Joe Jezioranski

As I walked along the streets just recently travelled under fire, my head and leg wounds hurt more. I think my body was trying to give me an excuse for my defeat. We were led to an open space somewhere toward Malczewskiego St. A large number of people already stood there. A couple of German soldiers were guarding us as well as a mound of grenades dropped by the Polish soldiers. One of the grenades (a British gammon, we used to call them) was lying on the ground with its tape unwrapped. I was watching it. With a bit of a pull on the tape it might explode and set the whole pile off. I noticed that each approaching group aimed some grenades at the gammon, a suicidal attempt. I guess this was the expression of feeling that permeated the group: “Why don’t we all die now!” You may call it Polish Romanticism.

Well, I thought, the whole thing started as an act of desperation for me and so it may finish. But the grenade did not explode and we were not all killed. All that happened was that another phase of my life started. That’s why I can write this story: God divided my life into chapters.

This was a day of walking. First we walked to the end of Raclawicka. In the open field, they fed us soup and bread. There was nothing to eat with, but somebody soon found a pile of old German tins, which passed from hand to hand. The line-up for soup was ended prematurely, by the “grand arrival” of the victor himself Gen von dem Bach, who gave us a speech about the great goodwill and grace of the German nation and Adolf Hitler who fed us – the bandits and insurrectionists – and would even allow us to become prisoners of war. All this while a group of army photographers and filmmakers were taking pictures of the scene. Revolting. By now both the soup and bread had been magically removed. And we walked again.

This time we walked a long time. I fell asleep many times while walking, and so did many others. As soon as some man walked into you, you knew he was asleep and you propped him up gently and led him back into his place within the ranks. Sometimes one had to do it repeatedly. Occasionally we had to catch a guy walking away from the ranks – he could be shot if he strayed too far. Once in a while a warning would be heard from the accompanying guards.

I thought about walking away, but we had seen no sign of life anywhere around. Pruszkow. We walked all night.

I slept on a cement floor. Somebody was shaking me. You better get in line – they are distributing food. You had to be there to get it. When they finished distributing it, that was it. We tried to organize the reception and distribution of food, but soon the trains were taking people away.

I don’t remember quite how, but the next thing I remember we were in the transit camp (was it Skierniewice?) and I was in a hospital bed. The big room was full of Poles from the uprising, Poles from the Berling Army [33] and Russians.

The wounded prisoners were attended to by a doctor who was a prisoner himself – this was a standard practice in the POW camps. Each morning, a Russian doctor – they sometimes called him a butcher, at other times a saint – would come along. He only examined me once – took my bandages off. Told me to keep my wounds in the open and tell him if they swelled a lot. Was he going to bandage them again? He does not have many bandages.

One guy next to me had a chest and stomach wound. After examination, he bandaged him in the same bandages.

“Bad sign,” the man on my right said. “This man is going to die.” He did, two days later.

33. General Berling was the commander of the Polish Army formed by Soviet Russia. The Berling Army fought side-by-side with the Russian Army from the great battle of Kursk to the battle for Berlin. Gen Berling disappeared soon after the Warsaw uprising. The folklore has it that he tried to help the AK in the uprising despite distinct Russian orders to the contrary and was removed as a penalty for disobedience.

The man behind was trying to hide a bad leg wound. One day the doctor spotted him and took his blankets off despite strong resistance. The man had gangrene. They took him away. He came back amid shouts within an hour minus his leg. It was hard to sleep in that place. The moans and shouts were difficult to bear, considering the state of your own health, both in the physical and the mental sense. I think I was there more than a week. I began to have a lot of respect for the doctor. Many people were improving despite the rough treatment. Many people died, with not too much sympathy. There were new patients ready to take the place of the dying almost immediately.

One day we were told to walk to a train. There was no objection if some who were not wounded too badly carried the more heavily wounded. Some were helped by the orderlies of the doctor. The train was filled with the soldiers from the uprising and some loose spots were filled with Berling Poles. Before we left we got three packets of crackers.

There were twenty-one beds and a stove in the middle in our carriage (if a cattle truck can be called a carriage). One of the beds was reserved for our guard, a poor specimen of the super-race. He looked about sixty and walked with a sort of a wobble. During the journey he slept longer than anybody else in the carriage. In stretches the train would move fast, then it would stop in the middle of nowhere and stand there for hours.

We had a man in our carriage whose hand was mutilated by a piece of a grenade. The Russian “doctor” tried to clean up his wound but he found it very difficult to extract all the pieces of shattered bones from the center of his hand. Thus the hand continued to ooze with pus. Maggots got into his wound. It was the doctor’s method to leave the maggots in, as they tend to reduce the quantity of pus and therefore reduce swelling. But the patient feels the maggots moving in his painful wound. Furthermore no pain killers other than aspirin were available. The wound, now infected for weeks, stank horribly. The stench and moaning was driving us bananas. His nickname became Little Paw.

Half of the wounded could not get up from their beds. When the train stopped, it was possible to get some water occasionally. We had to carry the water from the side of the train to the heavily wounded.

I thought about running away, but I never gathered enough heart to do it. Neither did any others. Then again I did not care much to be in occupied Poland any more. I was afraid of the Russians as well. I did not know whether any of my family had survived. What a set of excuses! I guess I just wasn’t man enough. There were many opportunities. The train moved through forests and countryside, and by the poverty of the villages one saw, I could swear we were still in Poland. Thoughts, despairing thoughts. Always: what was it all for? Could I have done anything to stop it?

The third night we came to Berlin. Our train stood at Ostkreutz while the late suburban trains were whizzing past at what seemed like a hundred miles an hour. We were tired, hungry and dejected. The guards brought a kettle of hot water. There was nothing to put in the hot water, so we waited for the water to cool down. We had only two old tins from German preserves. The sirens began while we waited. The guards left the kettle and ran to the air-raid shelter. Those of us who could walk got out of the train and observed the bombing. Some cheered. How sad, I thought. The raid took a long time. We left before dawn.

The guard left our carriage unattended – he could not stand the stench from the wound of Little Paw. Some guys now regretted that they did not run away. Sort of crying over spilt milk. Magdeburg [34]. Another air raid. I fell asleep.

34. A German city situated halfway between, and to the south of, Berlin and Saxony.

The carriage was beginning to empty out. Badly wounded first, then those that could walk but had to be helped. Finally those that did not need help to jump down. It was time to wake up. A Polish doctor or first-aid man was sorting us out. He sent some straight ahead or to the right. Others had to wait. I was in that group. I did not need an immediate operation or any significant hospital care work.

35. German cavalry barracks situated near Magdeburg, which were used as a POW camp in both wars.

Each prisoner had to go through a registration procedure where all his documents were taken away and each man was informed that he would instead be identified by a number. Mine was 45294. We were informed that this was Stalag XIA [36], that our wounds will be attended to by doctors who themselves were prisoners, and that subsequently we would be assigned to an appropriate place. It was a clear autumn day, rather warm for the middle of October. Around noon the planes started moving along the sky. Hundreds, maybe thousands.

“Berlin again,” somebody said.

The planes seemed to cross each other’s paths. Near the end lighter planes dropped down and rocked their wings. Their pilots obviously knew the location of the camp.

Late in the afternoon it was finally my turn. For the first time all my wounds were not only cleaned but properly bandaged. I impressed the French doctor with my broken French and he talked to me for a minute. Hundreds were still waiting, so he bid me good-bye.

36. Stalag stands for a standard camp. This kind of POW camp held all soldiers who were not officers. Doctors and chaplains often volunteered to serve in a Stalag. I am not sure about the numbering of Stalags. Stalag XIB did exist. I think it had something to do with military districts.

I was sent to a sort of transit barrack. The authorities were reorganizing the camp to keep the new Polish prisoners somewhat apart from the others. Morning saw our first inspection. We were woken up at dawn and had to line up and shout our new numbers while a soldier checked each number on a list. Then a group of goons walked along our line and picked on some unsuspecting person and violated him somehow physically. I was one of the men picked out. The soldier who picked me out ripped my pants and told me to throw my upper garments on the ground. For the rest of the year I had a difficult time keeping my pants together. I noticed that the goon was walking with a heavy limp indicating a serious leg wound. On his shoulder the insignia proclaimed: Leningrad [37], and another below the first one: Warsaw. Momentarily I felt rather proud that Warsaw got the distinction of being a difficult battle for the Germans. Then I felt ashamed of feeling proud. Everything seemed so futile.

37. Leningrad was surrounded by the German forces for over three years. It was later given a “hero” status by the Russian government.

Our barrack was surrounded by a double fence. Inside there were two rows of boards arranged in two tiers along the wall. We were supposed to sleep on them. Unfortunately the space was inadequate. Some of us had to sleep on the floor.

The food was horrible. The worst was a soup which seemed to be made of sticks, The sticks were so hard it was hard to bite through them. There was little else but sticks in the soup. The daily portion consisted of a fifth of a pound of bread (made mostly of sawdust), an eighth of a tin of meat, soup once a day and coffee (a black concoction somewhat bitter) once a day. You could not die on it and you certainly could not live on it. It was not until we were moved to permanent barracks (after about two weeks) that we could do anything about our food supply.

About a week after we came to Altengrabow, a transport of AK (Polish Underground Army) from Zoliborz [38] arrived. They were placed in a different compound, but we could see them across two fences. I found out that many of my school friends from Bielany were in that transport. That is when I found out that most of them belonged to the Polish Nationalist Organization (NSZ). They described the battles on that side of Warsaw: the battle for the railway line and the river shore and the way out to the outskirts of town. I also found out that many of my classmates had died in those battles. The transport from Zoliborz stayed only three days in Altengrabow and then all my friends were sent to another Stalag.

38. Zoliborz – name of the city area in Warsaw. Contained some of the more modern apartment complexes.

Soon after, we were moved to our permanent quarters.

Now matters improved slightly. Many prisoner groups decided not to take the food supplied by the Germans. Poles and Serbs and some other national groups having food parcels from abroad decided to donate the standard kitchen food to us. In normal conditions, prisoners would share their parcels with the newcomers; in the case of the AK, there was too many of us coming to the camp at the same time for the older prisoners to share their Red Cross parcels. So the best they could do was to permit us to draw their daily food rations from the German kitchen, which few of the old prisoners wanted to eat anyway.

Once moved to our permanent quarters, we could move around certain portions of the camp more freely. Some prisoners engaged in camp commerce, selling items they had brought from Warsaw for food and cigarettes. Of course the thing to do was to buy those items from one another and sell them at a higher price to old prisoners, then do the same in reverse with barter items obtained in exchange.

My method of supporting myself was to walk to the sport field, which lay in our area of the camp. Most English prisoners and some of the others were walking around the field at about 6 am. They all walked in a clockwise direction, thus I walked in the counterclockwise direction. I greeted each oncoming soldier with “good morning.” Most often I would get an answer “good morning.” Occasionally the man addressed would stop and start a conversation. I would normally give him a sob story and be rewarded by an offer of a cigarette. I had a stub prepared and would light the stub while pocketing a whole cigarette. An hour of walking would result in between five and ten cigarettes. In the evening I would go to the Russian compound and buy potatoes from Russian prisoners who had stolen them while working.

At some point I had enough cigarettes to buy a packet of 10 cigarettes for 11 singles. Now I was in business. I could buy some valuable item for the packet of cigarettes and sell it to a French prisoner at a profit. All this because of my knowledge of languages. Of course my knowledge was sort of deficient, but what was important is that it impressed the guys that I was able to converse with them in my broken English or French.

The place we lived in was hardly a palace. It used to be a stable for the German cavalry. All stalls had been removed and three rows of boards supported by 2-by-4’s placed at 6-ft intervals extended the length of the building. Each man had a 2-ft wide space (or less) for himself. Lice dropped from the upper to the lower layer.

In order to keep clean, one had to have a utensil with which to wash himself, wait his turn to get water from a single tap for the barrack of about 1000 men, and find enough time to perform one’s ablutions. If one needed to cook or heat the water, one built a contraption from three or four powdered milk tins; one tin for a tiny fireplace, one tin for the housing of a fan, one tin cut up to form the fan blades. The fan axle was made from the milk tin opening key. The band around the tin was wrapped onto the key and a piece of string or rubber (if you had it) connected it to the handle which was placed in a support made from other metal bands. The handle was made from another opening key. The whole contraption was placed on a board, which had to be “procured” from somebody who worked in a carpentry shop. As one turned the handle, the fan turned much faster and blew a stream of air on twigs placed in the little furnace or stove, thus causing it to create a high heat stove to cook an item placed on top of the stove. One cooked potatoes in about ten minutes with only a small supply of twigs.

Before the end of November, I managed to be sick and therefore moved to the hospital where one had a bed and all. Unfortunately it did not last long. One day all the boys under seventeen were sent out to a work place (Kommando) and I was not considered sick enough to be retained in the camp.

The journey was relatively fast, and by night we were unloaded in an unfamiliar place. No food all day. We were marched through town and deposited in a factory, in a dark room. We felt all around and found some food on the table in a series of small utensils. It tasted good. We later found out that we had been placed in the management dining room at the Billeter Works. The food was left-overs of the managers’ supper. This was the end of the second shift and at midnight we were marched with other prisoners to a camp. However we were not placed in a prisoner-of-war camp but in a civilian prisoner camp. The civilians were people gathered from occupied territories and brought to work in the German Reich’s essential industries. Those included farms and any industry that had incurred a shortage of labor through the mobilization of young Herrenvolk (the German supermen serving in the army).

Now finally somebody decided that we deserved some food. Our guard selected one of the boys (Zygmunt) and took him to the kitchen. He brought us each a sandwich. It later turned out that the kitchen issued one and a half sandwiches each, but the temptation was too great and Zygmunt ate six sandwiches on the way (there were twelve of us in the group). The boys were incensed and were all for executing prison-camp justice and beating Zygmunt up. I objected strongly and told the boys that they would have to beat me up as well. Somehow the others grudgingly relinquished the idea of punishing Zygmunt.

We were placed together with a number of civilian Polish men from different areas of Poland. The attitude of these men was definitely antagonistic. We tried to find out why. They had been told that we were criminals caught red-handed with arms in our hands terrorizing the civilian population in Poland. Our protests were of no avail. The older civilians said that they were already told that we were likely to feed them a story of being freedom fighters, but that we have caused the demise of many people in Warsaw. It was hard to contradict that the uprising did cause the deaths of many civilians. Our explanations became too involved for the peasant sons of Poland and we remained the bandits from Warsaw. It caused us grief and sorrow, but somehow in the days to come we decided to convince the older Poles that we were not bandits. I do not think we ever succeeded. It was just another of the spiritual blows administered by the enemy.

The next week was important and crucial in our Billeter saga. We were first taken to the factory at 5.30 and introduced to our work. Since we were all under seventeen, we were to be trained as machinist apprentices. This was a privileged job and further alienated us from the other Polish men. None of them had light work of that type. They worked in the foundry, in the yard, or as loading and unloading personnel – all very heavy manual labor. We were all wounded, however slightly, and received treatment in the first aid room in the management building. Our co-workers wanted to know why we hob-nobbed with the German managers. They were not completely satisfied with our answers. We worked a six-day week twelve hours a day. On Sunday we were exhausted. As light workers, our diet was much lighter than that of our compatriots. Our great hunger and scrounging for any scraps made our compatriots ashamed of us. They laughed at our efforts to find food in the surrounding fields. All farmers’ sons, they knew well that November was too late to find anything useful in the field – all produce was now stored in the appropriate storage on the farm.

Early Sunday morning we were called to the camp commandant’s office. He wanted to identify an interpreter. Although my German was the best in the group, I refused to be so identified. Today I think that my action made little sense but at that time I wanted to have nothing to do with the Germans. One of the boys, Wladek, volunteered.

Wladek had difficulty understanding the camp commander and often I would suggest to him, what was said. It would irritate the officer no end that I mumbled often something after he stopped speaking. He would hobble toward me with a whip in his hand and shout, “Halte schnautze, du lausbub Polacke [39]! You must wait to speak until you are asked to.”

Then we would look into one another’s eyes with a measure of hate. The commandant had lost his leg in the Polish-German war and hated Poles more than the other prisoners. I must say that he never hit me or mistreated me physically, other than shouting at me. Still, the thing that I remember most about the German military and other officials is that they always shouted. I often wondered whether they were capable of communicating in a normal tone of voice.

39. This phrase contains a number of abusive expressions which are not easily translatable in another language. Halte means hold, schnautze refers to an animal mouth. A very loose translation would be “keep your trap shut” or simply “shut up.” Lausbub is a lice-infected urchin. Polacke is a deprecating term referring to a stupid Pole, similar to “pollack” in Chicago.

The commandant wanted us to sign a paper stating that we wanted to be treated as civilians. We did not know what to do. I was very much against it, while the majority of the boys did not seem to mind. Wladek originally expressed our reservations to the commander. He got mad and told us he would keep us standing to attention for as long as we refused to sign. After about an hour he started taking Wladek and another boy to the side and trying to persuade them to sign. At some point one of the boys agreed to sign. This was the beginning of the collapse of the common front. Most of the boys did not see any good reason for not signing anyway. I decided not to act individually and signed as well.

I suppose my reluctance to sign did not have a really good reason. The main reason for the commandant’s insistence was a question of accommodation and somewhat one of intimidation. Once we signed he could treat us the same way as the other Poles who were not prisoners of war.

Whereas we were not able to become friendly with the older Poles, I soon made friends with the Belgian prisoners of war and French civilians who also worked in the Billeter Works. The Belgians often fed me at the lunch hour. They were now well supplied with Red Cross parcels and would often invite me to share the meal with them. As for the French, I got particularly friendly with Marceau Chiampi, a French secret-service agent who came to work in Germany to escape potential investigation by the Gestapo.

Marceau showed me a number of ways of improving my diet – we were more or less all starved due to undernourishment during the uprising and subsequent poor treatment in the POW camp. One way was to get to a German restaurant and order a standard meal. Such a meal, consisting of vegetables with some sauce, did not require the provision of ration coupons which of course we did not have. We had to be careful as eating such meals was not permitted – we were lower-class citizens. In general we were supposed to wear an identifying mark – a yellow square containing the letter P, for Polish – and the meal would be refused. In order to get the meal we had to remove the P.

Prisoners from the west – Danes, Dutchmen, Belgians etc – did not need to wear identifying marks and were allowed to eat in the restaurant: they were the higher class citizens. People from Russia had to wear a mark proclaiming OST and were even lower quality than Poles. Of course there was no recognition of the existence of Jews at all; they were so low they were not even classified. As I understand it, Jews were to be exterminated first of all. Later our turn would come. The western nationalities were to be kept as servants of the super-race.

My friendship with the foreigners and my escapades were noted with much criticism by the older Poles. I was warned that they knew that there are a lot of criminals among those nationalities. As I mentioned, our explanation of being freedom fighters had not been accepted, especially by two big fellows called Jasio and Wojtek. Wojtek especially was extremely strong and intimated that we must listen to him. Still trying to be friendly I pointed out that my friendship with other nationalities did not seem to hurt his lifestyle. He said that if I did not listen he would throw the Frenchmen out if and when he came to visit me. I told Marceau of the threat, but it appeared to challenge him. The next Sunday Marceau appeared with a swagger at our sleeping quarters. Both Jasio and Wojtek moved toward him. “You have to leave,” Jasio said.

“And why would I want to do that?” replied Marceau.

“ Because you don’t want to get hurt.”

“No,” agreed Marceau, “but I am sure I will not get hurt. Nor will anybody who is my friend.”

The next moment both big Poles jumped on a much smaller Frenchman, but he seemed to avoid both of them. Next he sent one sprawling by a hit across his back and tripped the other one toward the window. Jasio was first to get up and only succeeded in getting himself in a painful arm-lock while Wojtek’s attack was blocked by Jasio’s body.

“I will let you go,” said Marceau, “if you promise to leave me and Joe alone. I have no quarrel with you if you have none with me.”

And so it ended. We never became friends with Jasio and Wojtek although I apologized for the grief I caused them. They told me they want to have nothing to do with me.

I soon found another source of food supplement. On the road to work we had to walk through the whole west section of town. I noticed a field with rows and rows of little hills. I asked one of the men going to work what it was.

“Don’t you know? That is where the potatoes are stored. You guys don’t know anything.”

I found a bag thrown into the garbage at work. On the way back I wandered into the field and dug into the soft earth. Under a layer of straw, I found the stored potatoes and filled the bag with them. I was cooking the potatoes on the stove provided for warming our quarters when Jasio stopped by. “Where did you get the potatoes?”

“Would you like some, Jasiu?”

“I am not going to have potatoes that you robbed somebody of.”

But a couple of days later he consented to have some, without thanking me for them. It seemed that a truce had been agreed upon.

It was hard to walk to work two miles or so, especially as the work started at 6 am. It was even harder to come back home after 6 pm. Originally work itself was not too bad. We were supposed to learn to be fitters or machinists. Billeter Works was supposedly well-known for the manufacture of large machines to work on metal: lathes, mills, and especially shapers. The Billeter machines were designed to work on large pieces of metal. A picture showing their largest single shaper – over 100 ft long – hung in the offices. This machine had been produced in 1938 for Stalingrad of all places.

During our training time, which lasted only about six weeks, we worked in a special area learning to use various tools. There was only room for less than twenty people to be trained at a time and most of the machines with which we were supposed to produce our “models” were one of a kind. In the middle of our training, a dozen or so German boys started training in our area. These boys were probably 2-3 years older than we were.

They were, of course, acting very superior and thus invited resentment and active obstructionism from us. At the time that they came, the German forces had mounted an offensive which is generally now called the Battle of the Bulge. This offensive puffed up the German youth even more and depressed us some. Whereas we were working on an innocuous project, the Germans got involved in the production of arms. Up to this time Billeter Works produced only heavy equipment; thus the only war materiel that was produced was intended for heavy armour: tanks and such. As western Germany was both under attack of ground troops as well as under heavy bombardment, the factory began to produce rifles as well. These were the semi-automatic Mauser type, which were to match the American M1 and M30 rifles. The German boys felt very important producing parts for the rifles and felt that we should not interfere with their work.

One day as I was sitting and drilling some part or another, a German boy came and told me to shove off. I pretended not to hear him. After shouting louder a couple of times, he got irritated and tried to push me off the machine. I was prepared for this maneuver and hung on with both my feet and one hand to the machine and the other hand to my seat. The German could not dislodge me.

“Be careful!” I said. “This machine is in operation. You might get hurt.”

He went to see the training instructor. The instructor was another cripple. I believe he had only one leg and one arm. He came and asked why I did not move when told to do so.

“I did not hear him asking (!) me to move,” I said. “And anyway I was trying to finish my piece.”

I was told to move whenever a German needs to use the machine. This of course gave me an excuse to do nothing when a German was using the machine. Now I aimed to always need the machine when a German was using it. This was observed by the Germans and the instructor, but no mention of my behavior was made that day.

Our dressing room was behind the dressing room of the German boys and we had to walk through their room to get out. As we were dressing, it was obvious that the Germans were waiting for me to walk out. I prevailed on all my friends to leave, in order to avoid a mass battle. As I walked out from the dressing room, all the German boys moved to block my way.

“Apparently it takes twenty older Germans to beat one Pole with a wounded leg,” I said.

“Leave him to me,” said the boy with whom I had interfered in the shop. I was disappointed; I had hoped that the boys would be shamed into leaving me alone. There was nothing for it but to battle with the boy, about a head taller than myself. He was already jumping around and punching me lightly here and there.

OK, I said to myself, I am not going to win this way. I moved close to him and grabbed the lapels of his jacket. Now I was being pounded in the face, but because of the close quarters, my opponent could not really take a proper swing. I pushed him toward an overhanging radiator and began to pound his head against the metal. We moved back and forth: when he punched me, I let the bodies sway away from the radiator and when he was taking a swing, I pushed him hard against the radiator. His body provided most of the momentum, but his face told me he was beginning to hurt.

“You have had enough?” he said. I decided to go along with his face-saving maneuver and said, “Yes.”

“I hope you will behave yourself in the future.” I moved through the door unopposed. Next day the boy missed work. After the weekend he was wearing a cap to work, but would not say anything about the fight. I did not either – this was dangerous business.

Nevertheless, the training instructor decided we had had enough training and I was the first one to be moved to work on the floor. I was put to work with an Italian prisoner (a fitter). We communicated in broken French and German. Our job was to even out the top plate of a Panther tank to within one mil. The Italian fitter was a master at cheating. The measurement had to be taken with a steel bar placed across the plate in three directions, and along the whole length of a 2-meter bar, there could not be a difference of one mil. The evening of any surface irregularities was done with a scraper, which had a piece of Widia steel attached to it.

The way to cheat was to pack paper under the bar at the low spots. Of course it had to be removed very fast under the eyes of an inspector. The fitter would always finish the job himself as he was not sure I was adept enough at both scraping and cheating. I moved often to talk to other men working on the floor, while the Italian was finishing the job.

I talked to Belgians and Englishmen and Italians. The floor foreman noticed my wanderings and came one day to tell me that I am supposed to do what the Italian tells me, not wander around. In my apology I mentioned that the Italian wanted to do the final touches himself. The floor foreman was pacified. Next day I asked to go to the nurse to get a new dressing for my leg, and the foreman gave me the permission but wanted to know how come I could communicate with so many nationalities – Poles were not allowed to be educated. This caused me to give him a lecture on underground schools in occupied Poland completed by a sarcastic statement on German inability to control the so-called “inferior” people. I think that the whole speech went past him, as he probably could not understand my broken German. Still, I felt better.

Some days I took our tools and wandered into the tool shop on the pretext of sharpening the tools. Marceau worked in the tool shop. He was working as a precision toolmaker, the trade he learnt in Germany. We talked about many things – he was a very knowledgeable person. Other days I would visit German Communists, who had to eat in a separate dinning room watched by a party member. They were tolerated because of their skills, but probably did more damage and sabotage than the foreign workers. I asked one of them why was it that he always milled the gun sights crooked.

“Well, it is for the Volksturm [40] anyway. They are too old to see the sight properly and can’t shoot straight,” he said with a smile.

Most of the time I ate lunch with the Belgian prisoners. They fed me the best tidbits. If I did not wander a bit, I would be very tired after a twelve hour shift. Still I had to be careful, as many foremen were critical of my work.

40. Near the end of the war, German authorities formed a Home Guard of all the men able to carry guns in the Fatherland. Since all the able-bodied men were already in the army, the Home Guard (Volksturm as it was called) comprised of very young, very old and the infirm.

While I was still in Altengrabow, I wondered how I could get in touch with my family. I figured out that the easiest way was through Aunt Jadwiga who lived in the mountains (Zakopane-Olcza) and thus was somewhat isolated from recent events.

In the early days of December I got a letter from Aunt Jadwiga. She described the fate of my father who was working in Krakow for WTU, the fate of my brother who was in GrossRosen concentration camp. My sister Alina and her family were doing fine in Raba Wyzna, my father had spent some time with them, and, she wrote, my father would tell me about the rest of the family. Well, the important part of my family omitted was my mother, and the way she was omitted told me that she was dead. I walked out from the dining room where I was at the time and walked crying and praying for half of the night. This was the first time I had prayed for a while. Somehow I had lost faith in the power of my prayers, but when real sorrow struck, I turned to God. My father’s letter came a week late and confirmed what I had already surmised. My mother never liked to go to the basement. She died when a German bomb destroyed the WTU building. After my mother’s death, my father spent the rest of the uprising with Mr and Mrs Wegielski who had introduced my parents originally after the First World War.

A few weeks passed. One evening we had just come home from work when one of the guards came in and said, “Your father will see you in the commandant’s office.”

At first I thought I did not hear him right. Then I got worried that somehow my father got arrested or sent to work in Germany. It turned out that he had asked his Treuhänder whether he could do something for me and my brother. Although the Treuhänder was very sympathetic, he said he could not do much, since we were both involved in criminal activities against the Reich, but he could help my father to see us. Well, thank God for little mercies! My father did want to see us. And the Treuhänder, a minister of the GG [41], got him a special permit to go and see us.

41. General Gouvernement (GG) was the name the German Reich assigned to the part of Poland not included in the Reich or the Eastern Territories.

He came to see me first, as he thought it would be easier to get permission to talk to a prisoner of war than to a prisoner of the concentration camp. The next day was Sunday and I was permitted to spent the whole day with him. I cannot describe the joy of this day. Even today I have to cry while I am writing this. I think that this day also taught me to glorify God again.

I laughed with my father when he told me the story of his travels. Since he had a special permit and was a foreigner, he had travelled first class. A German in his compartment got into discussion with him and at one moment asked, “What branch of the party are you in?”

After my father’s explanation that he was not in the party and in fact was a Polish citizen, the German did not speak to him again. It was funny because it presented the unreality of the situation.

As I found out later, my father was right about the difficulty which had to be overcome to see my brother. My father got to GrossRosen, but was not allowed to see his son. Somehow, however, my brother got wind of his visit. My brother was already in the hospital. He was able to run out and watch our father walk out of the camp. My brother’s exertion made him contract pneumonia. Considering the hardship of the subsequent evacuation, he would have died anyway.

My father was very concerned about my leg wound, which caused my leg to swell to twice its size. Shortly after he left, he wrote a letter to Billeter. This letter caused the examination of my wound by a specialist and subsequent hospitalization and treatment.

I was lucky to spend a large part of January and February in the infirmary. Finally my wound, now properly treated under doctor’s orders, began to heal. As a matter of fact I had four wounds now, since my leg had become ulcerated through improper treatment. All it needed was a bit of sulfa and proper dressings every day.

In the meantime the weather turned cold. The infirmary was heated, but the fuel for our barrack was on very low rations. My friends found out that there was coal just across the fence, at the Junkers plant, and decided to “procure” it. Unfortunately the guards noticed that their barrack was the warmest and found it was heated with coal. No coal was allowed for the barracks. The guards identified the source of the coal and the commandant came and told my friends to carry it back to the pile through the hole they had made in the fence. The commandant stood at the door and gave each carrier a hit with his cane (he had an artificial leg). When George’s turn came, he walked very slowly until he reached the commandant and then ran. The poor commandant fell on his arse trying to hit George. George decided to stay outside for a while.

My stay in the infirmary was somewhat spoiled by the companion I had. For most of the time, he talked about various ways to have sex. He tried to convince me with very illustrative descriptions why oral sex is superior to natural and insisted that most of his French compatriots were of the same opinion. I was trying to tell him that there are other interesting subjects, but it only caused him to call me a prude. I gave up.

Late in February I went back to work. Soon afterwards we received Red Cross parcels. The commandant called us in to tell us that he would distribute our parcels to all the prisoners in the camp. We insisted that the parcels were ours, and that if we decided to share them with others we would do it ourselves. He claimed that he had the power to distribute them to whoever he wanted. We said that if and when he showed us the authorization from the Red Cross to do so, we would go along with him; in the meantime we would like to have our parcels. He delayed our parcels for a week. We wrote a letter to the Red Cross. He delayed the letter.

In the meantime Aschersleben, the town in which we worked, was bombed. In the middle of the day an alarm sounded. As usual, while everybody went to the air raid shelter we walked up onto the factory roof. A group of planes was flying high. This kind of scenario happened often. Planes from allied bases in Italy often flew over Aschersleben towards Berlin. This time the planes turned around and a dozen or so dropped their bombs on Aschersleben. For some reason we were excited. I guess we still looked for revenge for the German ravaging of Warsaw and other Polish cities. The air alarm was still on and the security guards stayed in the air shelter. We ran toward the area bombed and walked along sightseeing. We ignored the cries for help. I am ashamed of our callous behavior.

The day after the bombing we were issued our Red Cross parcels. Soon afterwards a parcel arrived from my father. I was crying as I opened the parcel. The Old Man had sent me Kielbassa and pork fat and crackers – such food was the price of gold in Poland. I wondered where he was then – Krakow was already in Russian hands. We were well provided for now. We had Nescafé (for a tin of which I obtained twelve loaves of bread), cigarettes (for which I obtained new pants to replace my ripped ones), tinned powdered milk (which we mixed with cocoa and water and ate by the spoonful).

On top of this bonanza, Zygmunt began to work in a bakery. Remembering my defence when he stole the sandwiches, he would steal Wehrmacht vacation ration coupons and give them to me. I often shocked the German bakers walking into the bakery and asking for a dozen rolls. A vacationing SS man was issued four for a week! This behavior was also dangerous, but the Germans were now subdued – the war was near its end. We shared some of our spoils, but not that many. We still resented the early reception received from the Polish civilians with whom we lived.

March was full of air alarms. Allied planes were flying low now and finally found the railroad station and Junkers plant. We found that there were many Polish women working at Junkers and visited them at night. Some had been taken from Warsaw. We took food and cigarettes to them. I remembered especially a mother and daughter. The girl, about sixteen, was bored and really happy to see somebody her own age. The mother, very strict, wanted to know our family background and all. At the time I was rather annoyed. Today I think of her as rather pathetic and probably acting as a mother should. Toward the end of the month, rumors of evacuation began to circulate.

In early April, small allied fighter planes were buzzing constantly above the camp and the factory. Little work was being done, as the constant alarms interrupted work very often. More German soldiers appeared. An American truck full of tires drove in north of our camp and was stopped by a group of German soldiers who were dug in on the side of the road coming from the west. A plane dropped a bomb on an ammunition train standing at the south side of the camp, and caused it to catch fire. The resulting explosions of shells destroyed our washroom and caused many barracks to be pierced by pieces of shells. Strafing of the Junkers plant next door to our living quarters was a daily occurrence.

One day a guard arrived at our room and told us to get ready for evacuation in the afternoon. We did not want to be evacuated. We moved through a hole in the fence to an open field. Once there we began to argue. George and Zbyszek wanted to walk toward the oncoming front, while I, always cautious, suggested we wait nearby until the situation became clearer. Most of the guys wanted to stay with me. George and Zbyszek left while we wished them good-bye. We never saw them again.

The rest of us walked to the park. The park was on the other side of town. We moved among the bushes and decided to wait. We were worried when it started to rain, but it turned out to be a short shower. The night was lovely and warm. The next day we enjoyed our freedom in the park. During the day a very heavy air raid hit some place to the west. As I later found out, over a thousand bombers had virtually destroyed Halberstadt [42] after some Volksturm soldiers fired at the entering Patton [43] armored troops.

In the afternoon, German artillery and mortars began to take positions in the park. The place could be dangerous! We decided to go back to town. We spent most of the night in the deserted main street. In the morning, an air raid. We moved to the outskirts of town just as the bombs started falling on the main street. The raid extended into the morning. We saw barricades being built near the stretch where we were sitting and decided to move closer to the camp. As we left the road, light bombers laid a layer of surface bombs along the road. Maybe the safest place was our old camp.

We stayed in the deserted camp for a while. I decided to walk west in the morning. The other boys felt safest staying put.

42. Halberstadt is a German city, situated north of the Hartz mountains; population was more than 100.000. Presently part of the East Germany (German Democratic Republic).

I left camp about 4 am. As I walked along the outside fence, I met one of the foremen from the factory. He wanted to know where I am going.

“I am going to see my girlfriend,” I lied.

“Oh, a bit of ladies’ man, eh? You work fast!” he said. He told me to be careful because the troops were in the area and showed me where the outposts were. His assistance helped me tremendously. Now I knew how to navigate between the outposts.

I kept my head low and moved between the furrows in the field. This took me in a northwesterly direction. After about an hour I began to crawl over to the next furrow in a westerly direction and then kept walking. Finally I struck a road that seemed to move to the west. I walked along the road, but in the first rays of light I noticed it had been travelled by tanks recently. Should I get off this road? No, I decided, this could be German tanks retreating or American tanks advancing. Soon the country road met the highway. The sun was shining brightly now and the road was climbing up.

Soon I was walking through the forest. There was a clearing. As I approached the clearing, suddenly I saw that the clearing had been man-made and there were anti-aircraft guns standing in the middle – a bit of a fright until I saw white flags decorating the guns. So I kept marching. I reached a crest in the road and there below me was a group of vehicles with white stars on their engines, looking exactly like the truck full of tires that was stopped by the German soldiers.

Thank God, I am safe, I thought.