Our parents slept a little while the meal was cooking, and when they woke, we heard them talking quietly between themselves. My father was saying, “Of course, of course, you are right.”
Mother took four silver spoons out of her bag, a wedding present from our aunt, polished them with a handkerchief and gave us each one. We sat on the ground and ate kasha from a sooty cooking pot with silver spoons. It was our last family meal together. When we had eaten, Mother said it was time for us to part—they were too old to go on with us. “We will only be a hindrance to you on the journey. We have decided to go back home,” she said. “The Germans will do us no harm. I served in the Austrian army, they will take that into account. Don’t worry about us,” my father said. “And you try to make your way to Palestine. That would be best, because here you will surely be forced to work as laborers or they will think up something even worse,” my mother said. There were already rumors that the Germans were capturing local young people and using them as human shields for their tanks during attacks.
Our parents stood side by side, so old and small, and with such dignity. There were no tears, no lamentations. “Only promise me that you will not under any circumstances be parted from each other,” my mother added. Then she carefully washed the four spoons in what was left of the water, added two more from her bag, polished them with her handkerchief and admired them. My mother loved those spoons. They gave her a sense of her own worth. “Take them, even in the worst of times someone will give you a loaf of bread for a silver spoon.”
My father solemnly took out his wallet. He, just like my mother, liked solid possessions he could ill afford. He gave us some money. I think it was all they had left. Then he took off his watch and put it on my wrist.
I wondered afterward why we had been so docile in obeying them. We were already grown boys. I was seventeen, my brother fifteen, and we loved them very much. I suppose the habit of obedience was very strong and it never occurred to us that we could disobey or act differently.
On eleventh of September 1939 we said good-bye to our parents. When they went back down the road in the direction we had just come from, I lay on the grass and wept for a long time. Then I and my brother gathered up our few possessions, I put on the one rucksack we had between the two of us, my brother slung a knapsack over his shoulder, and we walked away, leaving the sun behind us.
For several days we stumbled along the roads, sleeping at night in the forest. We had no food at all and skirted round villages because we were afraid of everybody. In the end we realized we would need to get work as farm laborers. A Ukrainian peasant family took us on, and we were set to digging potatoes. We worked in the fields for a week, not for money but in return for food and shelter, although when we left the farmer’s wife gave us something to eat on the road and we again headed east. We had no plan at all, and knew only that we had to get away from the Germans.
The next day we encountered soldiers. They were Russian. We found we had escaped from the German occupied zone. It was completely unexpected. We knew nothing then about politics, and I can’t say it makes much sense to me even now. We knew there had been a non-aggression pact between Germany and the USSR, but not about the secret clauses which provided for a partitioning of Eastern Europe. Latvia, Estonia, and East Poland (that is, west Ukraine and west Belorussia) and Bessarabia were ceded to Russia, and west Poland and Lithuania to Germany. Under this agreement Lwów became part of Russia. We did not know Poland had surrendered, or that under the agreement between Stalin and Hitler Russia had reannexed some of the territories it had been granted after the partitioning of Poland in 1795.
We walked all the way to Lwów and were amazed, never having seen such a great city before, with fine houses and broad streets. There was trading going on in the market square and we had a great stroke of luck there when we met our friend Aaron Stamm who was also a member of Akiva. Stamm was older than us, and he, too, was dreaming of getting to Palestine. We found many members of Akiva had come together here and were hoping to make their way to one of the neutral countries, from which it would be possible to emigrate. At that time Lithuania was still a neutral state, and we decided to head for Vilnius. It all took time. The Zionist leaders had first to organize transit points all the way to Palestine, and that was very difficult with a major war going on in Europe. They were looking for safe, roundabout routes. This group of young people were stuck in Lwów.
My brother and I immediately started looking for work, and from time to time managed to earn a little money. My brother was better at this than I was. He would get a job in a hotel, or a bakery. Mother was right about the silver spoons, one of which I exchanged for a rustic loaf of bread.
The situation in Lwów was very difficult and struck us as at the time as completely nightmarish. There were so many refugees from Poland, mainly Jews. Looking back later, after all our misfortunes in the war, we no longer thought it had been all that bad: nobody arrested us in the streets, or sent us to prison, or shot us.
We got by somehow, five of us renting a shack in the suburbs, in Janow, not far from the Jewish cemetery. In the evenings we came together, dreaming of the future and singing songs. We were very young and had neither the experience nor the imagination to foresee what was in store for us.
Winter came early. By November everything was deep in snow and the members of Akiva split into groups to cross the frontier, which at that time was between Russia and Lithuania. Initially the frontier was not closely guarded, but the situation changed and the frontier guards became vicious. Our groups were intercepted and several of my friends were arrested and sent to Siberia.
I was the leader of one group. We tried to get over the border near the town of Lida and took the train there. We were met by a local guide who promised to take us across at night. We made our way through a trackless forest, sinking knee deep into the snow and feeling terribly cold. We did not have proper, warm clothing. Then, when we were totally exhausted and thought we had already crossed the frontier, we were arrested, spent the night in the local jail, and were released in the morning after handing over all our money. The same guide met us again, and this time led us over the frontier along a well-trodden path without any further difficulty. We heard later that this was a trick he had devised to enable his friends in the local police to make a little money. He was not all that dishonest, because he could have simply abandoned us. The remaining family spoons were handed to the policemen. On the whole, we could consider ourselves lucky.
My brother was lucky, too. He crossed the border with a different group. They were stopped by the Lithuanians but allowed to pass when they showed their Polish documents. My brother said they lived in Vilnius and the illiterate guards didn’t argue.
We were very pleased to have reached Lithuania and imagined that with a little more effort we would make it to Palestine. We were happy to have gotten away from Russian-occupied Lwów to Vilnius, which was Lithuanian only in a geographical sense. More than half the population were Jews and Poles.
11. August 1986, Paris
L
ETTER FROM
P
AWEŁ
K
OCI
SKI
TO EWA MANUKYAN
Dear Ewa,
I am perplexed by your refusal to read my book. At first I was offended, but then I understood you are one of those people who prefer not to know about the past in order to maintain their equilibrium in the present. It is an attitude I have met before, but if we conspire to erase the past from our memories and shield our children’s minds from the horrors of those years, we will be failing in our duty to the future. The experience of the Holocaust should be assimilated, if only in memory of those who died. Mass ideologies cut people loose from their moral bearings. In my youth I professed one such ideology and later, in a territory occupied by the Fascists, I was the victim of another.