‘Well, fine. Comrade Frenchmen! On behalf of the Red Army I am fraternally glad that we have liberated you… This girl will now translate that for you.’ Now we could communicate effectively, by mediated translation, and the French cheered up instantly. A soldier came out of the ranks, took off his forage cap and placed it on the interpreter’s fair hair.
Watching this, the commandant had lost his thread but now resumed. ‘There is an order in respect of yourselves. Right, then, you are immediately to proceed to the city centre and join up there with the French contingent. I don’t know whether they are from your camp or some other, but so what, you are compatriots. So stick with them. So you are all in one place. No one is to wander off. Observe that order strictly. Understood?’
As I listened to the commandant’s order, I could immediately tell that something had happened, something had changed, something had ended. The free-and-easy atmosphere of even a few hours ago was over. The commandant adroitly mounted his horse and galloped off to his regiment.
One of our soldiers, perhaps, the commandant’s courier, took the liberty of shouting, ‘Long live free France!’ and was understood by the French soldiers, who clustered around him and responded, ‘Vive la Russie!’ The French marched off in free formation, waving encouragingly to the women as they departed.
The women remained hesitantly in the road. The sky was still calm.
About three days after our troops liberated Bydgoszcz and drove the enemy further west, with only a few of our units remaining in the city, a message was received that German troops to the north were preparing a counterattack on the city. You can imagine the unenviable situation in which the small Bydgoszcz–Bromberg garrison found itself as it faced a targeted blow from German troops desperately attempting to break out of encirclement. Everywhere in the city, hackles rose. The sense of community all had shared, the fervent friendship, the multi-ethnic unity was disrupted by this new reminder of the war. An augmented patrol was combing the city, looking for German spies who might have infiltrated during those hours of jubilation.
A very thin woman, a German refugee, ran in the entrance of the commandant’s office. She was looking for her five-year-old son, whom she had lost the day before at the station. I appealed to a Polish administrator, who was sympathetic and phoned round the local commandant’s departments, while the woman sat on a bench anxiously clasping her hands together.
The telephone enquiries yielded no results. The woman got up, as if she had never supposed they would – she was so slim and so very young, just a girl. You could see she was reluctant to leave, how afraid she was to go out of the building, to be on her own again, running God knows where in her desperation. ‘Oh Lord, how cold it is!’ she exclaimed. How could she be expected to bear this monstrous burden the war had imposed on her?
I am still terribly pained by the memory of that woman. What became of her? Of her son? Was he ever found?
The prisoners of war who had left their camps, and the forced labourers brought here by the Germans to build their defensive rampart, were ordered to stay together in national groupings. They were lodged, some here, some there, in very varied accommodation. Where the French went I do not know, but I was sent off to the jail to smooth relations with our British allies, who had been allocated this cavernous, deserted residence. They would at least have a roof over their heads until morning, when everything could be sorted out. But was it really hospitable to put our allies in a jail, even if was not functioning as such? In wartime such niceties have to go by the board, and we were facing a military emergency. It was left to me to sort out this delicate situation.
The prison gates were still open. At the entrance the sentry shouldered his rifle and let me through. The interior was dark. Upstairs, on a broad landing lit by barred windows, the Italians were lying around in their baggy clothes, desperately cold and dejected. ‘Hello. How are you?’ I asked awkwardly in German. They did not reply. Perhaps they had not understood. Someone sighed and groaned, ‘Oh, Madonna!’ Others joined in, sighing loudly, stirring about. They were demonstratively unhappy and, as only people from the south and children can, communicated this by their downcast mien and the inconsolable mournfulness in their eyes.
Someone sitting with his back to me turned his head, said wearily, ‘Salve, signorina!’ ‘Signorina russa!’ a resonant young voice sang out. An older man raised his narrow, almost truncated-looking face, drew back the scarf from his long, veiny neck, rose to his knees and gently spread his arms as if to say, see for yourself how we are. Carefully selecting the German words, he said hoarsely, ‘War is Scheisse!’ ‘Scheisse! Scheisse!’ the others joined in.
The only German they knew, apart from commands, were curses, and they tried to outdo each other, shouting, becoming animated, gesticulating, appealing to heaven: ‘O cielo, perché?’ Oh, heavens, why? ‘Krieg finito,’ I said, mixing German with Latin which, I felt, as Romans they ought to understand. War finito! For the Italians, at least, it was.
‘È finita. Basta! Santo Dio…’ ‘So, bene,’ I said. ‘Che bello!’ the man with a narrow face repeated. They were, however, in a desperately bad situation, having been dragged all this way from their sunny Italy to the misery of this war. ‘Adieu!’ ‘Addio, signorina!’
The British were in prison cells. I knocked. The door was opened from the inside and I was let in, with courtesy and British reserve. There was an amazingly pleasant scent in the celclass="underline" of soap, eau-de-cologne. Aromatic refreshing tissues dispelled the odour of prison. A large table in the middle of the cell had a tartan blanket on it and the British were sitting there playing cards. They desisted and stood up – lanky men in long greatcoats, very proper. Our allies.
Politely addressing me as ‘Miss Lieutenant’, they inspected me with curiosity, supposing I must be a representative of the Red Cross. ‘No, no. From headquarters.’ ‘Would you have some news for us?’ I shook my head. No. ‘What then?’ Indeed – what now?
How was I supposed to smooth over the obvious difficulty? The commandant had told me to paper over it somehow, but just turning up was not enough to cheer them, or reconcile them to their present anomalous and unwelcome situation. In fact, it had the opposite effect, because now they had someone on whom to vent their frustration, which only became the greater the longer I stood there.
‘What are we doing in here?’ What could I say? I certainly could not tell them about the parlous situation the city was in, which had obliged the command to separate everyone by nationality, to keep them under control and make preparations for their speedy repatriation. In any case, what language were we supposed to speak? As with the French, it seemed that German was taboo. I could more or less understand what they were saying, but could pronounce only a very few words of English myself. During the years of war, German had displaced from memory the little I had learned at the institute.
‘One day here, tomorrow not here,’ I somehow scraped together. ‘War.’ These were people who had experienced disaster at Dunkirk, on Crete and who knows where else. They had been held in captivity for four, even five years. Perhaps they could have been more tolerant, more amenable because, after all, it was only for ‘one day’ and we were, after all, in a ‘war’, but there were already British troops fighting the war in the Ardennes, and this evidently stiffened the sense of self-worth and pride of my British allies here in their prison cell. They were insistent, demanding. How and when would they be given transport? Did the Soviet command at least have a plan of action? I knew nothing about that, but suddenly, from my student past, an old British soldier’s song we had sung many times came to my aid. I said, ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary…’