What became of the town’s German citizens, who were not expelled from Bydgoszcz but whom it was resolved not to feed? What did that mean anyway? I should have jumped down then from the back of that truck and rubbed off those swastikas chalked on human beings, but that was possible only in my dreams in later years. The war did not understand or tolerate such feeble acts of protest, manifestly inappropriate to your rank. And in any case, I did not have the bottle to do it.
Among the throng of faces and the ferment of events, how poignant is that skinny, very young German refugee woman in the doorway of the commandant’s office, who had lost her five-year-old at the station twentyfour hours previously. Even today I shudder to remember her, to think of the horror of that mother, and the horror for her child of being lost in the madness of war.
That is the way things were. There is no changing the course of those events now, but neither can I resign myself to accepting them. It is a torment.
At a fork in the road the traffic ground to a halt and re-formed itself into two streams. Our headquarters unit was going with the troops to the west. I found myself detached from people I knew and assigned to a Smersh group subordinate to the commander of the front and attached to the units storming Poznań. With one foot on the step of a truck cabin, Major Bystrov, bade me farewell. ‘We’ll meet again, Lelchen, if we survive!’ He rapturously exclaimed, in an outburst of emotion, ‘Our tanks roar forward and our infantry advance, in trucks not even on foot, in Studebakers and Donnerwetters… Hurrah!’
We were to meet again, in just over two months’ time.
The highway to Poznań. A plain without snow; a dead, barefoot German soldier frozen to the ground; slain horses; the white leaf-fall of leaflets we had dropped before the attack; soldiers’ helmets as dark as crows on the battlefield. Columns of prisoners. The intensifying rumble of artillery. The second, third echelons of our troops advancing. Banners being carried in their covers, trucks, horse-drawn carts, carriages and people on foot, on foot, on foot… Everything is on the move, wandering the roads of Poland. In the back of a truck an old man sitting on a chair is shaken about. Two nuns wearing huge white starched wimples are stubbornly marching in step. A woman in widow’s weeds is pulling a boy along by the hand. Only here and there is there any snow. It is cold. The roads are flanked by trees with whitewashed trunks.
I was shown a letter by the family of an electrician in Gniezno. It had been smuggled from Breslau–Wroclaw: ‘Czy idą Rosjanie? Bo my tu umieramy.’ Are the Russians coming? Because we are dying here. The Red Army is on the march and, together with the Wojsko Polskie, is scouring Poland clean of the Nazi occupation.
On 9 February, our army newspaper comes out with the headline, ‘Be afraid, Germany! Russia is coming to Berlin.’
The Nazi armed forces invaded Poland before dawn on 1 September 1939. Having carried out their first Blitzkrieg (‘lightning war’), the Germans annexed a large part of its territory to the Reich. There remained a small region that the Germans declared to be a ‘General Government’.
Sovereignty over this territory is held by the Führer of the Greater German Reich and exercised on his behalf by the Governor General.
About a year later, Governor General Hans Frank said,
If I came to the Führer and told him, ‘My Führer, I have to report that I have again exterminated 150,000 Poles,’ he would say, ‘Fine, if that was necessary.’ The Führer stressed yet again that the Poles should have only one lord, the German: two lords, one next to the other, cannot and should not exist; accordingly, all representatives of the Polish intelligentsia must be exterminated. That sounds cruel, but such is the law of life.
The General Government is a Polish reserve, a large Polish work camp… If the Poles rise to a higher level of development, they will cease to be the workforce that we need.
‘It is our duty to eradicate the population; that is part of our mission to protect the German population,’ Hitler instructed his accomplices. ‘We will have to develop the technology for eradicating the population. If I am asked what I mean by eradicating the population, I shall reply that I mean the extermination of entire racial categories. That is exactly what I am preparing to implement. To put it bluntly, that is my mission.’
In the path of our troops lay the hell, revealed to the world at this time, of the Treblinka, Majdanek, Auschwitz, and other death camps. The soldiers broke down the gates and cut the cable providing power for the electrified barbed wire. What was exposed through the gates of the concentration camps seemed beyond human comprehension. Hundreds of thousands of people murdered, asphyxiated or tortured to death. Those still breathing had been left to die of starvation or from their physical and moral torments.
Near Poznań we stayed in an empty house. In a polished frame on a bedside table was a photograph of a boy with his arms folded, frozen in motionless delight. His father, Paul von Heydenreich, a Baltic German, read the New Testament and Schiller’s plays. In a large desk was a copy of a document which, after bursting into this well appointed home in October 1939 with an escort of German policemen, Heydenreich presented to its owner. In it the owner read that, in accordance with an order of the German Burgomeister, he, the Polish architect Boleslaw Matuszewski, owner of the house at No. 4, former Mickiewicz Street, must without delay leave the house together with his family. He was permitted to take with him two changes of underwear and a raincoat. He had twenty-five minutes to pack… Heil Führer! (I copied the document into my diary).
We had now long been advancing through the part of Poland the Nazis had annexed to their Reich and attempted to Germanize forcibly. After a crossing of the Rivers Warta and Notec, General Vasiliy Chuikov’s troops surrounded Poznań. The approaches to the outskirts were blocked by a powerful defensive ring of forts, which withstood attack. They had to be besieged and taken by storm.
Here, in Poznań, on 4 October 1943, Himmler had declared,
How well the Russians live, how well the Czechs live is of no interest to me. What there is among these peoples of good blood of our sort, we shall take to ourselves and, if need be, select children and bring them up ourselves. Whether other peoples live in prosperity or die of hunger interests me only to the extent that our culture needs them as slaves. This is of no interest to me in any other sense.
Poznań was one of the first Polish cities to be captured by the Germans. In 1939, hot on the heels of the German divisions, thousands of German businessmen and Nazi Party officials came running to assimilate the ‘Province of Wartheland’. The Poles were expelled from all even halfdecent apartments. They no longer had any factories, department stores, schools or personal belongings. Their streets were renamed, their language banned, their monuments vandalized and churches desecrated.
Focke-Wulf workshops were moved from Bremen into the fortresses. Poles were deported to provide forced labour in Germany. The Jewish population was shot on the outskirts of the city. Such was the triumph here of the spirit of National Socialism.
Stalingrad assault detachments experienced in street fighting battled in Poznań for every street, building and stairwell. The artillery helped, but every time the outcome was decided by assaults that sometimes came to hand-to-hand fighting. The sky above the city was aglow, lit by the flames as, losing block after block, the Germans burned and blew up buildings in the centre. Now all they still held was the citadel of Poznań, an ancient stronghold designed to withstand attack for a long time. It towers over the city and occupies a large area, two square kilometres as I recall. The ground on the approaches to the citadel was lined with trenches, behind which were the fortress’ embankment and massive wall.