Do you know what,” the older lady from Lodz said to me, “I will tie your feet to these bars, because we could I have an accident” Through my sleep I felt her tying my legs to the bars with a scarf. “The car is open, and if it should give a sudden jerk you could go flying.” I heard her subdued voice through the roar of the wheels. “Mrs. is sleeping in a sitting position,” she said, “and there could be a misfortune because it is easy to fall off. But the scarf will hold you.”
Actually, I was not sleeping, only napping. I dozed on and off, dreaming a little. I was satisfied that I was headed for home. I did not have a home to return to this very minute, but I would certainly have one in Poland, in this new people’s Poland. The trip on an open car was not comfortable, especially with the bars pinching my flesh, but I was moving forward, and for me that was the most important thing right then. It was no easy matter for me to get on this train in the first place.
Right after 9 May, Klara and the Hungarian woman came down with stomach typhus. A military ambulance took them to the hospital in Röbel. The next day I started getting ready to return to my country. I prepared myself psychologically only, because any other means was out of the question. Every day I went to the station with the older lady and her daughter, counting on some lucky break that would enable me to get back to my country. I felt myself suffocating in this little German town. I could not bear to look at the women in their white aprons, working in their gardens, carrying on their calm, normal, everyday lives.
I always took my possessions with me: one new sheet and a white tablecloth with a monogram in the corner. We did not have much food, but at that point I was not really interested in food. All I cared about was finding a way to get home.
I remember the twenty-first of May. As usual, we came to the station very early. I wandered out onto the tracks and saw a long line of cars loaded with iron bars. There was a convoy of Russian soldiers accompanying the shipment of iron bars. I thought to myself, where can such a train be going, and quickly I found the answer. It must be going to the Soviet Union. If it is going to the Soviet Union, what direction must it take? It must go through Poland. Without any further thought I took a seat on the bars. My friend and her daughter climbed in with me.
The train gave a sudden lurch, and we were underway. We passed fields, forests, and meadows with grazing cows. It looked quite idyllic, but that very fact troubled me. The tranquility is unbelievable. How could life return to its normal patterns so quickly?
After about an hour the train stopped at a station. A young Russian soldier told us that we had to get off. “This is a military transport,” he said, “and civilians aren’t allowed to travel on this train.” What could we do now? We got off at the station, and when the soldier left we got on the train once more. At the next station we ran into the same problem. The soldier screamed, explained, ordered, but he could not guard all the cars at the same time, and as soon as he turned away from us we returned to the iron bars.
That was how we spent the first night on the iron bars. I did not even have a blanket to cover myself, and it was a cold night. In spite of the cold, I dozed, and the older lady tied my legs to the bars so I would not fall off the train. At night the train stopped for long stretches, moved a little, and then stopped again. If the train kept moving at this pace, I did not know whether I would be able to endure the trip. For food we had just one loaf of bread and a few pieces of sugar. If we had to stay on the train for a few weeks, what would we do then?
“Oh, ma’am,” the older lady said to me, “here comes the soldier. He is going to chase us out of the car.” We went down without being told, and a minute later we were back on the bars. This cat and mouse game with the soldiers made me angry. When the soldier appeared again at lunch time in order to repeat, “Citizens, you can’t travel here,” I asked him if he knew where we were returning from.
“I am a Communist,” I shouted from the train. “I am rushing back to my country because they are building a Socialist state there. Think! Maybe they need me there, and you just keep chasing me and harassing me, instead of finding out whether I am hungry.” I knew the Russian language very well, and anger gave wings to my words. Then, for the first time, I looked at his face. He was so young. He could not have been more than eighteen years old. He looked at me in astonishment, as if seeing me for the first time. I smiled at him and he answered me with a smile. He turned and left.
“Did you make things any better?” my friend asked. He would probably bring an officer who would chase us off the train for good. But he did not bring anybody. That evening he brought us half a loaf of army bread, some hot coffee, and a plate of soup. Later he brought a mattress and two blankets. We arranged ourselves in a booth between cars where it was warmer and safer. From that time on he brought us food every day. He did not ask questions. He just brought the food and left. Apparently, he was not supposed to speak to us.
At one of the stations, two Polish soldiers jumped into our car. They were dressed in Polish uniforms, with eagles on their hats. I rubbed my eyes, not believing what I was seeing. Polish soldiers. Where did they come from?
“Lady, why are you so surprised?” one of them asked. “You crossed the Polish border, ma’am. This is Poland,” he repeated, seeing that I had turned to stone.
I remember that at that very moment I smelled a different aroma coming in from the fields. The sky looked different above us; different roads, forests, meadows, all rushed by the train. How is it possible that I had not noticed? I was overwhelmed with joy. I started to sing, to shout with joy.
“Tell me, how are things in Poland? How are the people getting on? Have you been in Lublin? How are things in Warsaw?” I inundated them with questions.
They did not want to talk to me at first, but after I pressed them for a time I discovered a few things that sent a chill down my spine. “Don’t tell strangers that before the war you were in prison for being a Communist. Haven’t you heard about the gangs? There is no peace in Poland. People are dying every day. Be careful,” one of them shouted when they jumped off the car at a station. We traveled further, all the way to Bydgoszcz.1 When I saw the large sign on the Bydgoszcz station, I decided to get off.
We wandered around the tracks. We had a loaf of bread in our bag, which had been given to us by the Polish soldiers. There was no need for us to hurry. There were a lot of people milling around the station with huge packages and valises. Where had they come from, and where were they going? I did not have the nerve to ask. I had heard nothing about these expeditions to the west to pick up the goods that had been left behind by the Germans. A train pulled into the station filled with soldiers who had no belts and no weapons. “Those are deserters,” someone told me. I had gone no farther than Bydgoszcz, and already my bubble had burst, my dream that if I could just get to Poland everything would be alright. I had imagined that they would be waiting for us, the political prisoners and the prisoners from the concentration camps, with flowers. Instead we wandered around the station, hungry and dirty, and nobody paid any attention to us. Maybe it was better this way, I thought, remembering the parting words of the soldiers.
After lunch a civilian train pulled in. The older lady and her daughter did not want to go any farther. I did not think much about it. I got on the train and let myself into a compartment. I even found a spot near a window. I looked eagerly at the passing villages and towns, so homey and so close to my heart. I was so taken with the scenery that I did not hear the conductor when he asked, “Ticket, please?” What was he saying? I was very surprised. Did he want a ticket from me, a visitor from another planet? Did he not realize where I had been? “I don’t have a ticket,” I shouted angrily. “Where would I get money to buy it with? They didn’t give us money in the German camp.”
“Excuse me, I didn’t know,” he said gently.
Now I really became interested in the train’s destination. “Please, sir, can you tell me where this train is headed?”
“You don’t know? This train is going to Lodz.”
“Can I get a train from Lodz to Lublin?” I asked.
“There are no passenger trains to Lublin as yet, but there is a freight train. Some of the freight cars are set aside for passengers.”
I had found out what I had to know. I relaxed now and enjoyed the scenery. As the train came closer to my home, my anxiety increased. What was waiting for me? I had already cried for the death of my whole family in April 1942. But would I be able to look quietly at the house and the city where my parents, my brother, my sister-in-law, and all my relatives had died so tragically?
“Please, lady.” Someone’s voice tore me from my thoughts. The conductor was standing in front of me. “I brought you something to eat. Please accept it. It’s Polish food,” he added, seeing my confusion. There were two pieces of fresh white bread thickly spread with lard. In the thermos he had some hot tea. I ate. He did not ask questions, for which I was grateful. I did not have the strength to talk, right now, just to satisfy someone’s curiosity. The past and present were getting mixed up in my whirling head. Nothing seemed real to me. Later that evening I arrived in Lodz. The station was filled with people. Every inch of the walkway was occupied by people, standing, or else sitting on packages and valises, or simply sitting right on the floor. I sat down near the tracks. All around me people were shouting to each other, telling each other stories, laughing and eating. I listened, but the words did not make any sense to me. I was asked a question about something, but I did not answer. I simply could not speak. I was really very sick from what I had lived through the last few weeks. Everybody around me was waiting for the same train that I was. The train was to arrive at approximately ten o’clock in the morning. I spent the whole night sitting on the walkway. Very early in the morning everybody started getting ready to fight for a place on the train. At a little before ten, two civilians came with red armbands on their sleeves and carrying carbines on their shoulders. The train had not yet arrived, but the armed civilians stood in line waiting for it. I noticed that only those who pushed money into the hands of the armed personnel had a chance of getting on the train. Anyone without money was unceremoniously shunted aside. I was afraid to get stuck among those hags with packages. I imagined that they would trample me without giving it a thought.
At ten o’clock a long freight train arrived. They opened the large doors of a few of the cars, and the people, together with their packages, started pushing toward the entrance. The two caretakers with the carbines shuffled along with the passengers. “It’s full,” screamed one of the hags. “Lady, shut the door. Nobody else can fit in here.” The door was closed. Then I stepped up to one of the armed men.
“Mister,” I uttered in despair, “I don’t have any money. I am returning from the camp. You see, sir,”—I showed him the number tattooed on my arm—“I have a new sheet. I will give it to you. Please let me get on the train.” I took the sheet from my bag. He took it. He opened the door and threw me in at the last minute. The train started.
I sat on the floor, in the middle of the car. It was quite dark in there, because the only light came from two little windows near the ceiling. As usual, the passengers in the car divided into several groups. They treated my intrusion with complete indifference. They spread out napkins before themselves and started to eat. Here and there a bottle of whisky appeared.
There was a bench under the windows and a group formed there. A few women and men were listening with bated breath to a story being told by a young man in an old worn-out army officer’s cap from which the eagle had been torn. “I’m telling you”—I kept overhearing scraps of his story—“when I saw Russian officers in the Polish army, I thought to myself, this is not for you. Run away from this army. They’ll never live to see the day that I fight for a Communist Poland. I took off, and you see how they shot at me and almost killed me. I took care of a few of them on the way, though. I have a gun. It will come in handy against the Reds.”
“Drink, you poor soul.” One woman became very mushy about the whole thing and put a glass of whisky in his hand. A second woman gave him bread, salami, and an egg without a shell. He removed his cap and it was then that I saw that his head was bandaged with a bloody rag.
“What do you think,” somebody said in another corner of the car, “that things will stay the way they are now? Nothing doing! The Soviets will never lord it over us. You’ll see. Anders will come back from London and chase those beggars the hell out of here.”
“What are you carrying?” another woman asked.
“Men’s shirts and materials from the warehouse in Szczecin. I bought the stuff from somebody who somehow sneaked into the warehouse.”
As I listened to these conversations my skin crawled. I lowered my head and pretended to be asleep. I was scared. I was trying to think of what I could tell them when they got around to asking me where I came from. Could I admit to these people that I had just come from the camp? They could strangle me in this terrible car if they found out that I am a Red. If only I could hold out until night time, then it would be easier to hide in a corner. I was very hungry, and I had nothing to eat with me. No one offered me even a crumb of bread, even though they had everything and were eating all they wanted.
Soon the car was enveloped in total darkness. Everyone went to sleep. I fell asleep, too.
Early the next morning they all started arranging their packages, dividing them into smaller packages, so that they would not be conspicuous.
“Lady, you don’t have any baggage. Maybe you can take one of my valises,” one of the women said to me.
“I can’t. I am sick,” I answered.
At twelve noon the doors suddenly slid open. We were in Lublin. I was the first one to leave. As I reached the street, I was greeted by a colorful Easter procession. There was a colorful crowd of women dressed in their native costumes, children, and elegant men. There was no room on the street. All of the balconies and windows were decorated with rugs, flowers, and pictures of the Holy Family.
So this is Poland. I understood the words of the Polish soldiers whom I met on the border: “Don’t tell the people you meet that you are a Communist.” The fight had not ended. A fight takes time.
1 Bydgoszcz is the capital of Bydgoszcz Province in north central Poland. The city had a Jewish populace of about 3,000 before World War II.