Joe Jezioranski

The jeep drove over a couple of hills and stopped in front of the barn. “’Raus!” [44] the noncom said, pointing to the barn with his rifle.

44. A short version of a command “get out” in German.

We were all lined up inside the barn and a young American lieutenant talked to a person at a time in broken German. Where do you come from? What did you see on the way? Did you encounter any troops? Where are you going? Why? When he began to question me, I tried to answer in English. He could not understand.

“I wonder what language he is speaking in,” he said to his sidekick. After one more try, I tried my broken German. This was better. We both knew we could understand no more than an occasional word, but it did not matter. If you spoke English, then he would have liked to understand all words. He was glad to have found a Pole, told me there was a camp in Halberstadt [45], told me he thought I could get there before night if I walked fast. Good-bye and good luck!

45. A German city of over 100.000, situated north of the Hartz Mountains in Saxen-Anhalt area.

The day was bright and I enjoyed my walk. I walked fast. There was nobody around, but the birds were singing, the sun was shining, and I was free at last. Every so often I would break into a run from the sheer joy of it all. Just think – no more superior race, no more fear of imprisonment, no more killing. Maybe even food. How stupid, I did not ask the Americans for any food. There was nothing to eat in sight. I decided to try and address the first group of Americans that I found on the matter of food. There was a village in sight. I moved faster.

On the side of the road, a whole column of tanks. I decided to stop at the third one. I greeted them. We talked a while. These guys at least tried to understand me and got a big kick out of my broken English. Where did I learn it and all that. Where is Berlin [46]? But no food. After a while I realized my approach would not work. I walked away. All the soldiers were inactive and strangely subdued. The radios inside the tanks were blaring a description of something that sounded like a speech. I did not realize that this was the day when Roosevelt died.

46. In the last weeks of the war all US troops and in particular Patton’s third army, wanted to get to the capital of Germany before the Russians took it.

Then I spied, a few tanks away, a couple of GI’s eating from a tin. “Have you got anything to eat?” I asked.

“Eh? What do you want?”

“Eat, eat. I am hungry.” He looked at me searchingly. A smile danced in his eyes. He jumped into the tank and appeared at the turret.

“Here, catch!” It was a packet of K rations [47]. I thanked him but could not bring myself to say any more. I was ashamed.

I walked fast again. This time I was running from the site of my embarrassment, but I guess it was worth it. The K rations tasted wonderful after my fast. I saw a figure walking in the distance and decided to catch up to him. It turned out to be a man with a Polish soldier’s cap on his head. I addressed him in Polish. He spoke with a southern accent, must come from Galicja [48], I thought. He told me he was sick of serving the Germans on a farm and was going to relax in a Polish camp in Halberstadt. So here again was the confirmation that I was going in the right direction.

Now I had to slow down a bit. The man did not feel like hurrying. I was considering whether to stay with him. Apparently he knew where the camp was and also knew Halberstadt. He claimed that the camp was run by his friends. At noon he decided to take a rest. He had food with him, bread and sausage, and shared with me. He offered me some alcoholic beverage but I declined.

We continued our journey and soon we caught up to a good-looking but somewhat stout redhead. My companion struck up a conversation. It turned out that the woman was also going to Halberstadt – she had a small daughter in an apartment there. Apparently she had visited her in-laws in the country. She was worried about passing close to the Russian prisoners’ camp on the outskirts of town. My companion said he would make sure that nothing happened to her on the way. It turned out that she had good cause. The Russian prisoners, now liberated, were making up for the years of being celibate. In those days of lawlessness, nobody prevented them from raping every woman in sight.

47. There were two types of food rations that the US troops were carrying (at least as far as I was aware at that time). C rations were suited for distribution of hot food, but K rations served as emergency rations. Tank forces in particular had boxes of K rations inside their vehicles. A box of K rations was a balanced diet, rations containing some protein and some carbohydrate and fat. It contained cigarettes and chocolate, which generally were the most valuable exchange items. One could often find a packet of K rations, from which a soldier took out cigarettes and chocolate, thrown away at the side of the road.

48. A district of southern Poland.

My companion prevented the group of Russians standing at the gate from taking the girl into the camp by claiming that she was his wife. This was of course very nice of him, but then he insisted on accompanying her to her apartment, where she offered us a drink of some sort. Now a long period of seduction began. The woman tried to imply that she was greatly attracted to me, whereas I had no interest in the business other than to try and get to the Polish camp as soon as possible. My companion would not give up. For all I know, he may still be hanging around her house. Her appeal to me was so obvious that I finally dragged him out onto the street. We got to the camp after midnight.

It was an awful place. A large theater full of people trying to satisfy their basic needs: food, going to the bathroom and mixing with the opposite sex. There was hardly a place to lie your head down in peace. In the morning, after obtaining my share of daily rations dispensed by some unsavory group of officials, I inquired whether there was any other place.

“Yes, there is a place near the lake. But the guys there are all those AK guys. They keep very much to themselves and insist on law and order. No fun.”

“Thanks for telling me,” I said without elaboration, and left to look for the place. As it turned out later this was not the only other place where there were camps near the city. Anyway I found the place at the lake. There were many guys there whom I had met previously in Altengrabow. In fact the majority of them comprised a group which had left Altengrabow to work in a quarry in the Hartz mountains. They walked to town because the mountains still harbored a couple of divisions of SS. I was accepted by the group, but not before I was interrogated by the commander of the place, a lieutenant of AK by the name of Kowalski. He was a very smart cookie. In those early days he made sure that the group marched through a German army supply depot and a textile factory carrying substantial amounts of war spoils, which helped sustain us in the succeeding weeks.

Most of the camps relied on requisition slips, which were issued by the US city commandant. Halberstadt, like many other places, was ruled by a QMC lieutenant with a major force of two men. This was all that Patton could spare for a city of 200.000. The lieutenant would issue a series of chits, which the German administration had to honor with food for each day. What food you got depended a lot on your ability to argue or threaten the administrator.

Kowalski was good. I never saw him lose an argument. He looked non-descript, never raised his voice, and his demeanor was such that after a while his opponent felt guilty of mistreating him. He used to get his wish from most of the authorities or at least would leave with a promise of continuing the current discourse.

Our rations, in quality no different than what other people obtained, were substantial in quantity. Furthermore, a lively black-market activity, involving materials originally obtained from the German army stores soon after our liberation, supplemented our diet and provided other amenities, such as clothing and amusement (meaning: sex). Within the larger group, we soon formed smaller groups of friends who remained together for a long time after. I still have friends in Australia whom I first got to know in the Polish camp at the Halberstadt lake. Most of the boys that I befriended were just a year or two older, and had worked in a quarry in the Hartz mountains while prisoners of war under the third Reich, and most of them were from the Warsaw uprising.

I had left Aschersleben on April 13. On the 3rd of May we celebrated Polish Constitution Day in Halberstadt. We invited some Americans, Italians and French. I remember in particular one Italian who would not give up singing for (so he thought) our entertainment. In those early days, besides chasing women, our entertainment was driving abandoned cars. Most of the time the fun was over as soon as the gas ran out. There was no gasoline to be obtained except from the American troops, and the GI’s were still involved in fighting the war. Not for the lack of trying! I remember one group trying to drive a car on acetone paint. It went for a while but then the engine sort of gummed up. Of course none of us really knew how to drive, but that did not seem to daunt our enthusiasm.

Every so often a motorized column would stop close to one of us and inquire about the direction of Berlin. It seemed the predominant interest of all the troops: get to Berlin. The reason we were accosted often was that we were generally dressed in the old US uniforms which were given to us by the Red Cross just before the end of the war.

The war in Germany ended soon after. In the meantime we were tasting freedom, getting drunk, chasing girls, and building new acquaintances. Leszek found a camp full of Polish girls and got us all acquainted with some of them. They were no different than the boys in their pursuits. We used to visit three sisters from Kutno. One fell in love with Leszek, one spent most of her evenings in the Italian prisoners’ camp with some Romeo or other, and the remaining one was trying to attract other three or four of us.

German girls came to visit our camp often, mainly because we had more food and cigarettes. Of course we were very much second rate to the American soldiers. The German girls were more sophisticated. They taught us to play games: anything starting from “pass the straw along” and “post office” to “pass the partner along” and “night-time skinny dipping.” I suppose the German girls had had a lot of recent experience doing all this stuff with German soldiers on leave.

Somewhere in Potsdam the big guys were discussing our future, while a great exodus began. The French were going to France, Italians to Italy (even the girl’s sweetheart disappeared overnight) – British and American ex-prisoners left within days of liberation. Then the Jews started emigrating to Palestine and the Russians were unceremoniously transported to the Russian zone. Soon after, or maybe even before, the remaining displaced people were moved to larger camps. First the 30th Division took over our district and began to establish some order. Before they got very far, the British took over our district and promptly turned it over to the Russians. The people who did not want to go to Poland in the first transport leaving were moved to Bad Hartzburg. The girls from Kutno, one broken-hearted because the Italians left, the other broken-hearted because Leszek did not want to get married, left in the first transport to Poland. So did one of our friends, Stefan.

We lived in beautiful houses in Bad Hartzburg, one of the prettiest places in the Hartz Mountains. I enjoyed it especially because somebody had left a great collection of Mozart and Haydn records in the villa where we stayed. John was playing the piano which we found there.

Charlie, who left a German sweetheart in what now was the Russian zone, went twice across the border to see his sweetheart. The rest of us wandered over the mountains. We found a group of Polish girls who seemed to live all by themselves in a big house. It took us a week or so to persuade them to move in with other Polish people. It turned out that they were afraid to mix with other Poles. The Germans had forced them (or convinced them, I don’t know which) to serve as a travelling army brothel. Their guards left before the advancing American army and the girls just stayed in the house the Germans had left them in.

They were definitely an interesting set of characters. Blond Mary who couldn’t refuse anybody, dark-haired Mary who wouldn’t let anybody before marriage, Kinga who did not know what she wanted, and Horsey (her nickname related to her looks), a one-man girl always supporting her boy. I can’t remember the others but some of my friends certainly have various memories about them.

Bad Hartzburg didn’t last long. This time there were more choices. The British were forming groups of people under a designated camp leader. We stayed with Kowalski, but now the group included a couple of other ex-AK groups and some Poles from the 1939 campaign. We moved to a camp in a field, not far from Helmstedt.

This camp was probably as ideal as a camp for displaced people can be. The camp housed only ex-prisoners of war. Kowalski managed somehow to obtain supplies from the Germans and from the English and even from the Red Cross. There was something not quite legal about this operation, but as we were not informed about it, who worried? About a mile and a half from our camp there was a large DP camp. We would invite women to our dances from the other camp and conduct all our social life between the two camps. The other camp was not nearly as well fed or dressed and nobody in the other camp received the English military rations nor the Red Cross parcels. Thus we played rich uncles or rich daddies as the case may be. We were also surrounded by German villages and close to the Russian zone. Thus in addition to being well supplied with goods, many participated in black market and across-the-border traffic.

Our room housed mostly boys from AK who were too idealistic (or too stupid – depending on the personal opinion) to engage much in the illegal activities. The worst of the group in our room was Zbigniew, who was a bit of a sexual maniac, and Johnny, who was a habitual drunk.

It was a good day when Zbigniew was sleeping at some girl’s house, otherwise he was likely to have a girl in bed in our room. We finally told him that either he had to move out or we would put his bed in the passage outside our door, so we did not have to listen to his orgies. From then on Zbigniew would give us lessons in masturbation.

The problem with Johnny was that he could not stop drinking, and drank not very selectively. One time he got drunk on rocket alcohol and was dead to the world for three days. Occasionally he would wake up to take a sip of water, whereupon we had to help him back to bed, as he could not stand on his feet. We all agreed that anybody else would have died from the stuff, but his body was so used to being poisoned by alcohol that he survived the ordeal and started eating again after four days.

Down the hallway from us there was a roomful of ex-criminals from Mokotow prison. During the uprising in Warsaw, our troops had taken the prison from the Germans and held it for a few days. When we were withdrawing, prisoners were given a choice to fight Germans alongside our troops. Many took this opportunity to get out from prison. Now a group of them lived only a door away from us. These people were dangerous. They actually preyed on some German villages, and when somebody opposed them, they were known to murder people without any remorse. Some of the campers were terrorized by the group. They tried to terrorize our group by barging in one day and demanding we give them something (I believe it was alcohol). Since all eighteen of us stood up and told them to get out, they stopped bothering us. It was a dangerous moment, as they came in armed, while we were defending our peace with bare hands.

We still retained most of our old group: Leszek and Jerzy, Charlie and Paul, Janusz and Zbyszek and many others. I still have their photographs. The camp’s style of living in the “luxury” got rather boring after a number of dances, love affairs and even some rather interesting acquaintances and visiting with the other camp back and forth. We decided to travel through Europe. I went on a big trip with Jerzy and Janusz. We visited northern Germany: Hamburg, Lübeck, Minden and Köln; then we moved through the southern part: Frankfurt, Mannheim, Augsburg, Nurnberg and Munich. We even wandered to Austria and Italy and France. On the way back we met a girl who claimed to be a courier from the Polish underground. She convinced us to travel to Poland with her.

We travelled by train to a village somewhat north of our camp on the advice of the (alleged) courier from the underground. She seemed to have taken a fancy to Jerzy. Janusz went back to the camp. We slept in a farmhouse near the border, Jerzy and the courier in one bed and I in the other. Early in the morning we tried to cross the border, but were caught by the Russian border guards (NKVD). They took us into a big barn. Over the day the barn filled up with many people caught. We were interrogated by a lieutenant of NKVD and informed him uniformly that we were going home. The only reason we did not go by a normal transport was our youth and inexperience. Can you believe what lies people are getting into under an interrogation? Who knows, maybe this was really the truth.

At night the guards came to take all the women for a night of enjoyment (theirs, not necessarily the women’s). Our friend the courier, being already experienced in the ways of the world (or at least the border guards) never came back from the interview with the lieutenant. I guess it was better to deal with one man than with the whole company. We were released in the morning, possibly through a new-found influence of the courier, and told to make our way to Poland, but we never saw the courier again.

We took a train to Berlin. We travelled with beating hearts, since we had no acceptable papers. Still we were going toward our homeland, which theoretically was a legal journey. Once in Berlin we breathed freer. After all we could move to one of the US or British or French zones. Should we go ahead? Well, we decided to try it. A train from Ostkreutz to Frankfurt-am-Oder? No, there are no such trains; the only trains moving in that direction are the Russian army trains. Where is such an army train? The German official looks sarcastically and thinks for a moment. I could sense his thoughts: “This guy is a foreigner, he is crazy, am I my brother’s keeper? Or does he know something I don’t know? Naa, but to hell with him anyhow, he will find out…”

“There is a train full of Russian soldiers. Nobody else travels on that train!”

“Are you sure it is going to Frankfurt?”

“Oh yes, maybe even to Warsaw!” We walked to the train and sat down on the back of one of the carriages on a little walkway permitting the brakeman to walk from one side of the train to the other.

The train did not leave till the evening. I was tired now and slept in a very precarious position: high up on the railway carriage without any hope of hanging on to any support. I woke up in the morning – the train was beginning to move again after standing at some stop signal. It continued on until the afternoon when it stopped again this time at a station: Frankfurt-am-Oder read the sign. We discussed the situation with Jerzy. There was no use waiting for the train to move. The next barrier was the Polish-German border and we did not know what would happen there. We were not supposed to travel on the Russian troop train for sure. If we could get to the border we could claim that we were refugees coming home.

We stopped for a while on a deserted platform with a few bags that we had with us. A Russian soldier was standing there. He looked at us and we looked at him. Finally he walked toward us and asked who we were and where we were going. We are going home. “Not much baggage?” he asked.

“No, not really.”

“Well, I am going home too. We’ve got to walk across the bridge. But I have too much baggage.” We noticed that he was a sergeant of the NKVD – border guards. Not a bad companion to cross the border with.

“We will help you to carry your bags,” I said.

The bridge was a crude affair built during war action, but it carried us through to Kustrin or Kustrzyn as it was now called. It was its proper name; Prussians changed it to Kuestrin back in the eighteenth century. Kustrzyn, originally a city of 100.000, was totally destroyed in the fight between German and Russian troops. The only building standing was half a house that housed the Polish police. We obtained a ticket and a hundred zloty to carry us home, by claiming to be returning home.

The train had broken windows and was overloaded but one way or another we got to Warsaw. I remember there was some unpleasantness with Polish troops evicting other passengers from choice seats. The so called “Polish officers” couldn’t speak Polish, but conversed between themselves in Russian.

When we arrived in Warsaw, it was not the old main railway station but the commercial transport siding that the trains stopped at. The rest of Warsaw was still in ruins. In fact one could not see a house standing in the area through which we walked.

I don’t remember exactly how, but the next day we got to Jerzy’s house. He lived in Wlochy, close to Warsaw. His house and family were intact. I kept looking for my relatives, friends, acquaintances – all of the familiar places seemed destroyed. Slowly I found people I knew in Mlociny: Marian and his father were alive and living in the same house. Stach, my friend from school, still lived in his old house at Bielany. And then I found one of my father’s business associates through his son. I knew that his son had returned to Poland in an early transport. He was now a military youth instructor in the #1 National High School (once called Batory HS). Through his father I found out that my father was in what was called the new territories, the part of eastern Germany that was incorporated into Poland.

It was interesting that the man who told me about my father was regarded by my father as a poor performer. My father maintained that he had to watch him very closely; otherwise the guy would make serious judgement errors. This man was selected by the Polish authorities to lead the National Insurance Organization. My father and other senior managers were not allowed to work in the Insurance Organization because of their alleged cooperation with German authorities – meaning they remained working in their key managerial positions while the Germans ran the GG.

Mr Dobrzycki, the man who told me about my father, was very nice. He told me how much he appreciated the help my father was giving him in his letters, how he could always rely on him to solve any difficult problems, and how he wished that the conditions were different. I thought the last statement was possibly made tongue in cheek. Still I appreciated getting my father’s address and decided to go to see him immediately. The route to Karlino, where my father lived now, could be taken through Kolobrzeg or through Szczecin. I had no money. One way of obtaining some money was to claim that I just came back to Poland. That could only be done at the Polish border and Szczecin was a border town. So I went to Szczecin.

I had a couple of minor scares. At Pila there was a Russian army establishment and the route was closely guarded. I had no papers and no ticket, a double jeopardy subject to arrest by the police (Bezpieka) at any time. As the train entered the military zone all the windows had to be covered, and in the middle of the zone, the Bezpieka started checking the documents of the passengers. It was lucky for me that as I moved slowly through the train trying to avoid the encounter with the police, the train passed the military zone. I got out at the next stop seemingly to enter the station, and then boarded the train just before it left the station, into a car already checked by the police. The second scare was in Szczecin. I had to know when the train from Berlin arrived in order to know when to appear like I was coming by this train into the city. Well, I was caught by the Bezpieka at the train. Fortunately they could not tell whether I was on the train or not.

They took me to the main police station and passed me though the “grinder” – an interrogation lasting four hours. I had to give them the names of Polish officers who were trying to talk us into staying in the West. I came out with Joseph Nowak, Adam Zielinski and Jan Krupa. If the police ever find all of them and identify them, it will be their lucky day. Otherwise, I also told them the story of my travel as it had happened, except that I claimed to be alone. I changed my itinerary in Berlin.

I got my hundred zloty. I felt I had earned it. I also got a free ticket to anywhere in Poland, which was the second bonus of crossing the border. The one-way pass also identified me as a newcomer to Poland, permitting me to travel in the direction of Warsaw without any additional papers.

And so off to Karlino. I arrived late at night. The lady that opened the door was somewhat suspicious and spoke German only. She allowed me to wait for my father but only on the staircase. I was very tired and fell asleep on the doorstep. My father woke me up early in the morning. He wept from the happiness of seeing me there. It turned out he had been playing bridge all night with his friends. I spent delightful two days with him. I met all his friends and got introduced to all the youth of my age (they were not too many at that time in the new territories). Father was trying very hard to induce me to stay with him. He mentioned the possibility of getting me a job in different branches of the newly formed government of the new territories. He also mentioned the possibility of studying in Warsaw with his financial support. I suppose I was very ungrateful and unloving, but the memory of the interrogation by Bezpieka was very fresh in my mind. I wanted to think and so I changed the topic. I asked him what he was doing, what happened to mother and Alina, and did he know about our other relatives.

I gathered that Alina had left Poland. Aunt Jadwiga lived reasonably peacefully in Zakopane. The Brodowscy were somewhere in Poland. He had seen the Jezioranski brothers, but was not sure where they were. He knew that the Kobyleccy were living in Warsaw. Alka, Ania and Kostek were in appropriate places, but I no longer remember what he said about them.

He was working hard. His original job grew every day to more and more jobs. There were not many skilled people in the new territories.

All people who claimed to be Polish and resided in eastern Poland now annexed by Russia had to move to the new territories. Most of them were farmers. All of these resettled people, literally millions of people, were uprooted and moved to the new territories. The lucky ones, mostly the people who had to leave the land in the Russian territories, were allocated houses and sometimes land. Others were just located in the new territories in an environment that was considerably different than the environment from which they came. German people who had lived in the “new territories” before, were evicted and sent to east Germany. This of course created millions of dissatisfied people, both Polish and German, who hated one another as well.

My father volunteered to go to the new territories and was accepted because of his financial and commercial skill. His first job was to be a financial advisor to a sub-district officer. It soon became apparent that he had great organizational ability and new jobs were given to him as the time progressed. He organized the district finances, agricultural cooperatives, crop insurance, banking, courts, hospitals, transport, social clubs – in total he had thirteen jobs when he died. On the day of his death in the hospital he was auditing hospital books while a patient in that very hospital. His activities only pointed out the tremendous shortage of talent in the occupied territories that very likely contributed to the general poverty of Poland.

By the time I visited him, he was offered the possession of the house where he lived as a sort of recognition of his services to the district. He refused, because it was owned by the German lady who let me into the house originally. She pleaded with him to take it, since she was going to be evicted anyway and was afraid that somebody else would get her house. My father said that he could not participate in the illegal acquisition of property. Of course such moral feelings never stopped German occupiers from taking our property.

I loved him very much, but could not bring myself to sacrifice my life for him. I lacked his ability to perform in the hostile environment. All his superiors were in their positions not because of their ability but because of their association with the political regime, whose philosophy I could not share. My feelings tend to exaggerate the influence of the Russians on the system. It appeared to me that I would be coming back into an occupied Poland rather than a free state. I found an excuse in my promise to my friends in the west that I will come back and tell what were the conditions in Poland. If that was so, I should have returned to Poland afterwards but I never did. I was searching for self gratification.

Anyway, I stayed with him a couple of days only and left to go back to Warsaw. While in Warsaw I found Henry, the man my brother went to “save.” He returned and lived in the house in which I started the uprising. The house was burnt but turned out to be relatively easy to reconstruct. I found some of my school friends and visited most of families of the boys who were now in the camp near Helmstedt.

We proceeded to travel out of Poland with Jerzy. We tried first to cross the border near Cieszyn. We were caught by the Polish border guards and bribed them to let us go. This took all of the money that I obtained from my father and Jerzy from his parents. We arrived in Cieszyn on the Czech side and got caught again by the Czech police. This time we ended up in prison.

After interrogation, in which I practiced my father’s advice: if you have to tell a lie, cover it with a lot of truth, we were put in a cell with other eighty people. Some of them were the criminals. Some of them were in prison for five years already. In fact, those that were in prison for a long time were the privileged few who slept on two beds provided (eight people to a bed). Others slept on the floor, the more recent ones, the closer to the door. We were guarded by the German SS. The Czech authorities considered that SS had the longest experience in guarding prisoners; therefore they were the most qualified. Of course the SS guards were prisoners themselves and could not leave the prison building, but they administered, guarded, treated and fed the other prisoners. That is why being close to the door was not advantageous: you never knew how the SS would feel a particular day.

The cell housing the eighty prisoners was about 10 by 12 feet, including a toilet. The toilet not only permitted the normal function but also served as a source of water. There was no tap from which to obtain water to drink and the only way to wash, one had to be very adept to flush the toilet and sprinkle the water from the draining flow on one’s face or hands. Since we were in prison only eight days, I never mastered the technique. I did, however, get infected with lice, reminding me of the other times spent in prison.

Of course one of the highest crimes (the judges of the crimes were the oldest prisoners) was to dirty the sides of the toilet while taking a bowel movement. This affected the ability of others to obtain the drinking water. The penalty for crimes was the usual beating by the volunteer executioners. Since there are many criminal types in prison, incurring the beating was not advisable. Other crimes were stealing, offending the elders, making smells etc.

We got soup once a day and bread with other stuff once a day. In fact the food was somewhat better than the Germans fed us in POW camp. And that after SS stole their portion, never mind other authorities, whose share we could not even guess.

There was the usual abuse of the newcomers, which you better took rather quietly, or one might incur severe penalty. Loss of life was advertised as a good thing: the room was overcrowded. We experienced a beating, but no loss of life while we were there.

I must say that we were not sorry to be taken out of prison after eight days. We were informed that since we were Polish we will be transported back to Poland.

Our guard was a talkative young man. He had good memories of the wartime partisans and told us about cooperation between Polish and Czech partisans. We convinced him that we were partisans ourselves and described some of our activities, coloring them somewhat for good effect. He told us that at the Polish border he will have to empty himself and that his responsibility finished when we were on the Polish soil, which was a very nice way of suggesting our escape. We took advantage of his suggestion and jumped out of the train in between the Czech and Polish border inspection. It was lucky that we now knew the drill, having been caught on both sides of the border.

After jumping out from the train, we stayed close to the railway. We noticed that the border guards assumed that nobody will be stupid enough to stay close to the high concentration of border guards: the railway line. Thus it was the safest area. We needed to wait only a short time before a train with people returning home arrived. Now the border police was busy sorting out the transport, counting people, selecting groups of people to go through the particular entry.

We got mixed with a group on the way to the standard refugee acceptance route. It was the returning people who were somewhat upset when we got in front of some people. But we had experience there as well. We suggested to a guy with a lot of baggage that we will help him with it. He kept very close, afraid that we will steal some of it, while we were really trying to get lost in the crowd. We got through the identification process without any trouble. As a matter of fact, we repeated the procedure three more times since we were now short of money and each returning refugee got a ticket and a hundred dollars. We had already planned to go to Warsaw and then back to more familiar Polish-German border, so we got tickets to Warsaw and to the western and northern Poland.

After going to Warsaw we only stayed there a couple of days. I could notice Jerzy already getting reluctant to leave, so I insisted on travelling soon. I was determined now to go back; finally I knew I could not stand another stint of life in prison. From Warsaw we went back to Kostrzyn. Kostrzyn was much tighter now, full of border NKVD. We found the reason for this police treatment: the evacuation of Germans from the Polish territories was in progress. There was a number of trains full of German evacuees at the railway station. This gave us the idea to cross the border in the evacuee train.

At the right side there was a line of NKVD, then on the left another train and another line of NKVD. We walked to the end of the train and then moved across. At the end, another group of NKVD. I decided on my old device. We walked now on the other side of the trains and then stopped and talked to the NKVD soldier in the middle of the train. I asked him what were those trains, where they were going, etc.

An NCO noticed our discussion and came in to asked us who we were. Oh, well, we just came back home and wondered what was the commotion. He told the soldier to watch the train and told us off. I apologized and said we will move in a moment, we just wanted to rest a while. We sat down on the platform. Soon the NCO got interested in something at the front of the train. We sat for a while on the platform and suddenly boarded the train. We moved towards the front of the train. We saw the NCO coming back and searching for us. We kept moving forward through the train. Soon the train began to move. Now we watched for the bridge and across the bridge the train turned south. It was moving through the ruins in a semicircle. I said to Jerzy, “Let’s jump out now. The back and the front of the train is around the curve.”

We landed in a ditch and lay there until the train was gone. As soon as the train was out of sight we ran through the ruins. After five minutes or so we walked in the direction of main highway. We sat for a while on the side of the road.

A Russian truck transport was coming down the road. Jerzy pulled out a bottle of vodka. We let the first few trucks pass and then signalled with the bottle. The third truck stopped with the driver grabbing the bottle.

“Where are you going?” I said.

“Berlin Bernau,” was the answer.

“Can we come along?”

“Get on the back.” We climbed on the back of the truck. The truck was full of potatoes. We sat on top of the potatoes. This was travelling first class.

The column stopped somewhere, but it was not Berlin. We climbed down. We moved a little way to the side and waited for an explanation. The driver who took our bottle of vodka asked us whether we were hungry. He brought us some baked potatoes after receiving an affirmative answer. We engaged him in conversation. They came all the way from Brzesc in Russia. They stopped to wait for a truck that got lost on the way, they had to have a full complement when they would arrive in Berlin. They will leave as soon as the find the truck. They were nearly a thousand miles from Brzesc, could take a long time. We walked a little way into the village and found a young German boy. He told us a railway station in the village was not functional. The nearest train was seven miles away. We decided to walk there. The train only began travelling to Berlin from this station a week before. The station master was very surprised to have any passengers at all.

We got to Berlin the next evening. As soon as we got to Ostkreutz, we went on E-Bahn to the American sector. Although we still had a ways to go, it made us feel better to be in the American sector.

We came to a railway station in central Berlin and tried to figure out our itinerary. The place was packed with refugees. Obviously the transports from Poland and the extensions of railways to the east made their impact on the movement of the population. German people were telling horror stories about the life in the eastern part of East Germany. First of all there was the Russian occupier who allegedly raped and robbed. Secondly the eastern part suffered the most from the fighting near the end of war. All facilities were destroyed and the lack of transport hampered the reconstruction efforts. Finally, due to the bad conditions, many epidemics broke out. Lack of water and medical facilities contributed to the epidemics.

We had to wait until morning for the train going west. As we stood in the middle of the station leaning against a pillar of partially destroyed railway station, a man offered me a seat by moving to the side on the bench on which he was sitting. I sat down and fell asleep. In my sleep I felt a hand moving inside my inner thighs. Before I fully woke up, I swung my arm and struck the man sitting next to me with my elbow. When I woke up, I realized that I hurt his face. Still, I could not bring myself to apologize.

The train we boarded in the morning took us to Magdeburg. Further travel was only possible with the permission of the German chief of police and the Russian commandant. Anyway there was no train until the morning. While we slept at the Magdeburg railway station, there were two spot checks of documents by the NKVD. Luckily the place was full of people, and luckily the NKVD did not ask us for papers and the rationale for being there. We had to get somehow on the train without the tickets, since we had no permit to go west from anybody.

Early in the morning we wandered into the open area of the station by climbing over the ruins. We knew the time and the direction of the train, thus we could guess which train we needed to board. We were on the train sitting on the floor before anybody boarded the train yet. As soon as the train was in place it was surrounded by the police and each person boarding the train was checked and searched. The train did not leave until the late morning.

In the afternoon we had to change trains. A smaller train (narrow track) was already waiting at the station when we arrived. The smaller train was full of people. A mass run toward the train ensued before the police was able to stop the crowd. Soon a cordon of police formed and all subsequent people were advised that only people with specific papers will be allowed to board the train. All the people who boarded before were advised to get out to get their papers checked. We simply moved along toward the back of the train. It took literally hours for the police to release the train, but by the time the train started moving we were on the train and in the middle of very sizable crowd.

It was one of the slowest trains I was ever on. When it was going uphill we would jump out of the train and ran ahead for exercise, then jump back on when the train caught up to us. For some reason there was no police on the train, maybe because it was overloaded, but we had to watch for the conductor since we had no tickets. Sometime at night it finally got to the place called Wolfburg (or Wölfenburg – I can’t remember which). Anyway it was not far from Helmstedt, only Helmstedt of course was on the other side of the border, on the other side of the “iron curtain.” While still on the train we made acquaintance with a group of German refugees who were themselves trying to get over to the other side: a middle-aged German beauty who take a shine to me (a nice young boy!), a German major who continually tried to persuade everybody that the world would be so much better if Hitler won the war, a frightened and exhausted family who nearly starved in the eastern part of East Germany and so on. These people told us of a guide who took people across for a payment. We planned to promise him a substantial payment in American cigarettes once we got across.

We slept in a barn in the little country town (I’ll better not get back to trying to recall its name). The German major would not let go of his speeches about the glory of the Hitler times. Somewhat irritated, I asked him finally why he felt that he was mistreated. He recounted a story of his imprisonment by the Russians in Stalingrad. After he was taken prisoner he was made to walk with common soldiers nearly five hundred miles.

“Did anybody else march with him?” I asked.

“Yes, of course, the Russian guards, the German soldiers… It is not according to the Geneva convention to treat the officers the same as the common soldiers,” he said.

“Did you know that the Soviet Russia never signed the Geneva convention?” I asked.

“That is beside the point,” he said. “Listen, they not only marched us five hundred miles but only fed us black bread and herrings on the way. Quarter of a loaf a day and one herring.”

“What did the guards eat?” I asked.

“Well, the same thing, but they are used to it,” he said. “I was the member of Marshal Paulus’ staff.”

“That is very impressive. Did you know that the Russian prisoners were marched by the Germans from the Russian front to the center of Poland without being fed?”

“Well, that is different! You said yourself that the Russians never signed the Geneva convention.”

“There was a cemetery containing fifty thousand Russian soldiers, who died from hunger after being taken prisoner near Zamosc!” I said.

“Look,” he said “the Russian themselves send the surviving ex-prisoners to the Gulag camps! What was the use of keeping them alive – the uneducated mongol Horde!”

“Well,” I said, “my experience with the Russian authority is not a very happy one. On the other hand I would not really call the years under Hitler full of joy.”

“You needn’t have to fight the greatest army in the world.”

“Somehow they lost the war,” I said.

“Well, of course you are prejudiced,” he said.

“That is true,” I replied.

And so passed the night in the barn. For the rest of the night I lay close to my fan, the middle-aged lady. At least she was warm and not argumentative (good influence!).

The guide got us up at 3 am. We walked single file down the main road. He told us to keep close and quiet. After a few miles we turned into the field and walked around a large well-lit building. “What building is that?” I asked.

“Headquarters of the border NKVD,” the guide replied. “Keep very quiet now. Tell the others not to talk.” I did as I was told. After we passed the building, we came back to walk on the main road. Around five o’clock we passed under the barrier strung across the border point. On the side there was a little guardhouse with nobody in it. It was truly amazing. We kept walking in silence for another half an hour until we heard the sound of an engine.

“Get into the forest quick!” the guide said. We moved to lie down in the bushes. A jeep with three English soldiers passed by. After the sound of the engine receded we continued walking. Soon we could see Helmstedt in the distance. We parted with the group and walked into a small camp where we had friends: Kajtek, Robert, two Marys (the black and the blonde), Kinga and others. We were so happy.

We got stuffed and drunk and we celebrated by going to sleep with the girls. My partner was the black Mary who let me kiss her and play with her but nothing more. I didn’t mind. Mary was waiting for the right kind of man to get married to. She got married to a wealthy English merchant and, true to her word, did not invite us even to her wedding.

The guide came a week later to get his payment. We let him have not only our rations and saved cigarettes but we robbed some of our friends to shower him with gifts. He was impressed.

We were continually called upon to tell people about the conditions in Poland and about their relatives, if we saw them. Kowalski got an offer from the British army to form a work company to help the British with guarding the border. Kowalski terms were too stiff. He asked the British to treat us like the British soldiers and still give us same privileges as other displaced persons. The British told him off. Anyway soon afterwards a transport to Poland was formed. Kowalski decided to go to Poland. This caused everybody to formed decisions about their future. A lot of my friends went to Poland, especially the marrying kind. Zbyszek got engaged and went to Poland with his fiancée, Jerzy got married and went to Poland. And so on.

For the rest of us, we needed to do something useful. US army was recruiting Poles to work in the labor companies, which permitted them to reduce the quantity of the US troops in Germany. A large transport was formed of the men who decided to go to work. In addition to people from our camp, the men from other two camps near Helmstedt decided to go.

Now that I was without a job, I found the days to be long and tedious. Robert visited us and suggested that I can get a job in Wiesbaden where he worked, but I felt I could not leave my friends. When the announcement was made that the Australian mission is coming to recruit people for work in Australia, I was ready to go. My friends agreed that we have to leave this idle camp life as soon as possible.