The Testimony    (8 page)

One day our guards announced that we would be transferred: those who could walk must assemble outside; the rest were to be taken by trucks.

My mother had died some weeks before; I was very weak after the typhus and had lost all initiative and wanted to be left alone.

Irena, a Polish lady in her twenties, I think, did not go by the trucks, although she was fitter than most and one of the few who did not become ill with typhus. She stayed with her dying mother. She would bring food inside for me and others, and chide us for giving up and not leaving.

Her mother died by the time there was another call to line up and be driven away. This time Irena pulled and pushed and got a few of us outside, including me. I joined the queue to march. We all knew the trucks would never come.

An armed guard led us outside the gates. We stumbled behind him in the deep snow. There were wide open spaces around us with an occasional tree. Several armed soldiers prodded and pushed us with their rifle butts: ‘
Schnell, schnell!’
But walking fast was beyond me then. I and two others sat down in the snow and asked to be shot, but the soldier said it would be a waste of bullets and went on.

We fell behind and lost the main group when it grew dark, as we could not see their tracks any more. We knew we must not fall asleep in the snow, that we must keep moving. I was not very alert at that time.

One of the others went ahead later and came back to say that she had found a shelter. It was a derailed railway wagon for goods or cattle; we thought it a miracle. There must have been a railway line beneath the snow, completely covered by it. We were utterly exhausted, and would have soon perished without a shelter. We got inside and huddled for warmth.

One of the others, still able to move, went out of the wagon in search of food. She found some cottages and begged for food. She got bread tossed out from some; others told her to keep away as they did not want to catch typhus. There must have been an awareness of the epidemic that had swept through nearby Stutthof.

In the shelter, we talked of our ‘freedom’ after years behind barbed wire, and slept until woken by the sound of sleighbells. Footprints in the snow had betrayed our hiding place.

It was broad daylight, and a horse-driven sleigh had pulled up outside. We were wearing clothes with numbers, and had shaven heads under ‘scarves’ made of torn garments. It was obvious that we were camp escapees. A German civilian looked in and drove away, without a word.

We expected the police to come then, and joked about dying for our freedom, ate some snow and waited. The sleigh returned at night. A bale of straw was put into the railway wagon, and a saucepan full of hot potato soup with chunks of pork in it, spoons, slices of bread and a jug of hot tea with sugar were placed near the door. We then had food delivered each night for several days by someone we could not see. Ours were the only words spoken: ‘Thank you!’ The taste of the bread was unforgettable.

We knew that ‘if we survive’—our constant thought and phrase—we would have to get used to normal food gradually; but, after many days on a diet of snow, we ate that rich soup avidly and were ill almost instantly. Snow served to replace the lost fluid. We then tried to eat very little at a time—just a spoonful of now-cold soup and bits of bread soaked in sweet tea, our first real food in years.

Several days passed and then the rumble of the distant artillery fire grew nearer and the food supplies stopped. I remember several days of snow blizzards, and we kept under the straw. The festering wound on my frostbitten leg got dark and started throbbing. I was running a high fever, and became disoriented and semi-conscious.

I woke up being carried like a baby by a very tall Russian soldier who was crying. He put me into the back of a truck carrying wounded soldiers. I remember a female army doctor, her frequent injections with large amounts of some substance, presumably vitamins, the painful dressing of my leg and a funnel in my mouth oozing a sweet goo. I was told that my leg was gangrenous and would have to be amputated. I refused and the doctor got angry, but her assistant offered to try the trick of applying compresses using my urine. This folk medicine worked and, after a while, the skin closed up. He saved my leg.

And the soldier who carried me was often there, refilling the funnel, washing my face and bringing more pillows to soften the sometimes bumpy ride. During stopovers in villages on the way, I was put into a bed; a clean, soft bed. None of it seemed real at the time, and much was blurry. But gradually I became able to focus on and comprehend my new reality.

I had been found and picked up by a small unit of the Russian army that followed the frontline.
Doktorka
Nina looked after the soldiers with minor injuries, while the severely injured were taken back to hospitals in nearby towns that had been liberated by the army. The soldier who had found me, my giant carer, was called Sasha. He was the unit’s cook. There were several other soldiers looking after supplies, organising transports and similar duties.

The unit belonged to Marshal Zhukov’s Ninth Army, which had marched from Leningrad through East Prussia and towards Berlin. They looked a motley lot, elderly and unkempt in ill-fitting, long winter coats. Only the officers had a military bearing and appearance. A rumour I heard much later had it that towards the end of the war the Russian army was badly depleted in resources and manpower. Long-term prisoners were offered the choice of serving out their sentences or serving on the battlefield in exchange for their freedom. Apparently, many accepted this offer. If true, this would explain the unsoldierly army unit I met. These tough guys had just been through Stutthof, and they talked of what they had seen there and wept.

Sasha was in his late fifties. His thick hair and facial stubble were of salt-and-pepper colour, and he had pale-blue, large, sad eyes. He was extraordinarily tall. His broad, powerful shoulders bore arms that hung down almost to his knees, and he had a short torso that tapered to a very small waist. His long legs moved in gigantic steps, so that when he was helping me walk again it took four of mine to one of his step. And I am not a midget.

Sasha was very protective of me. I was his ‘find’ among the carnage of Stutthof, and he said this was a good omen for the unit. Nina and Sasha called me
kosti
(bones) at first. When I was able to speak I said my name was Halina. From then on I was called Galinochka, an affectionate diminutive of Galina, the Russian version of Halina.

At one stopover Sasha, under Nina’s supervision, wrapped me in a blanket soaked in kerosene. I nearly suffocated, but all my lice died. I was told that one of the women found with me had died within a week, and the other went to her town in eastern Poland among a transport of wounded soldiers.

Sasha’s most popular creation were
blinchki
(potato pancakes) with many a variation on the theme. Grated potato, flour and eggs were the basic ingredients with, depending on supplies, minced pork or chicken, fried onions and other chopped-up vegetables. They were fried in lard on a huge, black, cast-iron skillet. The skillet was thick and very heavy, yet with one hand Sasha used to flick it so that eight or ten pancakes rose high in the air, turned in unison and magically landed in their right places to be fried on their other side. Others tried that trick but failed, often barely able to lift the skillet.

Soon I was able to hobble about and to help Sasha by peeling and grating bucketloads of potatoes. While we worked he sang Russian folksongs and arias, and a ballad about his beloved Leningrad. Only once did he mention the long siege of his city and the heavy loss of life. He tried to hide his tears.

Sasha had a magnificent, deep, baritone voice. It enchanted me. I recall one moment clearly. Sasha was singing a jaunty song, ‘
Kalinka, Kalinka
’, as he flicked the pancakes particularly high in the air. The smell of this food was also magic and, as I watched their flight, it suddenly dawned on me that I might survive the war. I was struck so forcibly by this thought that it took my breath away: I am out of prison and this really is freedom! I gasped. Sasha noticed and thought I was in pain. In my limited Russian I explained that I was a prisoner no more. We embraced, both quite wet around the eyes.

The flying potato pancakes are strongly embedded in the images of my liberation. As a cue to discovering freedom, pancakes might rate as a bit bizarre; but then so was everything else. In my wildest fantasies of ‘if we survive’, I could not have imagined this setting.

Our progress westwards was slow, with many stopovers. The army would not enter towns or villages until they had surrounded them completely, Sasha explained. By the time we got to Danzig—Gdansk, when part of Poland—now bombed and free of Germans, I could walk with a stick and had put some padding between my skin and my bones. There was no real hospital there in the bombarded Gdansk. We were stationed in an elegant three-storey house, where only the roof had been damaged by shellfire; from some rooms we could see the sky.

It was in Gdansk that Doctor Nina presented me to a high-ranking medical officer, described the state I was in when found, showed my many healing wounds and said that on me ‘everything had healed like on a dog’. This was not derogatory, but a Russian idiom for fast-healing people. Sasha stood nearby, beaming with pride, but did not get any mention for his nursing role. The big boss said that Polish authorities were establishing the city’s administration, and I should be handed over before the unit moved towards Berlin.

With all the wounded soldiers in hospital, discharged or back in action, there were only Nina, Sasha and the three support staff at my farewell party. Sasha made my favourite pork pancakes, and the men raided the cellar and found a lot of alcohol. Nina made a speech, wished me luck and offered a toast to victory and another to Stalin. She warned the men not to drink too much and left.

But they became very drunk. While washing the dishes in the kitchen I heard an argument, then a scuffle. Sasha, the gentle giant, was swinging his skillet like a weapon and was threatening to smash heads. The noise brought Nina in her dressing gown. She tried to pull rank and shouted military commands, but to no avail. Perhaps commanding while in a dressing gown doesn’t work. But her threat to call the military police patrolling the streets had some effect. She and I took the mattress from my bed into her room, and I spent the night there. Nina put the chest of drawers against the door, just in case. This, my first farewell party, remains memorable.

Next morning there were hangovers and much embarrassment. Sasha held his head in both hands, apologised and kept looking away. Nina told him to take me to the Polish authorities. We went to an office where an elderly man told me that, as I had no papers proving who I was, and as a minor could not sign a statutory declaration of my identity, I must find myself a proper legal guardian and come with him or her. He was applying prewar regulations that made no sense in the immediate postwar chaos.

On the way back I worried about what to do next, but Sasha seemed pleased. He said, ‘They don’t want you, but we do; so you can stay with us!’ But I knew they would soon go on to Berlin, and I was thinking of ways to start looking for my father. Nina pointed out that Berlin would be defended both on the ground and from the air. There would be a big battle. What if I were wounded or killed there? It was mad to rescue a youngster and then take her into a battlefield. Sasha nodded in agreement.

They took me to their army commandant and explained my situation. I wrote my name, date and place of birth on a piece of paper. The four of us went back to the Polish office where the piece of paper with my details was slammed forcefully in front of the old chap in charge. He was ordered to issue identity papers for me.

He typed up a brief certificate of my identity, which stated that I had returned from the concentration camp in Stutthof. He was also instructed to have the Russian translation of this written on the back of the document. We waited while this was done by someone in the next room.

I still have this document, now yellowed and disintegrating, a reminder of how the Russians found me, restored my body and then my identity. But I now know that they also kept my heart warm at a crucial time.

My Russian friends were leaving and there were tearful goodbyes. Sasha hugged me and said that he would like to have a granddaughter like me. Sasha knew I had lost my mother and hoped to find my father, but I knew nothing about Sasha, other than that he loved Leningrad, his city. His past and family, if any, were his well-guarded secret. To want a granddaughter one needs to have children, yet none were ever mentioned.

We both knew that this goodbye was for good. I was in limbo, and he too did not seem to have a forwarding address. Was he perhaps one of the prisoners released to augment the army? If so, he was a villain with a big heart, and I missed him.

* * *

A few days after this, I was placed with a Polish family that had recently arrived in Gdansk.

We watched the fireworks, on 9 May, denoting the end of the war. I think it was then that the father said, ‘At least Hitler rid Poland of Jews.’ So I left and asked the Polish authorities, which had taken over the administration of Gdansk, to be sent to Lodz where I might find people I knew, and to where my father would return.