chance of surviving that hell; somewhere he fell as an unknown Polish soldier in a foreign army. He never returned, and to this day I do not know the final chapter of his fate.
At the age of ten, I said goodbye to childhood, which had a bitter taste and a tragic dimension. Only then did I begin my education, entering directly into the third grade. To this day I remember the wonderful teachers, equally cruelly scarred by the war: Mrs Poniecka and Mrs Andrzejewska, Mr Kozicki and others. How we hated the Germans, insisting against all logic that “Hitler” had to be written with a lowercase letter... And we all wrote it that way in solidarity. But that is a different story.
...Like a splinter lodged in the subconscious, the memory of the horror of war remains; the war syndrome has been encoded in the biographies of my entire generation. The question will always return: why did people inflict such a terrible fate on other people?