The Long Walk (6 page)

Suddenly another voice howled – yes, it was a howl that shocked us, like the douche of freezing water that awakens a dreamer from his sleep. ‘Stop it, stop it! For the love of Jesus
Christ Almighty, stop it!’ Other voices joined it. ‘Do you want to make us insane? Shut up, you bloody fool.’ The man with the dream cake said no more. I longed for that damned
wonderful cake for days afterwards. I just could not remember what cake tasted like.

T
HERE WAS
time and to spare for a powerful amount of individual thinking as the endless-seeming ride entered its third
week, with the train well into Western Siberia. We had been losing interest in the names of stations, each with their white-painted bust of Stalin prominently displayed. The stopping-places all
looked alike, stretches of bleak, snow-covered country sometimes wooded and sometimes not. They varied only in the degree of cold they offered. The further east we went, the lower became the
temperature. We debouched on more than one occasion into the teeth of a shrieking, snow-laden north-easter and were not sorry to huddle back into the communal half-warmth of the truck.

We went on gleaning things about one another. I discovered that no one in this crowd had a lighter sentence than ten years hard labour. My own sentence of twenty-five years was fairly common and
there were a few even longer. Quite half of the men had one crime in common: they had served in the Polish armed forces. They talked, as soldiers will the world over, of their experiences and the
places they had served in, of their regiments and their friends. It set me thinking back and to taking stock of myself. I did not want particularly to bring my mind back to Poland, but there was
nothing else to do. I think it was an escape backwards to the memory of freedom.

It was the little Jew who started me recalling it all. He posed me an odd question – for a Jew, a most odd question. When the Germans came through in the West and the Russians in the East,
this little man with his little shop in Beloyostok realized on his stock and bought diamonds. He had relatives in Zyrardow, the textile centre near Warsaw, and a shoemaker friend who made him a
special pair of boots into which he built the diamonds. So, his preparations made, he set out to flee Poland. Where was he going? Why,
to Germany.
Because, he said, he did not trust the
Russians. But, I argued, the Germans would have killed you; they hate Jews. ‘Maybe, maybe,’ he answered. ‘But at least I was right about distrusting the Russians. Just look at me
now.’ Perhaps it was well for him that he never was given the chance to test the Germans. The Russians caught him trying to cross the border and that meant an almost automatic sentence of ten
years. Trying to escape from your liberators can be regarded as very anti-social behaviour.

By going home to Pinsk after the collapse of Polish Army resistance to the Germans, I had virtually chosen to let myself fall into the hands of the Russians. Would I have fared better as a
prisoner-of-war of the Nazis? It was an unanswerable question now, but it got me thinking of the Germans and the futile fighting of cavalry against tanks, the chaos, the bravery of a foredoomed
army in those crowded, desperate weeks of September 1939.

I was originally called up in 1937 while I was studying for my certificate as an architect and surveyor at the Wawelberea and Rotwanda Technical School in Warsaw, and served for twelve months at
the infantry training school at Brest Litovsk. After seven months they asked for volunteers for training as cavalry reconnaissance. I could ride well and leapt at the chance. At the end of the year
I passed out in the highest cadet rank. I went back to college and passed my finals in 1938, returning the same year to the Army for the big six-weeks manoeuvres in the Wolyn area near the Russian
Ukrainian border. I became a second lieutenant and went home, fit, bronzed and pleased with myself, to help my mother run the estate at Pinsk. Mother was the bright and practical element in our
family. My father thought the function of the estate was to provide the means for him to pursue his hobby – landscape painting. The house was full of his canvases, none of which he ever
allowed to be sold, although dealers had made approaches to him.

I followed my calling as estate manager for only a few months. On 1 March 1939, I was called up under an order of ‘unofficial mobilization’. Just six months later, on 31 August, on
the eve of my twenty-fourth birthday, as I sat reading letters from my wife and my mother and was preparing to open the parcels they had sent me, a messenger rode into our cavalry camp near Ozharov
to announce that the Germans were on the move. It was war.

My active service lasted just about three weeks but they were weeks packed with movement and incident. I went through again, in that rocking Russian railway van, my impressions of those days. I
remembered ducking for cover with my horse as the Stukas screamed on their road-strafing missions, the blocked roads, the baulked horse-drawn Polish artillery toiling to get within gun range of the
enemy. Often we were shelled and no one seemed to be quite sure where the Germans were. Near Kutno we found the main force of the Polish Cavalry, nearly ten thousand horses and their riders, their
main retreat route to Modlan blocked by well-positioned and dug-in Germans.

Here, at least there was some kind of unified command. The order went down the lines that we were to break through. Between us and the Germans were woods about a mile and a half in depth. From
unit to unit the bugles sounded the advance and we moved off. Men who were unhorsed in the first wave never got up again, horses went down squealing and the mounts behind jumped over them. As I
broke cover I saw horses staked on the steel barbed-wire supporting stakes, horses disembowelled on the wire. A cavalry charge induces a form of madness. Riders and horses alike are infected. Its
fury, its weight and its pounding impetus can only be stopped by the most awful and concentrated heavy gunfire. The Germans who stood up to surrender were mown down. The cavalry in a charge cannot
take prisoners.

Harassed by dive-bombers, threading our way along the choked roads, we fell back on Warsaw to reorganize, as we were told, for the defence of the capital. Foot soldiers climbed on to our
riderless horses and rode back with us – there was even a Polish sailor on horseback as we straggled into the outskirts of Warsaw. We found no organization for defence and when, after
carrying out some transfer of stores from military quarters in Praga across the Vistula to the old Warsaw cadet school, I heard there was an organized defence force in the outer suburbs on the
Warsaw-Piastov road, I saddled up, provisioned myself, and rode out. I was welcomed. I became leader of an eight-man cavalry patrol.

So it was that I came to see probably the last cavalry charge in modern warfare. We had left the horses in charge of four patrolmen in the outer fringe of some woods and had crawled to a hillock
topped by a clump of small trees from which we had a clear view down the main Piastov road, intercepted about a hundred yards from us by a four-road junction. There was a gaily-painted roadhouse in
the angle of the main road and one of the side roads. It was untenanted now, but there was still a large multi-coloured umbrella over an outside table. Then we saw two German patrols cautiously
probing the area on each side of the main road. One patrol passed between us and our horses. We froze quite still and kept our eyes on the two miles of clear main road ahead.

Not long afterwards we saw the reason for the scouting parties. Away in the distance swinging along with rifles slung over their shoulders came a platoon of German soldiers, followed by about
half-a-dozen officers on horseback. Behind them was a company of infantry and then some horse-drawn guns. The column was half-a-mile from the crossroads when I heard horses on the road behind me.
Emerging from the woods on to the road was a force of about 150 fully-equipped Polish Cavalry – I learned later they were the 12th Uhlans.

The cavalry formed up immediately and were thundering down the road, swords flashing, before the marching Germans knew what was happening. The horses smashed through the whole column with hardly
a shot fired against them. As the frightened artillery horses reared, the guns slewed across the road and there were Polish casualties as riders were unhorsed against the guns. They formed up again
and charged back to complete the havoc. They swung off along one of the side roads and it was all over. We crept away and found our horses, mounted and returned to report. The date was either the
15th or 16th of September. Warsaw capitulated soon afterwards.

The problem posed by the little Jewish shopkeeper just could not be answered, I decided. Germans or Russians? For the Pole in my position in 1939 there was little choice. There were plenty more
like me on this train, who had thought that fighting the Nazis might be a passport to Soviet clemency.

The days of comfortless tedium went dragging by. We dozed in numb misery, we dreamed racking nightmares which stayed with us as we woke again to realization that we were still in this awful
train and there seemed no end to the grinding of the wheels. We talked of wives and families. Some of the men would describe their babies in loving detail. We railed against the Russians and we
cursed Hitler and his Germans. We lived through long hours in which no man spoke as we huddled together against intense cold. Sometimes we were locked in for thirty-six hours on end. That was when
men moaned with the abject frustration of it all and called down searing curses on the architects of our degradation.

But we were moving, moving all the time. Men died and their names were written off, but the long snake of sixty or more cattle trucks went on eating up a staggering total of miles. The vastness
of Russia is appalling. We reached and identified the important Siberian centre of Novo Sibirsk, eighteen hundred miles from our starting point outside Moscow, and still the train went on. We had
covered over two thousand miles eastwards in an almost straight line when we passed slowly through Krasnoyarsk and saw grain piled high in the open, deteriorating and throwing out green shoots
because there was either no labour or no transport to move it. A big place, this Krasnoyarsk, seen through the spyholes in our wooden cells. A place of huge granaries and red brick buildings and
the activity normally associated with a busy rail junction.

About eight miles beyond Krasnoyarsk we pulled up at a long siding well out of sight and sound of the town. A brisk, well-wrapped team of wheel-tappers wielded their hammers down the length of
the train. These wheel-tappers must be among the most assiduous of the world’s railway workers. At every possible opportunity during the long ride they banged away at the wheels. They were
obviously workers of the greatest importance. A breakdown on one of the stretches of snowy wilderness between towns would have been disastrous. This time they found defects in some of the wagons
and we spent the hours from mid-morning to dusk in the open trying to keep circulation moving while repairs were carried out from materials taken from a couple of brick shacks at the side of the
line. There was, by now, one slight improvement in our condition. Following the example of one unknown minor genius, we had made trouser-fasteners from twigs threaded through the waist bands. Now
we had both hands free. Now we could flail our arms about to stop freezing.

It was the end of the third week and some thought that Krasnoyarsk might be the end of the line for us. At dusk, however, we were loaded aboard, locked in and sealed again. The wheels turned and
thudded into the old rhythm. There were six more nights of travel, six days or parts of days in the open, stamping around to stay alive. Then, incredibly, one month and over 3,000 miles after the
start, we reached the end of the train journey. The place was Irkutsk, near the southern tip of the great Baikal Lake.

The soldiers walked down the train removing the seals and unbarring the trucks and ordering, ‘All out. The trip’s over.’

We stumbled out and a shrieking, whipping wind, and a sub-zero temperature made us gulp and gasp and cling to the small shelter afforded by the trucks. In a few minutes ears became icy cold,
noses purple-red and eyes streamed tears. We shivered, all of us, uncontrollably. It was the second week in December and Siberia was already fast bound in winter. We met it still clad only in a
pair of trousers, canvas shoes and a thin cotton blouse. The soldiers inspected each wagon to make sure it had been cleared. Some men, seized with cramp or worse, had to be lifted down. There was
some milling about, a shouting of orders, repeated again down the line to each group and we formed into a long, untidy column – a crowd of perhaps four thousand prisoners, headed, tailed and
flanked by soldiers. We shambled off, heads bent against the wind, trousers soaked to the knees in the snow and slush churned up by those ahead.

The march took us five miles across country, out of sight and sound of the railway. It was typical of the whole enterprise that our resting-place was to be no haven for drooping travellers. We
stopped and broke out of ranks in a vast, wind-swept potato field. Nowhere, as far as the eye could see in any direction, was there a building of any sort. The field lay under two feet of crisp
snow. A few wood-burning
kolhoz
lorries stood around. There was a single mobile field kitchen which seemed grossly inadequate for the needs of such a mass of prisoners. The wind had jagged
teeth that made me feel quite naked to its attack. Men stood in the snow and looked bleakly at one another. All the tears were not caused by the cutting wind.

The period of aimless standing around did not last long. It was urgently necessary to do something to get out of the paralysing blast of the wind. One group near me started to scrape heaped snow
into a windbreak. The idea spread rapidly. Soon there was feverish toiling to make little snow-ringed compounds. Men scraped and scratched away with numb fingers down to the rock-hard black earth
and when their work was done crouched down behind the windbreak.