I was born in 1919 in the royal town of Kuty, the southernmost town in pre-World War II Poland, a sleepy town dozing since the reign of the Jagiellonians, until it collided with history in the tragic September of 1939. That autumn it became one of the border crossings for the Polish troops, civil servants, and members of government evacuating to Romania. Poles were the minority in Kuty. Armenians were the mayors of the town and were, after Ukrainians and Jews, the third largest ethnic group. The Poles were dead last. My father was a judge in this town, and I was the youngest of four siblings. We grew up in a home full of love and strict etiquette. No one dared so much as to raise a spoon to his lips before Mother sat down with us at the table. Then we were expected to compliment her on her cooking or to keep our mouths shut.

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I attended a high school located some forty-two kilometres away in Kołomyja, It was a boarding school, and I often felt homesick. But I could go home to Kuty only for major holidays. The discipline in the boarding school was draconian. Strapping and time out in a special detention room were the order of the day. And yet constant interactions with my peers, camping, Scouting, and cadet corps helped me understand the importance of comradery in a group, and in the army. This Spartan upbringing probably had a considerable influence on the way I weathered the later vicissitudes of my life. Then came the matriculation exams.

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Complying with my father’s wishes, I went to Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów to study law, although my heart had always been set on medicine. I was hoping to take up medicine after I finished law, as my father suggested. At the university, I became a member of the Academic Legion, a paramilitary organization. As a rule, the rank earned in the legion was later recognized in the army. Once a week we were confined to barracks and instead of going to classes and lectures, we went to roll call and military exercises. That day we had to wear special uniforms, which we normally kept at home.

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In the summer of 1939, after I had finished the second year of my law program, I went home for the holidays. It was a restless summer. Every day we listened to the radio announcements in an atmosphere charged with tense expectation. There were rumours about partial mobilization. There was also much posturing: “Let them try,” some would say, “and we’ll dance the next waltz in Berlin.” My father would often go to the courthouse after hours, expecting at any moment an order to open the sealed, top-secret document cache containing mobilization posters. Finally, the order came, and I spotted a policeman hanging a poster on an old oak tree.

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My brother, four years older than I and an officer in the reserve, was called up for active duty. We listened intently to radio broadcasts, trying to separate the grains of truth from the chaff of speculation. I was convinced that the Academic Legion would also be mobilized any day, so I jumped on my motorcycle and rode to Lwów, only to find that my conviction was unfounded. As there was little that I could do there, I had no choice but to face the southern winds and the ride back home. Only later did I realize how dangerous this escapade was, for some Ukrainian factions were already stirring up unrest. Fortunately, I spoke Ukrainian well enough and made it home without incident.

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Around 15 September, the first small military convoys began to approach Kuty. The main convoys were moving in the direction of Zaleszczyki, and some went towards Sniatyri, both being border crossings. But the flood of convoys reached Kuty, too. An unbroken chain of vehicles roared and rattled over the bridge on the Prut, built by military engineers. First to cross the bridge was the air force, in highly organized and disciplined units. Amid this general frantic activity, I was drafted into the National Defence. They gave us white and red arm bands and old Austrian rifles, almost museum pieces, for which we had no ammunition. We were meant to reinforce the Frontier Guards, but to this day I don’t have the foggiest idea what that was supposed to mean. If professional Frontier Guards could not control smugglers, how could we do it with our make-believe rifles? Besides, those smugglers later turned out to be valuable allies and helped guide many people over the border. Eventually, we were sent to regulate the traffic moving towards the border, and I was posted at the crossing of two roads, one from the north, from Kosów , and the other from Śniatyń. At that post I could see both the drama and the folly of the fleeing crowds. There was much talk, later, about the frantic exodus of civilians, and sarcastic accounts of fashionable ladies with their pets and canary cages streaming along the roads towards the border crossings. True enough, I saw some carrying lapdogs, and I probably thought then that it was foolish vanity, but today, from the perspective of years and experience, I find it neither very surprising nor culpable.

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One day a troop of soldiers arrived in Kuty, led by a captain of the reserve and maybe a company strong. They came with jeeps, trucks, a light anti-tank gun, and machine guns, and set up their command centre across the street from our house. The captain announced that he would stop the Bolsheviks, and that he would defend this bridgehead. He sent out soldiers to take positions on the roads leading to town. Word came from Kosów that the Russians had already arrived there. This meant imminent fighting, and people began to panic. The mayor asked my father to persuade the captain that he could not win this war. The captain’s nerves had begun to show - he ordered people around and behaved with unbecoming arrogance. So, my father confronted him and tried to talk some reason into him. In the meantime, the first columns of Russian tanks were spotted three kilometres away from the town. Whether his common sense waxed or his courage waned, the captain took down his posts and made towards the bridge. Not long afterwards a Soviet tank roared into town. At that moment, a jeep from the captain’s unit appeared from the opposite direction. The driver must have spotted the tank and immediately veered in the direction of the bridge. But his reaction was too slow: two bursts from a machine gun reached him before he could make it to safety. Minutes later a Soviet soldier pulled out some documents from the pockets of the slain officer cadet. He was Tadeusz Dołęga Mostowicz, the well-known writer. Some later accounts of his death are clearly inaccurate: I was an eyewitness and saw the manner of his death. I saw his wallet and, in it, an uncashed cheque from ROJ-Publisher for his second-last novel, The Memoirs of Mrs. Hanka.

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Jerzy Horodyriski helped organize a decent funeral, and the Armenian Manugiewicz family gave permission to bury him in their sepulchre, which had not yet been used. That same day local communists, mostly Jews from the Bund [an extreme leftist organization] and some Ukrainians, officially welcomed the invading Red Army. They hastily erected a platform in the market square and decorated it with a tapestry of the Polish national emblem, an eagle displaying its wings, taken from the building of the Gymnastic Association Sokół. From that podium, Master of Laws Krumholz, son of a local innkeeper, greeted the Soviet soldiers. His father had begged him not to do it, and when all his pleas fell on deaf ears, he cast a ritual curse on him. He was so shaken by his son’s betrayal that he was stricken with a heart attack and died. His funeral became a quiet manifestation of resistance to the Soviet occupation.

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 Two days after marching into Kuty, the Soviets arrested my father and took him to the court building. Within four hours the local people collected 4000 signatures requesting his release. The Soviets agreed but classified us into the passport category no. Ill, which meant that they considered us a “socially dangerous element.” As such, we were forbidden to live within the 100-kilometre border zone or in any provincial city. They gave us three days to pack up the house and leave. A friendly Ukrainian highlander took some of our things “for storage” and gave us a horse and a wagon. We loaded the suitcases onto the wagon and made our slow way to Trembowla in Podole, to join my sister, who was a teacher there.

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Ushered in by the tragic news, the autumn settled in all too quickly. Soon our provisions ran out, and Mother began to think twice about every potato she put into the pot. To help feed the family, one foggy morning I went potato-lifting with some of my high school friends. Out in the field, my lack of agricultural experience became so apparent that I was told to concentrate on collecting potatoes into sacks. Despite this demotion, I was proud that I earned a sack and a half of precious spuds. Later, when the weather got worse, we would go to the woods to cut branches for firewood. Since firewood was scarce in Podole, we began to barter: a cart of wood for half a piglet. Eventually I found more permanent work, first in a quarry, then building a road to an airport. The labour was hard and paid by the job, but it paid well; so well, in fact, that I was making more than my brother-in-law, a civil engineer supervising the whole works. My ambition was that for the coming Christmas we should have everything that we used to have for Christmases before the war. But what inspired me most was the sight of my father, shocked and depressed by the events of 1939, regaining his health and zest for life. Together, we signed up for an accelerated legal course in Ukrainian, which we attended throughout the winter. Our morale was further boosted by word from my brother, who had joined the Polish army in September. He had been taken prisoner by the Germans in a battle near Zamość but managed to jump the transport and make it back to Lwów. In October 1940, rumours began to spread that the Soviets would be drafting those born in 1917 and 1918 for military service, and soon the first recruits were sent as workers’ battalions, without uniforms, to reinforce defensive positions along the San River.

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I was conscripted in May 1941. Before I went, I had a serious talk with my father. “You know, son,” he said, “you must choose between the Soviet prison and the Soviet army. I would rather see you in prison than in a uniform with a Soviet star. But it’s your choice, and their prisons are as merciless as the front line.” With these words in mind, after a cursory medical examination, I presented myself to the Drafting Commission, twelve people, including three or four women, behind a long table handsomely wrapped in red flags. The chair of the commission asked me if I should like to have the honour of serving in the worker-peasant army. “Absolutely not,” I replied, “because I grew up in, and identify with, the bourgeois system. The Soviet state declared us a ‘dangerous social element,’ doesn’t allow us to live in the frontier zone, and does not trust us. So how can you draft me into your army?” General consternation followed. After this reply I was sure they wouldn’t talk to me any further but, rather, would throw me in jail. But the chairman got up and said, “Vot, panravilsia mne maladets [I like this boy]. He is not one of those who first shouted, ‘long live Piłsudski’ and are now shouting ‘long live the Red Army.’ He says what he thinks, and that’s what’s important to us. You’ll join our army; you’ll see what it’s all about. And once you’re released from active duty, we’ll change that unfortunate classification of you and your family.”

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His opinion was entered into my personal records, and with that I was drafted. I had done my best to evade the draft, but now that my honest efforts had failed, the prospect of serving in the Soviet army didn’t worry me much. In fact, it smacked of adventure—well, I was young and fearless. My father, too, came to terms with it. He himself had been a soldier, an officer in the Austrian army, who later had joined the Hallcrczyks. He taught me that the most important thing for a soldier was to have a clean rifle. From a piece of wood, he cut out small gadgets for cleaning the rifle, packed them into a cigar box, and added two strips of flannel for the same purpose. Later, when I reported for service and was turning over all my personal effects to be scrupulously recorded, the officer called his senior captain over and asked me what those wooden sticks were. I told him that those were the implements my father had given me so that I could clean my rifle well. The captain ordered the whole company to assemble and showed them the implements with which a father had equipped his son. I was commended, or rather my father was, and this was noted in my personal file. I was also awarded 300 rubles for being so well prepared for the duties of a soldier.

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From Ukraine, we were taken to a training camp in the Caucasus, in Ordzhonikidze on the Terek River. Our units were classified as tropical, and we even got hats made of thick canvas, officially called “Panama hats.” The daily training sessions in the camp were extremely exhausting. I was already tired after the twenty-minute morning stretching exercises, which were but a foretaste of what followed. Next was the morning inspection. The Red Army was probably the only army in the world that, in its book of regulations, had an entire chapter devoted just to lice. Regulations demanded that, every day, after the morning exercises, we had to take off our cotton shirts, and the unit leader had to check us for lice. If he found any, the entire unit had to go to de-lousing baths. We used the latrines almost on command and had to train our bodies to be regular. After a long day jammed with physical exertion, relieved only by singing lessons and singing contests with other units, everyone was completely drained. Our training was aimed at developing automatic, reflexive reactions. For example, on command we had to detach the cartridge-belt, open the rifle lock, insert the magazine with ten bullets, set the hindsight, assume position, and pull the trigger. All this had to be done in three seconds. At first it seemed impossible, but after a while one became so practised that the assigned regulation time was enough not only to perform all these tasks but to scratch one’s nose as well. It was the same with wrapping our feet in cloth (instead of socks). On the first few tries, our feet would get entangled or the cloth would not hold, but with practise we could wrap our feet perfectly in seconds.

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The Red Army wholeheartedly adopted Suvarov’s principle that “the more sweat during exercises, the less blood in battle.” They adhered to it strictly, so much so that the commander would ride out on horseback to check if the shirts of soldiers returning from exercises showed the dark contours of sweat. Hardly any other army in the world could so consistently squeeze out the last gasp from a soldier. If the repetitive, mindless exercises didn’t do it, the marathons in gas masks certainly did.

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After the war with Germany broke out, Stalin ordered that a recruit should be trained into a front-line soldier in three months. This was achieved by training sixteen hours a day. The scarcity of military supplies in the camp encouraged stealing as an effective method of assembling all the necessary equipment. I remember someone once stole my gas mask. When I reported this to my superior, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “It’s your business to make sure you have everything you need.” This ability to swipe what one didn’t have but needed was called a “soldier’s resourcefulness.” Most units were ethnically mixed and comprised a variety of nationalities. As a Pole from western Ukraine, I was considered an exotic chap.

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Few of the soldiers in the camp had been to the West, but all were very curious about the way of life there. They kept asking questions, which I tried to answer as honestly as I could; needless to say, the information they got from me did not always mesh with the official Soviet version political officers tried to inculcate in them. In fact, we had two kinds of training officers: some taught us military matters, others political. The political officers had to go through special ideological training after graduating from a military college. We had to attend classes with them every day. One objective of their intensive propaganda was to discredit religion. At one such lecture, a politruk strived to prove to us that making a sign of the cross with a holy icon to turn away a hail cloud was pure superstition. Then he turned towards me and asked if I believed him. “Sure, I agree with you,” was my reply, “because you’ve repeated what every self-respecting priest worth his robes says.” This last part of my answer caused him some consternation, but he was not ready to accept that such superstitions have nothing to do with true religion, which tries to eradicate them. He could not get over the fact that I, “an educated man, believed in God.” I tried to remind him that the Soviet constitution guarantees every citizen freedom of religion, but he cut short my argument with a rather ominous “We’ll discuss this again, later.”

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When the war with Germany broke out, the soldiers’ morale was propped up by reading the orders of comrade Stalin. At first, Moscow sent us new patriotic songs, which were self-confident, even swaggering. But when the Soviet units began to surrender in large numbers, the tone of messages from Moscow changed: we were informed of death sentences in absentia for twenty-three Soviet generals, including General Vlasov, for high treason. In this increasingly tense atmosphere, endurance and shooting exercises became even more intensive. I was not particularly affected by the pace of these exercises because the experience I had gained as a student in the cadet corps and in the Academic Legion had prepared me for it. I liked target shooting and shot well. My steady hand even earned me some additional income from testing the rifles, a well-paid function in the Red Army. I made quite a bit of money this way, well over 3000 rubles. In addition, I was excused from some other exercises. I also had good results in the so-called application shooting. We were using, among others, old Maxims [heavy machine guns], which I knew well from the cadet corps. The shooter did not know which targets would appear and at what distance. I quickly got a feel for this and only took a few rounds to fell the last target. At that moment the colonel ordered us to stop shooting and assembled the battalion in a square, the officers in the front. He called me into the middle of the square and recited the regulation formula thanking me for good shooting. As per regulations, I was supposed to reply “Sluzhu Savetskamu Saiuzu” [I serve the Soviet Union]. But I felt my flesh creep at the very thought of saying that, so I decided to say nothing. A tense, uneasy moment of silence followed, all eyes on me. And suddenly an illumination came. I remembered one of the recently promoted slogans and roared from the top of my lungs, “I serve the common cause of crushing fascism!” The colonel saluted, smiled, and dismissed the soldiers. Later I tried to convince the politruk that stage fright had made me forget the regulation formula. He didn’t believe me, but he understood.

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To intensify the ideological indoctrination of soldiers, all freshly recruited units were assigned young students not yet of conscription age but with special political training, whose task was to help raise the socio-political awareness of the soldiers. They used every spare moment to pull out a newspaper from their gas masks, or some even less savoury hiding place, and quote from it the words of wisdom or encouragement recently dispensed by comrade Stalin. They found little favour with the soldiers because they intruded into the few quiet moments that could have been spent more profitably smoking a joint of shag. Some called them names and hurled unflattering epithets at them or their mothers, even though, officially, this was forbidden in the Red Army. Often this was done in an indirect way, using slang expressions that on the surface seemed innocuous enough, but whose underlying meanings were apparent to everyone in the camp.

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One day, during the grenade-throwing practice, a newly arrived politboet took some unfriendly interest in me, having heard my name bandied about in the unit. He learned I was a Pole from western Ukraine. “Why do they feed him here,” I heard him saying to other soldiers; “at his first opportunity, at his first patrol, he’ll desert to the Germans anyway.” I heard all this from where I was sitting a short distance away, after hurling my six regulation grenades. It doesn’t bode well for me if this politboet thinks and speaks this way about me, I thought. So, I decided to deal with this in a Soviet manner. I went up to him and said, “Comrade, I am that Tadia you’ve just spoken about. When we’re through with these exercises, you’ll go to the politruk and report to him what you’ve just said about me to the other comrades.” He began to explain that he didn’t really mean it, but I was firm and threatened that if he didn’t report this, I would have to do it myself. I also added that I would go with him to make sure that his report was accurate. And so, we went to the politruk, who listened to his report and then dismissed us. When we returned from exercises to the barracks, we found that the politboet’s bed was folded up and his things packed. He had ceased to exist as far as the company was concerned. I never learned what happened to him or where he went. On some later occasion the politruk remarked that I did the right thing, but to this day I don’t know if what I did was right or not.

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Five of us in the unit stuck together and formed a small yet effective team. Kazimierz Świerczyński, from Mińsk, was a Pole, though born in Russia; his mother was a teacher, but he didn’t speak much Polish and knew only “Powrót Taty” [“Papa’s Return”]. His attitude towards the communist system was negative in the extreme, but when his grating, sour comments gave way to song, his voice was melodious and as strong as his well-built body. Bohachenko, another from our team, was a Ukrainian. As a civilian, he had been the leader of a rescue team on the Kasbek Mountain in the Caucasus. The third, Kolosov, was a teacher of Russian literature in a high school. I enjoyed going on patrols with him because he would recite Lermontov for hours, and, later, when I had gained his trust, Esenin as well. Those three I remember well. Then there was the fourth, Evert, from one of the German republics along the Volga River. I knew a bit of German from high school, and Evert spoke the same dialect I was taught at school. But he did not stay with us very long and did not go with us to the front line because the Red Army did not trust the Germans in its ranks. The rest of us managed to stay together through most of the training and, even later, on the front line. We used a simple but effective tactic: whenever we suspected that some soldiers were to be moved to another unit, we positioned ourselves, one beside another, in the middle of the same row. We were the same height, looked good and professional together, and must have projected so confident an image that our superiors did not think it advisable to separate us.

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Our first front-line assignment was to the 101st Infantry Regiment of Coastal Defence, which formed part of the navy. We were moved to Krasnodar, where they gave us completely new uniforms. They also began to feed us better, according to the front-line norms. We stuck together, our old team, all except Evert. We were allowed to build a dugout, and, thanks to Bohachenko, who was quite experienced at that sort of thing, we soon had relatively comfortable living quarters. In Krasnodar I was still learning the ways of the Red Army. One day Bohachenko noticed several bales of white cotton fabric beside some railway cars being loaded with troops. Those bales of fabric were used at airfields as part of a signalling system. So, he quickly picked them up and carried them on his back to the dugout. Later we bartered the cloth for food with the local people. On another occasion our team managed to obtain a whole bunch of leather insoles, for the same purpose, throwing them out of a railway car through an opening in the roof. I tried to question the ethics of this method of acquiring provisions, but Bohachenko made fun of me, saying that I behaved like a child and not a morally superior soldier of the Red Army. So, I decided to grow up and took my share of the loot and provisions.

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Eventually we had to give up our comfortable living, though, and were sent to Voroshilovgrad. Our regiment was assigned to evacuate civilians from the city because the Soviet command discovered that the Ukrainian population was welcoming the Germans as liberators. They were hoping the Germans would allow them to set up an independent Ukraine. To stop any subversive activities, the Soviets decided to remove all people from the urban centres, turning them into ghost towns below the expanse of the sky.

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With Bohachenko in charge, our patrol went to Krasnomaiskaia Street, where the creme de la creme of local communists used to live. I remembered well the expulsion and forced resettlement of Polish families from the territories occupied by the communist Soviet forces. Now I tasted the bitterness of revenge. We would walk into an apartment and issue an order, “Sobiratsa s veshchami!” [Take your things and get out]. We gave them three hours to pack and allowed them to take only what was most indispensable. Sometimes people tried to resist our orders, tried to impress on us their importance as members of the Communist Party, but to no avail; there could be no discussion about it. At first my buddies thought this revenge for my family’s exile would give me real pleasure or satisfaction, but revenge never does: it opens old wounds and shatters peace. The fear and anxiety of brutally uprooted people were the same here as in my memories from Poland. No one knew if or when they would be back. After overseeing the evacuation, our unit withdrew, leaving behind only messengers who maintained communication with other troops.

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The front line was getting closer. With the advent of winter, we went into action on the 4th Ukrainian Front on the Donets steppes. We were well equipped for the cold: warm underwear, gloves, caps with earmuffs. The Soviets had been looking forward to this winter. After Napoleon’s failed expedition against Moscow, there lived a saying that it was not General Kutuzov but General “Moroz” [Frost] who defeated the French. And now the Germans were also poorly prepared for the oncoming winter, proving that history, indeed, repeats itself. I’ll never forget my first contact with the Nazi enemy. We were being transported to the front line in railway cars and had stopped at a small station called Likhaya, crowded with military transports.

Suddenly several German airplanes dove towards us from the sky. The solitary train stop in the middle of the open steppe was an ideal target for them. Bombs began to explode. One of the first hit a car with horses. The roar of diving planes mixed with the neighing of the terrified horses. We were ordered to stay inside or under the cars; instinctively, everyone was trying to push himself into the frozen ground. The bombs hit the cars carrying ammunition, and the explosions looked like a festival display of fireworks. I was both terrified and mesmerized. Then I heard Bohachenko call my name. He led me to one of the bombed cars, and as we approached, I could smell vodka. We pulled out an undamaged crate of vodka and carried it back to our car. Right away several of our buddies smelled it too, and in no time, we were drinking between the tracks. Someone took out an accordion, and we spontaneously broke out in song. The mood became joyful, as if there was no war. Fortunately, other than some damaged cars and drunken heads, our transport did not suffer any serious losses. When we reached the reorganization centre of the 4th Ukrainian Front, we were taken by trucks and on foot to reinforce the most seriously endangered positions.

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For the first few days, we engaged in positional warfare during daytime and in reconnaissance excursions at night. Then came the first battle. I was assigned to 82 mm mortars directly supporting the infantry attack. The Germans had a whole company of machine guns hidden in stacks of pressed straw. They had an excellent firing position. Despite less favourable positions, the Soviets used the so-called wave attack: first one wave of soldiers rushed forward, another right behind it, and then a third one. Our task was to pound the stacks of straw, where the deadly machine guns were located. At that moment I really cared about the Soviet soldiers and desperately wanted to blow up that straw. We fired a whole round of shells before we managed to ignite it. I think we saved some Soviet lives and received a citation for it. Although we took the town, we couldn’t keep it long and had to withdraw again. There were no civilians left in the town except for an ancient man in a bunk on top of a stove. He did not care who came, or who went, and he wouldn’t budge from his hut.

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After we left, one of our caring nurses, active also in counterintelligence, stayed behind with him. She posed as the old fellow’s daughter, who had remained to look after him. Some time later she forced her way back to us and reported that the Germans were preparing something unusual and were already celebrating in an Orthodox church turned into a clubhouse. Our battalion commander decided to send out an independent reconnaissance party. Eighteen of us went on that mission. We got to the Orthodox church without incident. The church had three windows on each side, so six of us took clusters of grenades, crawled up to the walls, and tensely waited for the right moment. From inside we could hear the clinking of glasses, ribald laughter, jabbering German voices—a party in full swing. Suddenly the doors opened and several Germans staggered out. It was time to act. We sprang up and, straining every muscle, hurled thirty grenades through the windows, then jumped back. The roof of the church bounced up with the force of the explosions. We ran away like hell. Out of the door and straight into my path dashed a German soldier, gun in hand. I bumped into him. He fell but kept his eyes on me. My index finger tensed on the trigger. So did his. But neither of us pulled. He got to his feet and, with his eyes still on me, scampered away. So, did I. Under the confused, frantic fire of the surprised Germans, some of us managed to retrace our way back to our units. But fewer than half were so lucky. Eighteen set out, but only eight came back: the six grenade throwers and two from the back-up. We reported to the general. He knew I was a Pole from western Ukraine. He praised us for the job well done and offered us vodka accordingly. We were also supposed to get some medals, but for the time being we got three days off duty.

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Thanks to that furlough, I missed a German assault in which a good many soldiers from my unit were killed. Then, after yet another attack, the Germans blew us completely apart and began to encircle the shattered troops. I got out of their tightening grip by hitching a ride on a truck fender. From my entire regiment, only a handful of men survived. When we reassembled further away from the front line, our regimental commander stood before us and said—and I still remember his exact words—” All that’s left of our regiment is eighteen men and the number.” We used to be the 101st Regiment. The regiment had to be completely reorganized. We were joined by three new battalions and hoped we would not be sent to the front line for a while. In the meantime, we reinforced the auxiliary services, some of us working as messengers.

 

 

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Source: "Providence Watching" with the kind permission of Dr. Patalas

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Copyright: Gradziejewski family

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