Journeys with My Mother (16 page)

Ola in nurse's uniform in Lida after liberation

Halinka and Władek in Łódź, 1946

Ola as a medical student in Warsaw, 1949

Ola and Halinka, Safed, Israel, 1973

Ola with one-week-old Annette, January 1978

13

Six Days and Nights

Ahead of them another wrong road,
another wrong bridge
over the river oddly pink.
All around shots are fired, now closer, now afar.
Above – a plane is slowly circling.

Invisibility would be of use
some grey stoniness,
and better still an absence
for a period short or long.

—Wisława Szymborska

The beauty of this part of the world is not breathtaking. The landscape is green and gentle, even ordinary. Flat, if you disregard the slight undulations of the terrain. Large expanses of forest surround cultivated fields; the clear, slow-flowing Niemen River and its tributaries dissect the land and the opalescent swamps alike. Even now, the area is rich in wildlife. Storks, black and white – their presence considered a good omen – live here, as do herons, cranes and owls as well as almost-extinct bison.

Primeval forests, enormous and brooding, have long imposed themselves on the local psyche; their dark mythology – populated with unusual creatures, half-human, half-animal – played on people's fears, nourishing terrifying fables.

This is where operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in the history of warfare, the blitzkrieg conceived by Hitler, advanced with great speed. And like some mythical colossus, with a mere sweep of his arm, left behind corpses, burned villages and a countryside laid to waste. A four-million strong, well-equipped Wehrmacht army flooded the west flank of the Soviet Union and kept pushing ahead while a torrent of terrified people took to the roads, attempting to outpace it.

We were lucky to have left Białystok with the evacuating hospital; the train compartments, filled with wounded soldiers, were now turned into movable wards. Standing at the open carriage door, inhaling the cool air of the forest, my father – despite the latest news – was composed. He was relieved to be moving away from the advancing German army.

But we were not even close to Wołkowysk when our train, clearly marked with red crosses, was bombed. The noise was horrendous, the train stopped and those capable of movement made it to the surrounding woods. Father snatched me, and in a few leaps reached the group of trees. Dropping to the ground, he shielded me with his body. Only when the planes were gone did he return to the compartment. Ola, though white-faced and shaking, had remained with the patients. Władek felt ashamed of running away, hiding, leaving her on her own.

In the end, there seemed to be no alternative so they made a pact: father would take care of me; Ola of her patients.

Meanwhile, the train had started moving again, but slowly. Soon it was evident that the locomotive was in its last throes. Steam hissed and the machine heaved its last sigh before finally giving up. The speed and comfort of our escape came to an abrupt end. The carriages were full of wounded soldiers, all in need of care and transport. The commandant, walking from one carriage to another, ordered every capable person to take responsibility for a small group of injured. They had to be taken far from the front and delivered safely to the nearest hospital. That was how, entrusted with a group of twenty, Ola and Władek became a two-person rescue team. At such a moment, my presence could not have been the greatest of assets.

The Białystok–Wołkowysk highway ran parallel to the railway line but one could hardly see the road for the flow of people and vehicles. The Red Army was in retreat and civilians, not protected by anyone, had to rely entirely on their wits. Trucks full of soldiers could move only with difficulty as hundreds of people on foot, horse carts and bicycles determinedly pushed on, hardly knowing where to go except forward.

Władek, waving his rifle, pointing at the injured, stood on the road and tried to attract attention. It took a long time but eventually, almost from nowhere, a large empty cart drawn by two large horses appeared and the reluctant driver agreed to take us. We joined the flow of people moving along the road, which alternated between fields of wheat and forest. A woman dressed in something resembling a nightgown, child in her arms, followed the cart, begging Ola to take her.

Under an unclouded June sky, on a road already littered with discarded vehicles, human and animal corpses, and everyday objects people could no longer carry, we were an easy target.

After few kilometres, our driver had had enough. The cart and the horses were not his. Instead of doing our bidding, he left us. Perhaps he reckoned that the road must be the most dangerous place to be and he wanted to live a bit longer. Maybe he went back to his village. When planes appeared in the distance, father abruptly turned the cart off the road, driving us into a haystack; some of the injured scattered around in panic.

That's where we remained until nightfall before continuing towards Wołkowysk in search of a train, a hospital or food. Anything. It was almost midnight when, accompanied by a roaring noise, the sky was set alight and there was no longer anywhere to hide. We had to change direction again, so father turned the cart into a side road.

Eventually, at dawn, we reached Wołkowysk. It was desolate. There was no traffic, no train, nothing. An empty ZIS, a military truck, happened to stop close to us and a young soldier climbed down from the cabin. He had lost his convoy during the bombardment and had no idea what to do. Join us, suggested father, explaining our predicament. The soldier looked at the group of incapacitated men and helped place them on the truck. The horses, in much worse condition than the people, had to be abandoned; there was nothing to feed them, all my father could do was to pat them.

This is how my father remembered the days of escape:

Sometimes my parents argued. Father insisted on moving fast, my mother pleaded with him to slow down, or even to stop, for the wounded needed a rest. I remember how easily Ola cried, but she was made of tough stuff, my mother. As they drove through burned fields, from one destroyed town to another, she scoured the countryside for something to eat. Once, she found a bag of sugar in one hard granite-like block. They broke it into smaller pieces and shared it around. She made sure that the brave soldier behind the wheel always had his fill. His was a difficult task and so much depended on his driving skills. Another time, she spotted an abandoned package containing soldiers' underwear and shirts; she took it too. It would be bartered later for food whenever we passed a village. Money was merely paper, of no use to anyone.

Sometimes I imagine their small group in the vastness of the landscape, under bombardment, surrounded by fires, always on the alert, striving for safety. I cannot stop thinking how resourceful and dependable, not to say courageous, my parents were. And vulnerable.

There's an incident I know about from my father's recollections. My mother did not like to talk about it. One night, when threatening fires forced us to stop, when we were almost certainly surrounded by Germans and it seemed impossible to find a way out, she asked my father to kill us both. I have no memory of this, of being the child who must have been hungry and tired, not to say frightened. If death were delivered from the hands of my father, I would not have known any better.

But my mother knew and loved life. It was only the fear of falling into the hands of the Germans that horrified her more than dying. The possibility of being captured was very real, but killing us was something my father could not do. He was young. It was not in his character to give up. Having a revolver reassured him that dying could wait.

In this part of Europe, the German force was not mandated to spare cities or their inhabitants. Their plan was to enslave and eventually erase them.

Sitting in my comfortable home in Melbourne, I watch the German footage taken that week, reporting Wehrmacht's assault on Mogilev: tanks moving through vast fields of young, almost-ready-to-harvest wheat, spitting fire; half-naked artillery men, hot under the burning sun, incessantly loading and firing, destroying everything in their path. Could a mouse have survived such an inferno?

Then, something unexpected happened. We were stopped and my father was taken away from us. Here is my father's voice again: