Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

3 A Distant Thunder: Europe, 1945

It is said with resignation, ‘Our earthly life is but a little time.’ Have we still future enough to get to the root of everything, to the core of life? What is certain is how long the past has been. Reverse the future and the past and there will be an infinity of days that seem sometimes a hazy succession, sometimes an elusive delight, and sometimes have such density and fullness that the thunder reaching you from that chasm pounds against your transient being.

Warsaw has a suburb called Praga. It had long been taken back from the Germans. Fate had been kind to us, not compelling us to languish here, on this side of the Vistula, while the Warsaw Uprising flared tragically on the other. We had not, thank God, been here at that time but were deployed to Poland from our Motherland just before Christmas. Almost immediately the Wojsko Polskie and our troops moved on Warsaw.

Now Warsaw is liberated and we are in its suburbs, in Praga, in the midst of jubilant red-and-white Polish flags. Somewhere a small orchestra flares up briefly and goes out. There is broken stone and shattered glass underfoot, the walls have breaches in them. Front-line vehicles and the infantry are on the move. A houseowner in warm earmuffs waves a small red flag and stands there in the street, loudly welcoming our unit as it passes through, eager to shake every hand.

Here is where we will stop for the night. A steep climb up a dark, frail, creaking staircase to the second floor where we are to sleep in empty, freezing rooms abandoned by their occupants. We find a lonely old woman, the one remaining, longstanding resident. Hearing our heavy footsteps coming up the stairs, she waits warily in the corridor.

She has a worn, black velvet coat and a felt hat that must once have been fashionable, with the snouts of two small, unidentifiable animals artfully attached to it. Her gaze is detached, unfocused, and she seems to be looking past us. She greets us courteously and in slow motion. Her delicate hand, removed from a velvet muff, indicates the doors of the rooms that are empty, ‘Proszę panowie [Gentlemen, please],’ before it is replaced in the muff. In her high laced boots she minces back down the corridor to her own apartment.

In the morning she is waiting for me in the corridor, wearing an old shapeless dress that looks like a mantle, and long, elegant black earrings. Her grey hair is carefully divided into small tresses. She takes me to her room. A pair of men’s worn-out shoes serve as her indoor footwear and clatter on the worn, black parquet. Pieces of cotton wool are sticking out of the backs of the shoes, pushed in for warmth or, more probably, to keep them from falling off as she is walking. Her heels do, nevertheless, pop out and holes gleam all the way through several layers of stockings. At the door of her room she introduces herself: Madame Maria, a music teacher.

A big room, a divan, an open harmonium. Freezing cold. A baby grand piano, ‘Becker. St Petersburg’, covered in pillows, blankets, pieces of soft cloth to keep it from getting too cold. It seems to be the only thing here with any life. In a notebook I got hold of back in Latvia, inside a hard dark blue cover with light blue marbling, I write that day, ‘From somewhere, a wave of depressing weariness and pain.’ It must be because, having glimpsed someone else’s life, shot to pieces by the war and the German occupation, I was suddenly shaken by her rugged, uncomplaining solitariness. Perhaps it was an austere reward for my own nomadic, homeless destiny at the front. The entry is dated 19 January 1945, two days after Warsaw was liberated.

Madame Maria says she wants to celebrate it somehow, and touches one of her long black earrings. It is the first time in over five years she has worn them. She invites me to be seated and, looking a little absently in my direction, begins removing the pillows and blankets from the piano and putting them on the divan. Yes, yes, something to celebrate it, she says, mixing Russian and Polish words together. If Maria can be permitted, she would like to play something for me. She loves Bach, but after the Germans declared him an Aryan she stopped playing him.

She extracts sheet music from the pile on the piano and sets it on the music rack. She sits down on the rotating music stool, adjusts her hair, raises a hand to her mouth, breathes on her fingers and rubs them, then runs them over the keys.

She plays and her earrings sway. The pedal is operated by a foot wearing a man’s worn-out shoe. I do not listen very attentively but, as tends to happen when you hear music played, something inside you seems to fill with a sense of participation in living, perturbs you with an unfocused joy or hope of life, and carries you away from the limitations of war. My feet feel cold.

Maria finishes with a cascade of chords, looks across to me and says, with perhaps a hint of irritation, that she would, of course, have preferred to play something more serious but it would be difficult to do that from memory nowadays, and her finest music has long ago been taken to the bomb shelter for safekeeping. What she has here – she indicates the pile – is just what she is practising with her pupils, easy pieces.

Her pupils? Here in a suburb which has been on the front line for months and which only the Vistula separated from all the fighting and destruction in Warsaw? She evidently notices my puzzlement and tells me with quiet dignity that her son is over there, by which she clearly means on the other side of the front line, where the Germans are. He is in the underground. She reaches for her late husband’s warm dressing gown, thrown on the divan. Rising slightly, she wraps it around herself. Yes, yes, she still has two pupils. Their parents are not so rich, she tells me with an increasingly evident, and evidently defensive, haughtiness, as to be able to throw away all they have already spent on their daughters’ musical education. Quite possibly the ability to entertain a party with light music will be the only dowry they get. Just recently, though, she has taken on another student, a strange man, Pan Wojciech. His villa, requisitioned by the Germans, has been returned to him and he is intending to sit out the remainder of the war alone, minding his own business, whatever happens outside the walls of his home. That is why he has taken to learning the piano. He is fifty-four and his hands are completely unsuitable. ‘You need to be playing while your hands are growing to fit the keyboard!’ she says rather intensely, and it is evident from the way she says it that she disapproves of Pan Wojciech. She should have declined taking him on but now only has two other pupils – not enough to survive on.

It is time for her to get ready to give him his lesson, and our truck is already snorting down in the street. I run downstairs, pulling on my outdoor clothes as I go. The engine is being warmed up and the truck is juddering.

When Madame Maria emerges through the front door, I am sitting in the back of the truck. She comes over and, in the unforgiving light of a clear winter’s day, it is only too obvious how bloodless her aristocratic face, crisscrossed with wrinkles, is. A purple vein twitches under one eye. How old and scrawny the snouts of those little animals on her hat are. She is looking distractedly, perhaps at me or somewhere above my head, pressing her muff high up on her chest. There is something she is hesitating to say.

‘Warsaw,’ she quavers but breaks off. Pulling herself together, she says simply, ‘Give Bach back to us. How can anyone play the piano without Bach?’ She could equally well have said, bring my son back to me but she does not. She hurries off to give her lesson, teetering in her high lace-up boots over the frozen cobbles.

I wrote at the time in my diary, ‘She has lived her life and has no future, but she is giving music lessons in a town which for a long time was the front line, her hair carefully divided into little tresses. This is not senile affectation, it is her way of life.’ And with that way of life she is retaining her sense of self-respect, discipline, nobility and femininity in spite of her age and the sad losses she has suffered.

She goes off to give her lesson, and the brittle clacking of her heels gradually dies away. As I look after her, I am painfully aware how vulnerable Maria is amidst the collapsing masonry of war, how homeless, as if it is she rather than I who has no roof over her head. And in fact, that really is the situation: the war is my home. The war takes some account of me, I have business with it, while Maria, a private person, has none. It is up to her to survive as best she can.

The agony of Warsaw stares out at us, the blackened gaps between the buildings, the jagged fragments of walls, the spectral skeletons of houses stripped bare by the avalanche of shells and fire, the silent testimony of its ruins.

These ruins are a tragic monument to the spirit: its torment, its doomed passion, its inspiration and its horror. They are an emblem of something that cannot be gauged against earlier knowledge or experience. What these ruins encapsulate cannot be articulated or sculpted. Only the ruins all the way from Vyazma to Warsaw speak the language of what has transpired here.

The open road. The snow on the ground is drifting, the tall, thin Catholic crosses by the roadside with the figure of the crucified Christ flash by. Beyond the boundary of the road is open country and woodland shrouded in mist. What is it about this land that so clutches at your heart, so unsettles and bewitches you? You cannot pin it down. Only many years later did I see surviving newsreel footage of the Polish cavalry, with sabres drawn, charging German tanks. In that chivalrous, warrior-like outburst of valour there is such love and beauty and vulnerability that you are transfixed. I thought when I saw that sight that this gesture was the very embodiment of a Poland that had languished for so long under the yoke of tyranny; it was all in that gesture – the boundless devotion of spirit, imprisoned in mortal flesh, raising its immortal arm against soulless, invincible brute force.

We drive through some ruined town. The townspeople are ceremonially bearing two Polish soldiers shoulder-high through the streets. We have not been issued felt boots. The quartermasters withheld them on the grounds that winter in Europe does not compare with winter in Russia. In the back of our truck, however, our legs are frozen in our thin boots. We have no option but to stop at a village to warm ourselves. Our hosts cannot do enough for us. Before I can pull off my boots myself they rush to help. The mother shouts and a young lad grabs a basin, skips outside to collect snow, comes back, sits down on the floor beside me and starts rubbing my numb legs with snow.

Two little urchins wake up, escape from under the quilt and start jumping up and down on the bed. The only person in the house not involved in all the turmoil and excitement around us is an orphaned girl from Warsaw whom they have taken in. Kneeling by the stove, she is constantly, unsmilingly topping up the fire. It is her job to keep the stove fuelled. She half turns round and I see sunken, deeply melancholy eyes not at all like those of a child. She does not belong here. ‘Girl by the fire in the stove, her narrow little back wrapped crosswise in a grey shawl, saving something up, hiding it against…’ Against whom? I did not finish the sentence on the scrap of paper that has survived. Against the people who had given her shelter, against all of us for her orphaned life that can never be put right again.

A modest, subdued far horizon, a low sky, a snowstorm is trying to tear a poster down, flapping it above the road with one end still clinging to the post. ‘Brother Slavs!’ ‘Brothers…’

The war lumbered onwards, and brought us to the Polish city of Bydgoszcz, which the Germans called Bromberg, alien, not demolished, not devastated, as if the war, having passed it by, had now been pushed aside. The enemy had been forced out at dawn, or rather, obliged to depart, leaving no sign of having put up a fight. The tanks and infantry did not pause to fortify the position but rushed straight on. It was they who rightly enjoyed the enthusiastic welcome of the local Polish population.

The blizzard was dying down, but it was still snowing and foggy. Our truck was following the car with the chief of staff, drawn increasingly into the straight, narrow streets of the outskirts. From the back I could see the stone walls of prim grey houses, the pavements empty. Only on one corner, a collection of strange, stunted creatures, enveloped in what looked like dark flannel soldiers’ blankets, were shifting from one foot to the other to keep warm. We drove on towards the city centre and again saw, swarming on the corners, more of these indefinite, small, lumpish people. As the mist cleared you could just glimpse, if someone peeped out from a blanket, a woman’s face, dark, angular, with a vacant, unseeing gaze. There was something deeply disturbing about their unfathomable swarming, their incoherence, their disconnectedness from their surroundings. We learned later that they were Hungarian Jewesses who had walked out of a concentration camp abandoned by fleeing guards.

Our truck was already entering the town centre, where a confusion of vehicles had created a traffic jam. The place was full of people out in the street enjoying the tumult of victory. There were Polish girls, soldiers with dapper Polish caps, tomfoolery going on, boys jubilantly shouting threats to the Germans, and townspeople carrying armfuls of goods looted from the German depots and shops. We heard the order ‘Back to your vehicles!’, and the vehicles, extricating themselves, slowly moved off to their destinations around the city.

I finally jump down from the back of the truck and, on feet stiff with cold, advance through an echoing main entrance, crushing fallen plaster under my boots, and go upstairs to an apartment abandoned by its occupants. In the semi-darkness of the hallway someone comes towards me. I step back, alarmed, not immediately accepting that this is me, my own dim reflection in a dark mirror. Not half turned towards me, not in a shard of mirror glass, but straight ahead, full length. Had I ever experienced that before? Perhaps years ago, but I had forgotten it.

Antlers on the wall. A round wooden stand on the floor with the knobs of walking sticks and umbrellas sticking out. On a pier glass commode are a clothes brush and the stump of a candle that has run. I inspect and take all this in, and enough light is coming from the vestibule through the open front door to make out the dark depths of a corridor. The toe of my boot makes contact with displaced blocks of parquet in the doorway of a room.

The room is home to a sideboard too massive to be carried off by people fleeing in panic, its cut-glass panes sparkling. Outside the window a ragged bluish twilight is descending. The dense stone houses are bespattered with slithering snow. It is fast becoming dark in the room. Something darts across the floor and rustles in one corner, perhaps a mouse, perhaps some malevolent Germanic spirit. I come out of my reverie, pull off my mittens and grope in the already dark hallway for what remains of the candle. I pull it off the commode where at the last moment it has been blown out as those who had lived here retreated in haste from the apartment with their suitcases, bearing all the bundles of belongings they could carry and more, and now their ghosts are haunting the nooks and crannies, colliding with the ghosts of the Poles heaved out of their family home five years ago. All their other property became the spoils of war for the German family that invaded their apartment. Now a German catastrophe totters on top of that of the Poles.

I went back to the room and remembered about the window. From high up by the ceiling there hung a twined cord which I pulled and heavy curtains floated towards each other and fitted snugly together. For me it was an unfamiliar blackout method, but it was good not to have to fix a groundsheet or a blanket over a window. Now I could allow myself to light the candle. I struck a match, acutely aware, and later when recalling that evening, even more acutely aware, of the incongruity of how this halfburned candle had passed from one set of owners to another, and on from them to me.

I stood there, clutching what remained of the candle, looking round at the imperturbable sideboard and the magnificent curtains with their fringe and pompoms, so treacherously willing to serve new masters. I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs – one thing you don’t enjoy in war is privacy – and along the corridor, flashing his torch, came our Major Bystrov.

‘Cold enough to freeze hell over, Lelchen! Kalt! Sehr kalt! Warum kalt? Why is it cold when we’ve got a stove here?’ As indeed we had, only I had no idea how to get it going. I had never seen one like it before: low, small, square. It looked more like a locker, a smooth-faced stove with no chimney. Where was the smoke supposed to go? On the floor beside it was a wicker basket with neat briquettes of brown coal.

Bystrov had nothing against a degree of female incompetence, and may even have felt it displayed him to advantage. With speed and efficiency he worked out how to operate the stove and dealt with the perplexing fastenings on its door. (I held the candle.) The stove opened and the acrid smell of cold ash wafted out, a memory of the life lived here before we came, its last residue of expiring warmth.

A house that until recently had belonged to someone else was now abandoned. A candle. A few curious moments of a serenity rare in war, when everything is up in the air, still being made sense of by administrations, but when one thing at least is clear: the enemy has been pushed out and our orders are to stop here for now, in this city. Did something happen at that moment? It seemed at the time that nothing had, but looking back now it is clear that something did, at least as far as Major Bystrov was concerned.

I was used to his intimate German nickname for me (‘Lelchen’) and took it in my stride. I was used to his laborious efforts to piece phrases together from what he remembered of his school German. I had got used to his secret, passionate decision in respect of Klava – Klavochka! That brought us together, too. Even before then he had been happy to share confidences with me, but now, because Klavochka was my friend, I was positively his confidante. This time it was quite some confidence he shared.

Bystrov got the stove going and gave me instructions on how to keep it alight. Tonight, when people billeted here arrived, they would have somewhere to warm up. He was in a hurry to return to headquarters and prepare a reconnaissance report from intelligence coming in from the division, but paused for a moment and suddenly told me, as if it were obvious, ‘Here is what I have decided, Lelchen – or rather, this is the task I have set myself: when we enter Germany I am going to capture Goebbels.’ He might even have come specially looking for me to tell me that.

He had told me before that he could not be satisfied with a life without a specific task to accomplish in each phase of it, but then he had been speaking about before the war. At the front his job was to implement aims and plans that had been decided for him. In that respect, the war had clipped his wings. Now, however, it seemed he was on the brink of acquiring a clear mission of his own.

Who in their right mind would come up with an idea like that? But then again, Bystrov was not a loudmouth, not immature, not a fantasist. You could never have accused him of that, and now, somehow, he was growing rapidly. Those relentless days that fused into one long day left no time to delve into what might be going on in his mind, and in any case I had no inclination to try. We were in thrall to just one, overarching goal that was common to all of us, and that was to win the war.

It is only now, from a distance of many years, that I am trying to understand the meaning of the changes in him then, when victory was imminent. The blurred shadow from a guttering candle flame, its light glinting in the glass of that portly sideboard, the pretentious pompoms, the chimneyless stove, the obscure nooks populated by the town’s undead, the rustling… And in this weird setting, unflappably real, Major Bystrov. For a moment I see that calm expression on his yellow-tinted face but then, elusive, he dissolves in the candlelight and is gone.

Bystrov at the mature age of thirty-eight had a successful life behind him, and was still focused on it. In that life he had a candidate’s degree in biological science and was passionately devoted to the theories of Lysenko and the notion of being able to predetermine the sex of calves, bull or heifer, at will. He believed he was close to obtaining practical results when the war, temporarily, intervened. The war had also interrupted his work on a second dissertation, in philosophy. This, for some reason, I found incredible. Even though life at the front so discouraged speculative thinking, simplified matters and left no time for disconsolate navel-gazing, there were apparently highbrow individuals who still thought differently and devoted themselves to philosophical studies.

But what did I really know about Bystrov? I only imagined at that time that I knew him. He seemed just a level-headed, unassuming sort of fellow, until he emphatically made his mark. His slightly yellowed face was impassive but there was something in his movements, in the way he seemed always to be leaning forwards, as if preparing to jump; he seemed impulsive, focused, with a secret inner spring waiting to be released. It seems to me now that he was not really as immersed as the rest of us in the flow of the war.

In Omsk, in a comfortable apartment that had become chilly only as a result of the war, his wife, a chemist, would sit down at the piano late at night, after work, wearing a pair of warm boots and warmly wrapped up. He asked her to do that, and he would read us the letters she wrote him. So what was she playing back there? Scriabin, as I recall. How stable life was there, even now, safe, far away from the front! His only sadness was that they had no children. Others had far greater problems, their homes reduced to a heap of ashes, their relatives suffering in occupied territory, missing, or refugees barely alive, perhaps not all that far from his home in Omsk.

The keeper of the hearth was his wife, in the homely comfort of his mother-in-law’s apartment. Although that lady had died before the war, he cherished the memory of a representative of the ‘former people’, the ci-devants, with her sagacity and kindly benevolence towards him. The lynchpin of Bystrov’s life at the front was the dream he and his wife shared of the day when the war would be over, he would come back home and they would be reunited. But then, like a bolt from the blue, there was Klavochka! Who could have seen that coming? This is what happened.

We had reached the Baltic coast and, on our front, the war was over. For the time being, however, only our army was withdrawn and redeployed to Poland. The officers of the adjacent army, ‘my’ Guards army from which I had been transferred six months previously, came to our farewell party, and my friend, the headquarters clerk, Klavochka, asked to be allowed to come along. Out of a military tunic for the first time, she was wearing a neat suit made up from hessian of some sort, but skilfully tailored in the military mobile store. How deplorable that for so many years a tunic, so absurd and constricting on voluptuous Klavochka, should have masked her feminine deportment, the lightness of her vivacious shoulders. Her small head, crowned with billowing, self-styled curls, no longer seemed at all small above Bystrov’s shoulder as he whirled her round in a waltz. He had once mentioned having won a prize at an evening of ballroom dancing in Omsk, and that he had also come first in a motor race.

All this dated, 1930s, superman tinsel seemed thoroughly improbable in the charred setting of Byelorussia, which is where we were talking about it, but perhaps no more improbable than the cows that were going produce male or female calves on Lysenko’s say-so. There was, however, evidence to back up his claims, and when the time came for Bystrov to take his place at the wheel of a patched-up captured Opel, he proved an outstanding driver. Even before that, at our farewell party, he showed himself to be an outstanding dancer.

Klavochka danced tirelessly, heart and soul for the first time since the outbreak of war, with an outstanding dance partner! And she sang. She had a powerful, beautiful voice, and took her place, big and sumptuous, in the centre of the hall, eclipsing all other puny attempts by homegrown army entertainers. Her audience clapped and begged for encores, which she gladly provided. There was jubilation in her singing, and that evening Klavochka won every heart. Our colonel, unable to take his eyes off the pair of them, exclaimed, ‘Go for it, Klavochka! Klavdia the Great!’

Bystrov did not leave her side for an instant, and when she sang he stood close by. Again and again he whirled her round and, when he took her back to her seat he ardently, tenderly kissed her plump hands. He would have been the last person anyone would have expected so to lose his heart on the dance floor, in front of everyone. Bystrov was not, of course, so much captivated by the resemblance the colonel’s sportive eye had detected of Klavochka to Catherine the Great as she sang centre-stage in such grandeur. No, as he danced with her in his arms, whispering in her ear, kissing her hands, he was bewitched by her lightness, her warmth and gaiety.

The next morning Bystrov summoned a soldier and instructed him, ‘Right now, lad, take yourself off straight away…’ He sent by special courier to the headquarters of our neighbouring army a fervent declaration of love asking Klavochka to marry him. For the few days remaining before we were on our way again, the same scene was repeated every morning: ‘Right now, lad…’ and letter after letter winged its way to Klavochka.

He was entranced and wondrous to behold in those days, but what had brought this about? What sudden squall had so blown him off his steady course that he could, without a second thought of Omsk, surrender to this enchantment? Was it Klavochka? Yes, of course, partly; but something in Bystrov himself had been quietly ripening and just waiting to be detonated. The squall was that period of time itself, as victory beckoned. In a mere two weeks’ time we would be seeing in the New Year of 1945.

Bystrov had been changing. Close up it had been less visible than it is now, from afar, as I write these lines. He was already looking back less to his old life than to the new life incontrovertibly approaching as victory came nearer. Its contours were as yet obscure but already exhilarating. He was on tenterhooks, and suddenly there was Klavochka. Perhaps it was a personality change, a revelation.

He had served in the Army unassumingly, unhurriedly, not making himself unduly conspicuous, but now he was in a hurry. Eager for risk, he assigned himself a mission and went behind German lines, something his rank officially precluded. He did that not to gain recognition but because he needed to, in a hurry to compensate for things he had not found time for, had not made the effort for, despite being aware of inexhaustible reserves of strength within himself. Now he wanted everything: Klavochka, personal renown and, apparently, the scalp of Josef Goebbels.

Although I had great faith in him, not least because he succeeded at everything he undertook, his determination to capture Goebbels struck me as hare-brained. That sort of exploit was the last thing in my own mind. It seemed the purest vanity project. For a start, we did not know what route our army would be taking, where we would be when victory came, or where Goebbels might be hiding by then.

There was nothing hare-brained about the way Bystrov achieved a goal he had set himself, and the time was to come when not only was he moving in on his quarry, but his quarry was itself moving towards him. Perhaps it was the excitement of a researcher that motivated his pursuit of such a prize specimen. I do not know. Just as I do not know whether it was chance or predestination that made what he announced by the light of that candle beside that stove, which seemed a mere ridiculous whim, come true. I was to find myself drawn into the thick of events beyond even the dreams of Major Bystrov, and certainly of anything I myself could have imagined in our billet in Bydgoszcz.

All night Studebakers with doused headlights were rumbling through the city.[1] By dawn the sound of their labouring engines had ceased and the front seemed to have moved on. I was sent from headquarters to support the commandant appointed for the city because the garrison had no other interpreter. I was walking through the city to the outskirts. The liveliness in the streets had subsided; everything seemed quiet and empty. There was a slight frost in the air, and suddenly the sun peeped out, almost spring-like in its brightness.

Then I noticed that to one side and slightly behind, my shadow was following me like a compacted version of myself. It had never seemed to be there at the front, or perhaps I had not noticed it. I felt suddenly uneasy, as if I, and my shadow following me like a pet dog, in this unfamiliar city were separate from everything of which I had been so much a part all these years at the front: as if now I was on my own, no longer belonging. It was a weird, even alarming sensation. It gradually faded as I walked on, but perhaps it was a portent of a new dimension my life was about to take on. I don’t know.

Neither do I quite remember how I came to be talking to Marianna, but it happened when I reached the city prison. The massive, brown, five-storey prison was empty, all the prisoners having been freed. Through the open gate of the prison yard and visible from the street, the former Polish warders were pacing around. They had suffered under the Germans and were ready now to go back to their old jobs. All were wearing their uniform caps and old heavy blue greatcoats, which in itself testified to their patriotism, since retaining any Polish uniform had been severely punishable under the Germans. This crowd of blue greatcoats seen through a prison gateway was a token in the winter sun of a resurgent nation.

A small person in grey, perhaps a young girl perhaps an old lady, tightly wrapped in a raincoat, was scurrying to and fro by the prison perimeter. This was Marianna K___skaya, a prostitute. Her shoulders were hunched, her collar pulled up to her ears. The ends of a light headscarf were firmly tied under her chin. Her face was blue with cold but her prominent green eyes looked up at me trustingly. She had been freed from prison by the Red Army but had not gone away. She was waiting for someone she was sure would be coming back for her and whom she called Alfred. There was something touchingly vulnerable about her.

I cannot recall which of us spoke first or why, but we got talking and she must have led me to the commandant’s office and gone back to the prison. Yes, that must have been how it was, or she would not have known to find me there the next day, which she did. She was already changed out of all recognition. A kind friend had not only given her somewhere to sleep but also clothes from her own wardrobe. She was wearing a mauve hat with the brim lowered over her face and a narrow-waisted, flared coat with a fluffy boa. To me, someone who had lived for over three years surrounded exclusively by greatcoats, winter jackets and padded body warmers, and who had worn nothing different myself all these years, she seemed decidedly elegant. She had a pleasant face, but it was faded and could hardly be called pretty.

Tucked between the pages of my notebook are two photographs she gave me when we parted: Marianna on her own, and Marianna with Alfred R___d. He was a regular client at an establishment in Pflünderstrasse, a secondclass brothel for foreign workers brought by force to Bromberg to build a defensive rampart. There Marianna had caught his eye. It is difficult to tell what so attracted him to the faded creature in the photograph taken before she met him, with her sunken cheeks, her bulging eyes peering intently and anxiously upwards, with a bow on her sailcloth hat and with prim, unsmiling lips. In spite of everything, he fell in love and demanded that she immediately leave her place of work and become his wife. The German law on total mobilization stipulated, however, that no one might leave their post until the war was over, so the malnourished Belgian, spending such savings as he had brought from home, ransomed her anew every day.

The front line was approaching Bromberg, however, and the unfinished rampart was no guarantee the Germans would be able to defend the city. They began clearing it of the foreign workers, who were seen as a potential threat. As the contingent of Belgians was being marched out of Bromberg, Marianna ran after them. The German guards chased her away, throwing stones at her, calling her filthy names and menacing her with their assault rifles. In the end they seized her, handcuffed her, dragged her back into the city and threw her into prison as a Pole whose intimate relations with a foreign worker had far exceeded her job specification.

Now she was waiting for Alfred to come back to Bromberg for her, without giving a thought to the practicalities of how, under guard, he was going to do that. She trusted him implicitly, although what certainty could anyone have of anything in this world at war? She was, nevertheless, naively, calmly convinced that she needed only to wait patiently there at the prison for him to return. He had seen her being handcuffed, so he would come to the prison. Where else could she be, when even that other establishment, to which she would not dream of returning, had been closed? All along Pflünderstrasse the brothels, the better class ones for Germans and the lesser ones for poorer people, had been closed, and any young ladies who had not managed to run away in time were behind bars. Where would they be going now? Perhaps even to Siberia.

The sky above the city cleared to a bare, cold blue that might betoken bombing by Junkers. The uncleared snow crunched under the heavy marching of our patrol along the roadway.

Until now we had only entered major cities, like Smolensk, Minsk or Riga. There had been no question of stopping there, but now, in the ceaseless flow of the war, there came a new development. Bromberg was different: the first big city in our path to have survived a long occupation relatively unscathed, and which we were to occupy. This was a completely different, incomprehensible, unfamiliar kind of warfare, and created all manner of unforeseen problems for us to solve.

Alfred R___d did come back. He escaped by lagging behind the column of Belgians, at the risk of being shot in the back by a guard. I do not know what he looked like at the moment of his reunion outside the prison with Marianna, having made his way back to the city through the obstacles of warring front lines. The unspeaking man to whom I was introduced was clean-shaven, with a dark bar of a moustache: upright, broad-shouldered, stocky, bespectacled; with a high forehead, hatless, dark-haired, looking through his glasses with a rather glum but steady gaze. I remember it with painful clarity, but mostly for the dramatic days that followed. Now, when I look at the snapshot taken back then, I see how young this thirty-year old teacher from Liège still was. At the time he seemed to me a very mature man.

That first time we were photographed, the three of us just stood there, dazed. Marianna did not say a word. Her lips seemed puffed up with excitement and intoxication, and just as in the photograph of the two of them together (with its edges pinked in that German fashion), she stands there so puny, her shoulder pressed against Alfred, her gaze intense, trusting, looking out to somewhere far beyond us. The hollows in her cheeks have disappeared, the oval of her face is softly outlined, and she looks nothing like that fright in the sailcloth hat with a bow. He, though, looks out from the photo with the same firm, reserved, adamant, steady gaze as he had back then. The two of them. It seems as if only the two of them are in their right minds while everything around has gone mad, and war has no dominion over them.

Dear God, what high hopes! Years later I heard a saying in Alfred’s homeland that a Belgian is born with a brick in his belly, either in self-deprecation or proud assertion of the national obsession with building a house of one’s own. A Belgian in Nazi captivity had chanced upon the most humiliated, pathetic, crushed creature, had raised her up, taken her under his protection, and defiantly chucked his brick at the forces of chaos.

There was, though, something unresolved, something still bubbling away under the surface in the city. The countenance of victory can change in an instant when people remember the disproportionate sacrifices that had to be made to achieve it. What mattered most had come to pass: Poland had risen again and this city, seized by the Germans and called by them Bromberg, was once again Bydgoszcz.

But now what? Nothing had yet been definitively proclaimed. There had been no announcements. No notices had been pasted up on walls and columns. A Polish municipal magistracy had been hastily organized and was in session, but what was to be done about people who were starving? It was essential to establish immediately which Germans were still in the city and where, and how they were to be treated. What punishment should be visited on them, what reparation demanded for their seizure of Poland, the crucifixion of Warsaw, for the slavery, the inexcusable humiliations and plundering? There was a grimness in the city as it grappled with immediate and long-term issues.

The former Polish warders and prison officials were still hanging around at the prison without a job to do. All I can find about this in my diary is an entry consisting of a single sentence, which I had forgotten but now, as I am browsing, jumps out at me. ‘The magistracy has decided not to feed Germans.’ Many years later that still makes me shudder. Next to it I drew a swastika. I did not immediately remember why I had done that.

I heard footsteps. Someone with a brisk, confident manner, crossing the vast entrance hall of the commandant’s office, stopped in the doorway and saluted. It does not often happen that you meet someone to whom you immediately, at first sight, take a liking, but that is how I reacted to this person wearing an unfamiliar military uniform and a beret. He introduced himself as an officer of the French Army. He had fought in Africa and been taken prisoner by the Germans. He had been the adjutant of General Henri Giraud and had come as a delegate from an internment camp for French prisoners of war which was 10 km outside the city. The German guards had fled. The French had elected a camp council, made an inventory of all the remaining food, and sent him to report their presence to the Soviet command and ask how they should proceed.

While we waited for the commandant to return, I invited my French visitor to take a seat and offered him some high-energy cola chocolate we had lying on the windowsill. It was made to a special recipe designed to give a boost to the spirits of Luftwaffe pilots.

It seemed extraordinary to be meeting here in Bydgoszcz a man who had fought in Africa as the adjutant of the famous French general. Everything about the newcomer was very correct. He had not been robbed in the camp and still had his broad army belt, his sword belt, his insignia of rank, and a shock of wavy hair projecting from under his beret. There was no sign of recent captivity to be detected in his free and easy bearing and ready smile, but the conditions of captivity for French officers bore little similarity to those experienced by Russians and Poles. The French were allowed to correspond with their families and receive parcels from home and from the Red Cross. They enlivened their time in captivity with amateur dramatics, and General Giraud’s adjutant produced photographs to prove it (all with that crenellated border.) He handed me one depicting a scene from a play in which he featured. He was sitting in his officer’s uniform in the corner of a soft sofa. Sitting on his lap was a frisky, well-built blonde with a high bust, wearing a spotted dress, above knee-length and revealing unattractive legs without shapely calves and feet shod with plimsolls. She was embracing him with bare arms.

The role of the mademoiselle was also being taken by a captive French officer, wearing a dress belonging to one of the camp’s waitresses and a wig. This scene had evidently evoked much laughter and applause. Noticing that I was rather taken with the photograph, the Frenchman took out a pen with a fine nib and inscribed on the back of it, ‘Un souvenir à l’armée russe qui est venue nous délivrer du joug hitlérien.’ A souvenir for the Russian army that has come to liberate us from the yoke of Hitler. ‘Un soldat français d’Afrique en captivité à l’armée victorieuse. Amicalement.’ From a French soldier of the African army in captivity to the victorious army. In amity. I cannot read the signature. The date is ‘1 February 1945’.

The absent military commandant came back, a morose young major wearing a white Kuban Cossack hat, a winter jacket, and with eyebrows trimmed with a razor. He was the commander of an infantry regiment, and when I told him who this foreign officer was, looked him straight in the eye, enthusiastically lumbered over and with his great paws clutched him firmly by the shoulders. He did not, however, go so far as to kiss him. When I think back to that day, I see the moment as a pendant to the famous photograph of the Allies meeting at the Elbe. This ‘soldier of the French army in captivity’ was the first Allied soldier we had encountered on our long journey.

Looking much more cheerful than usual, casting aside for a moment all the attendant concerns of a city commandant and the need for diplomacy that did not come naturally to a regimental commander, he exclaimed in an outburst of cordiality, ‘Move them all here!’, emphasizing the order with a sweeping gesture that said, ‘Let the whole lot come piling into the city!’

Meanwhile, from all directions prisoners of war were already flooding in from the outskirts, abandoning their camps. Without receiving permission or thinking to ask for it, they came into what was again Bydgoszcz, marching in columns under their national flags, which they had stitched together out of scraps of material. And what a sight that was! Again, as on the day of liberation, the entire Polish population poured out of their houses, every one of them with a scrap of cloth, a miniature red-and-white Polish flag, pinned to their chest. Again the city exploded in a burst of exultation, tears and hugging. Soviet soldiers were in the middle of a whirlpool of people. Polish soldiers, identifying who was French, walked arm in arm with them two at a time. A huge liberated American pilot without a hat, in a khaki jumpsuit, was yelling, laughing happily, waving his arms about and grabbing everyone he met by the sleeve. Everything was in tumult and a spontaneous, unbelievable procession marched down the main street of the city: our soldiers and Polish soldiers with their arms round tall Englishmen in khaki, Frenchmen in forage caps and berets, Irishmen in green hats, and Polish girls.

At one point, an emotional Bystrov caught sight of me. Very excited and, unusually, with his fur hat pushed dashingly back on his head, he shouted, ‘Lelchen, look, it’s the second front!’ He shouted something else but his voice was drowned out by the happy hubbub in the street. We were carried off in different directions, but I took his paradoxical exclamation to mean that, even if this was not the second front we had so been anticipating during the fighting at Rzhev, when we had cursed our laggard allies, even if it was not the second front that had landed on continental Europe in Normandy and which we were advancing to support, these soldiers who had fought and been captured in Africa, these pilots who had bombed Nazi Germany, were they not a second front? And now they had joined forces with us here in Bydgoszcz, the ‘Russian Army that has come to liberate us’, as General Giraud’s adjutant had written. My God, I too was part of that army of liberation.

Everyone was singing, each in their own language, in splendid disunity. Somehow, magically, the songs all merged, a discordant, colourful, celebratory hymn to freedom. It was so uplifting, so joyful; it seemed that surely this was how we would all live together in peace when the war was over, in one great brotherhood of man. Italian soldiers, now also freed from their prison camp, clustered together on the pavements, staying close to the buildings. Until recently allies of the Germans and fighting against us, since Italy withdrew from the war they had been herded behind barbed wire by the Germans and were now thoroughly confused: who were they in our eyes, enemies or captives of the Germans? But the holiday atmosphere was contagious, and in the end they too joined in, bringing up the procession, raggedly wandering along together, not mixing with the others.

When the procession had moved on a little, we began to hear the squeals and shrieks of children in the streets. A whole generation of little Polish kids had been brought up having to keep their voices down. Poles were forbidden to talk loudly, and could be punished for doing so. Now the children had just discovered shouting, and were ecstatically yelling at the tops of their voices, revelling in the newly revealed power of their lungs. The children’s shrieks of emancipation reverberated through the city.

While this diverse, multilingual carnival was pulsating so vibrantly on the main street two quite different things were happening. Firstly, the Germans were preparing a major offensive to retake Bromberg–Bydgoszcz, something that for the present was known only to those privy to such matters, of whom I was not one. But the second thing was happening in full view of me in a quiet side street adjacent to the main road.

Here there was a straggling line of people with their belongings loaded on carts, sledges and on their backs. They were German smallholders, driven off their farms by the Poles, from villages where they had been settled for centuries, now wandering with only a few possessions to heaven knows where, but westwards. A posse of Polish teenagers were skating around them, whooping. Their ringleader broke away, skated ahead, and completely blocked the refugees’ way. An elderly German woman, with a coarse, heavy blanket on top of her coat, which our own village women, too, were wearing at that time and calling a shawl, tried to explain something to him, but he was not listening and frenziedly beat her bundle of possessions with a stick and shouted furiously, ‘Why you not speak Polish? Why you can’t speak Polish?’ I took him by the shoulder and said, ‘What are you doing? Leave them alone!’ He looked up, his face full of anger and with tears in his eyes. He stared at me, or rather, at my army jacket and the red star on my hat, and skated to one side. But I saw him watching bewildered from a distance. He found it unbearable that today Germans were being allowed to walk away freely after all they had done. Beneath this festival of brotherhood there was an undertow of fury and violence that had been building up under the yoke of brutality and was ready to break out and rage.

It was frosty, and fine, prickly snow was falling. Where on earth were these people headed? Who was likely to give them shelter, where, on which remote country track would they finally perish? Far from the great highways of history, from the global cataclysms and satanic dreams of world domination, these people who had known only the hard toil of a peasant life had been driven into a trap by the play of diabolical forces and now were being held responsible for everything that had happened. Neither the heavens under which they were born, nor the land they had cultivated for centuries, nor the ancient roots their families had put down in this soil counted for anything. Everything had receded, repudiating them. People are judged, brought together, or sundered by blood. It was Germans who had caused such suffering here, and now these pariahs were cut off by a front line from those with whom they had blood ties. What did they face? Where was the refuge that would take them in? For hatred and vengefulness these were irrelevancies. Who would argue their case?

Everything was a mess: the jubilant spirit of universal brotherhood, and this dark murderousness – these persecuted German peasants and the fury of the young boys pursuing them. People herded here, to ‘Bromberg’, to build a rampart against the Red Army, who, under the yoke of the enemy had lost their ties with the outside world, had so jubilantly, so inspiringly found them again, here, now. But if you can cut someone else off, expel them, is this not the beginning of a road that leads over the cliff edge? ‘If at one end of the world you cause harm, the effect will be felt at the other.’

At the entry to the commandant’s office, seated on a very serviceable stallion, the commandant, without dismounting, was issuing urgent orders in the light of the military emergency threatening the city. Along the highway a column was approaching, and the commandant peered impatiently at it, his horse pacing restlessly beneath him.

We could already make out a flag, the tricolour of France, but these people were not marching like soldiers but spread out across the highway like an odd crowd of private citizens. The French came closer and stopped, and from among the ranks of the soldiers, grey, dishevelled figures separated and grouped together to one side of the road. The commandant, high up in his saddle, was the first to notice, and was aghast.

‘Whatever next!’ he muttered angrily, leaping down from his horse, pointing with his chin and raising his stubbly eyebrows, signalling to me to follow. He walked quickly to the main road. The French greeted us as soldiers but the commandant appeared not to notice. He walked a little to one side of them where those strange, grey creatures were huddled, clinging to each other and, from a distance, looking like a ghostly, dustladen grey cloud. It was difficult to recognize them as women.

The commandant addressed them loudly. ‘Hello!’ I translated into German. ‘Once again, hello!’ he repeated furiously and with strained courtesy. The cloud stirred, and a yellow star was briefly seen on one woman’s back. That was the first time I had seen the yellow, six-pointed star, one of several the commandant had been shocked by when he saw them in the distance. Before that we had only heard about them.

These were Jewish women from a concentration camp, in sackcloth, with a blanket over their shoulders or a piece of hessian hiding those stars. Some had already cut the stars off, but those that remained were more than enough to leave you feeling pierced by an unbearable emotion. ‘Tell them they are free. You are free!’ the commandant said, beating me to it.

One woman in the crowd asked in Polish in a low, hoarse voice where they would now be sent. ‘Nowhere, of course! You are free!’ the commandant said, bestowing upon them all the conquered kingdoms of the earth. ‘See those buildings over there? There are empty apartments in them. The Germans have run away and abandoned them. Go and take them over, and everything that has been left there, all the property is yours. Take it! Did they understand you?’ he asked. I nodded.

The French soldiers, exhausted, in worn-out greatcoats, looked at us tentatively and smiled. General Giraud’s adjutant was not among them. These were rank-and-file soldiers, probably from a different camp. They went over and again mingled with the grey mass, giving the women back their small bundles and sacks. Their belongings were very basic but nevertheless a burden. The Frenchmen had carried them the ten kilometres, and lent a shoulder to those of the women who were too desperately weak. Now they bade them farewell with great warmth.

‘Vive la France!’ I said quietly and very sincerely. That was the extent of my knowledge of French, but they responded enthusiastically, joyfully.

‘Listen here!’ the major shouted. ‘French comrades…’ Not understanding what was being said to them, they rapidly fell back into line. ‘First of all, I sincerely welcome you.’ ‘Please, does anybody understand German?’ I asked. ‘Please tell the French soldiers that the major welcomes you warmly.’ There was silence. ‘I must apologize on behalf of all of us,’ someone in the ranks said in good German. ‘But we hope our contacts with Russians can take place without our having to use the language of the Germans.’

‘What’s the problem?’ the commandant asked impatiently. He was in a hurry. ‘They don’t want to use the enemy’s language for talking to us.’ The commandant grunted approvingly. ‘Do you know French? No? Well, where does that leave us?’ He looked round anxiously at his horse, which a courier had just brought up. ‘Well, that’s for them to sort out.’ ‘I can translate for you.’ A woman emerged from the grey mass of women. She moved her hessian head-covering down to her shoulders, revealing a head of blond hair and a young, enchanting face.

‘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 cell: 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…’

All of them laughed approvingly. Several voices began singing,

When the British were marching the next day to their repatriation point, they sang this contagious song as a joke, making fun of themselves.

Then, that evening, we were brought a contingent of captured German soldiers. They were held in a dark warehouse. Bystrov and I went in. There were a lot of them, lying about on the ground or sitting. ‘Are there any officers?’ There were none. ‘Perhaps somebody has something important they want to tell the Soviet command?’ ‘I have something to say.’ Major Bystrov directed his torch beam towards the voice. This caused a stir among the Germans, who looked across. Voice: ‘I am Private Schulenburg, the nephew of Count Schulenburg.’

The Germans’ attempted counter-attack came to nothing and prisoners were arriving for the rest of the night. The usual interrogations were carried out. Count Schulenburg’s nephew had nothing important to contribute to the standard intelligence report and remained in the warehouse. We accumulated enemy documents: reports, orders, letters, and a leaflet from the German command, addressed to the surrounded units:

This leaflet was calling on German soldiers to break out of their encirclement towards Bromberg. It went on to remind them that,

During the night we heard the distant rumble of approaching vehicles and the clanking of tank caterpillar tracks. The commander of the front’s reserve was being brought into battle to counter and repulse the German onslaught. Tanks continued to arrive, and rumbled through the city streets heading for the front line.

In the morning, while I was at headquarters, a representative of the newly appointed Repatriation Committee of the Council of People’s Commissars flew in from Moscow. The representative, who had the rank of lieutenant colonel, was a middle-aged, ill-looking man, tall, very thin, with a hollow chest, abrupt gestures, and an unexpectedly powerful voice. To tell the truth, he looked as if he had just been discharged from hospital. Quite possibly he had and, after being treated for a wound, had been sent to the rear, back to Moscow.

In some inexplicable way he already had a detailed knowledge of the situation in the city. He was here to discuss with our command the plan for repatriating liberated allies and others, but roared in outrage with that powerful voice, as if banging his fist on the table: ‘Are you aware that there are Poles who yesterday prevented Jewish women from taking refuge in buildings here?’

I was stirred to hear the wrathful voice of my nation speaking out in that manner at that fateful moment, but we also knew that other Poles had risked their lives to shelter Jews, whom they had regarded simply as their persecuted fellow citizens.

The yellow stars to identify Jews had been dreamed up by Goebbels. Very pleased with himself, he noted in his diary that the Führer had thought them a good idea. There had been a time when, for many years, Josef Goebbels had had a half-Jewish fiancée, to whom he had presented a volume of his favourite poet, Heinrich Heine. There had been a time when he was in raptures about a Jewish professor, under whose supervision he went on to defend a dissertation. Then, however, he threw in his lot with Hitler and all mention of his fiancée and the professor ceased. Heine’s books went up in flames at the very first auto-da-fé Goebbels organized as minister of propaganda. The Kristallnacht pogroms, the burning down of the major synagogues, were more of his detestable gestures as he rushed to identify himself unambiguously with the ideology of the Führer.

Now we were encountering those yellow stars on prisoners coming in from the hinterland of Bromberg. By good luck I managed to evade the yellow star intended to blight my own destiny.

The blonde girl who translated from German for the Frenchmen gave the soldier his cap back and, again covering her head with hessian, became indistinguishable from a distance from the other Jewish prisoners. Seen close to, however, they were all so different you would have thought they belonged to many different nationalities. The Austrian Jewish women, like this Viennese girl, looked quite different from the Hungarians, and those in turn were quite unlike the Polish or Baltic women. They all spoke different languages, each the language of their homeland. Selecting women who could sew from the ghettoes of different countries, the Germans brought them to a concentration camp here, outside Bromberg. They were given a temporary extra lease of life while they could be of use to the German Army. There was no one from Russia among them.

I was able to talk briefly in the commandant’s office to a woman from Vilnius. She was about thirty, short, with a dark, exhausted face and great inner composure. She was a dressmaker but told me that, no matter how events developed now, she would not return to her native city. She could never forget that, when the Germans invaded, students who were Nazi sympathizers burst into the apartments of Jews, created havoc, jeered and, when the Jews were herded off to concentration camp, derisively accompanied them with a jolly little amateur orchestra of their own.

I came out of the commandant’s office with her. The women were still standing there in the road, unable to decide where they should go now. I repeated what the commandant had said about the large apartment buildings that were empty now the Germans had fled Bromberg – and felt how indifferent they were to their fate. They had lived too long with the belief that extermination was inevitable to spring back to life immediately. They had no choice, however, but to decide something, and they slowly made their way in that direction. The cold February sun lounged disinterestedly above them, picking out the yellow stars among their grey rags. I stood there feeling desolate, perhaps trying to comprehend something that was beyond comprehension, that could not be fitted into even the diabolical categories of this war, which I was incapable of looking beyond.

The liberated foreign soldiers and forced labourers marched with their heads held high towards the repatriation point. ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary.’ They, at least, were on their way home. The war once more invaded Bydgoszcz. The sky was rent by the roar of ground-attack aircraft. The singing stopped, the march halted and everyone looked skywards.

Meanwhile, back at the warehouse a group of prisoners of war in German uniform were lining up, eager also to head to the repatriation point, also breathing the air of freedom. ‘We are Austrians!’ they declared. ‘Unfortunately, gentlemen,’ I had to inform them, ‘you are also soldiers of the enemy army.’ The Austrians filed disconsolately back into the warehouse.

Marianna tracked me down. Alfred had been taken to the repatriation point and was forbidden to leave it. Her voice had lost its crispness, its intonations, and now her speech was colourless and halting. She asked me to pass him a note. She could not do it herself because the sentries were not letting anyone in.

It was very noisy at the repatriation point. The soldiers reacted enthusiastically to my appearance, and as I crossed the broad courtyard I was bombarded with witticisms that evoked an explosion of mirth, perhaps inoffensive, perhaps not. The Italians were looking a bit more cheerful than the previous day. They wanted to tell me something but I could not understand what. It seemed, though, to be friendly.

To one side, beside a post stuck in the melting snow and bearing the flag of Belgium to summon his compatriots, stood Alfred. Alas, the Belgians who had been herded out of Bromberg were by now being marched by German guards far from this place. He was the only one in that column to have escaped. He stood there hatless, his dark coat unbuttoned, inscrutable.

I don’t remember now what language they communicated in, but I brought Alfred’s note back to Marianna. When she had been scurrying around by the prison waiting for him she had seemed much more confident that they would be reunited than she was now. She was baffled by the new circumstances that had so pitilessly parted them. Her face grew long, her cheeks were sunken, her lips tightly pursed together. She seemed stunned, but from beneath those downcast eyelids her bulging grey-green eyes were feverish with hope. I found some pretext to visit the repatriation point one more time.

In the courtyard soldiers of different nations were clowning around, energetically playing soldier games. I found Alfred still in the same place at the back of the courtyard, as if he could not move away from the pole with the Belgian flag. He was a lonely man. He took the note silently, quickly read it, undid and moved aside the flap of his open coat, and hid the note in the inside pocket of his jacket. Hurriedly, as if afraid of running out of time, he painstakingly outlined the letters of his answer, very large, as if he were writing to a child. His hand was trembling with tension. When he had filled the sheet of paper, he tore it out of his notebook, folded the little page in four and handed it to me. He watched silently, making sure I put it safely in the breast pocket of my tunic. He did not speak, but his face said it all, expressing the pain, the rage, the powerlessness. Or did it? That is how I remember it now but he was stony-faced. That made me even more afraid to look straight at him, to meet that unwavering gaze through his glasses.

Outside the gates tanks were passing, infantry were being deployed to Bydgoszcz in trucks. At any moment a battle might break out on the approaches to the city. The outskirts were being fortified, artillery brought in. The war was approaching again. A strict regime was enforced. That is how it was and, probably, the only way it could be in the avalanche of war, that victories crushed personal destinies. It seems it is easier to defend a city than to protect your feelings and the one person you love.

An early winter’s morning and the light is still dim. The church roofs are black and we are driving through this city for the last time. Trucks manoeuvre through narrow streets lined by buildings.

We overtake the prison officials in their blue uniform, walking to work: the prison is back in business. Ahead we see some male civilians sweeping the last of the snow off the pavements. We catch up and I see a swastika chalked on the lapels of their coats. And that explains the Nazi emblem I drew next to my copy of the magistracy’s decree not to feed Germans. I was not expecting what I saw. In fact I was dumbstruck. The magistracy had also decided that the remaining Germans in Bydgoszcz must go out to clear the streets. Not having to hand anything more suitable, a swastika had been chalked on their clothes. I cannot describe the wave of revulsion that swept over me. Everything seemed catastrophically turned upside down. Eine verkehrte Welt. A world capsized. Something irreparable had surged up from the dregs of the war on the very road to victory. How deadly this enemy was proving: you could kill him, but that did not free you from him.

Neither before nor after that day did I see anyone marked with a swastika. In Bydgoszcz it probably lasted only a single day, but on that morning there they were, those dark, grim figures, those identification marks chalked on human beings, those people cast out from the protection of the law, or even of common human decency.

We drove out of the city, leaving behind us the solid phalanx of our troops, and again saw at the roadside those tall, slender crosses bearing Christ crucified. Trees flanked the road, the lower part of their trunks whitewashed.

For some reason in the land around Rzhev while the fighting was going on every cell of life was eternal, in every physical detail, down to the most fragmentary, minute, tremulous particle. Everything was part of you. There, the road leading you to face danger and uncertainty kept you alert. Here, on the path of invasion, something was different. You could feel something was being pulled tight into an inextricable knot. At Rzhev there had been pain, but for that only the enemy was to blame. Here, an indefinable anxiety was wearing me down. I could not yet tell what was burdening me with a troubling sense of responsibility far too great for me to bear, and far above my authority to deal with in terms of rank. It was pursuing me, but why me? How could I put things right? Who was I to assume the responsibility?

We drove away from Bromberg–Bydgoszcz, having stayed there only a few days. So why do I find my thoughts returning so relentlessly, again and again to that city? Why are my memories of it still so sharp? Why do they still smart so? Why is it those particular faces and those particular episodes that so upset me?

I know nothing of what happened after that. Were Alfred and Marianna ever reunited, or were they inexorably separated by the state borders imposed by the victory and so pitiless towards an alliance of love? If they waited and met again many years later, had that sublime emotion they had shared survived, or had it withered and lost its amazing potency?

Did the Jewish women find refuge in that city liberated from a shared deadly enemy? Or were they doomed to stand around in the cold on street corners, like the Hungarian Jewesses on the day we drove into Bydgoszcz? ‘You are free!’ But what sort of freedom can there be in wartime? The idea was absurd. Captivity had provided a roof over their heads, and freedom none.

Where did those German peasants find respite, who had been torn from their native land? Where could they rest when Germany was beyond their reach, on the far side of an impassable front line?

And what of the nephew of Count Schulenburg, the German ambassador to Moscow who had warned of the German attack and was executed for complicity in the plot to assassinate Hitler? Perhaps he really could have been shown a little more sympathy, or at least interest? Nobody had any time for him, so there he stayed, in the darkness of that warehouse.

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,

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.

On the day I arrived, the greater part of the city was already in our hands but fighting was continuing in the north-eastern outskirts. The Germans were retreating, after dogged skirmishes, into the protection of the citadel they still held.

From its commanding height, and with a still powerful enemy ensconced in it, the fortress was a threat to the city. Shells periodically exploded as artillery fired from the fortress, but there was no stopping the great, solemn procession of the Polish population, who had come out in large numbers to commemorate the victims of the occupation. They were carrying wreaths to lay at a symbolic mass grave within the cathedral grounds. How touching it was to see among the ranks of the marchers children in school blazers they had so outgrown they looked quite strange, but which their parents had kept as a sign of patriotism and despite the strict orders of the German regime that every reminder of the old Poland should be destroyed. The Poznań tradespeople, butchers and tailors, bakers and furriers, came out to greet the Red Army with the banners of their guilds, which they had secretly preserved at the risk of their lives.

The stream of people stretched the length of the street, all the way from the railway station. Over five years ago, when the Germans overran Poznań and annexed it to the Reich, Alfred Rosenberg, the ideologist of their racism, arrived from Berlin, got off the train and promptly gave a speech. ‘Posen ist der Exerzierplatz des Nazionalsozialismus.’ Poznań is the training ground of National Socialism. What that meant was closing Polish schools, banning the Polish language and publications in Polish, and banning the performance of Polish music or songs, not only in public but even at home. The Poles were to be crushed by every manner of humiliation, like not being allowed to sit in the front tramcar, only in the one drawn behind it. I saw a notice to that effect on one tramcar.

On the day I am describing, amateur bands came out of hiding, and the Polish tunes they played in the streets were met with gratitude and much jubilation. Joy at being liberated mingled with sorrow at so many losses, in a united spirit of thanksgiving.

Bombardment of the city from the fortress had almost ceased. Evidently our forces had managed to suppress the guns or the enemy were running low on shells. The army assigned units to storm the citadel and then moved further westwards. Troops of our 1st Byelorussian Front had crossed the German border on 29 January.

No order came, however, to storm the citadel. It really was all but impregnable and the cost would have been too high. The situation of the troops holed up in the besieged fortress was in any case hopeless: capitulation was only a matter of time.

In my first days in Poznań German aircraft were busily dropping supplies to the besieged. There was no sign of our own fighter planes. We had no anti-aircraft guns here and, although we shot at the planes, they were fairly free to fly in and back at will. Periodically leaflets were dropped over the citadel, which rotated slowly in the air before landing in the fortress. Some of them blew our way.

There were other leaflets along much the same lines, and one that was not quite what we might have expected:

Such persistent marketing! ‘Orders taken’, so everything is hunky-dory in the Fatherland. Right then, back to more victories! This primitive drivel, designed to flatter the soldiers’ vanity by playing up earlier battles, was now being dropped, with a remarkable lack of tact, on troops irremediably holed up in the Poznań citadel. It was the height of absurdity, not immediately distinguishable from an act of derision.

Initially the aircraft were also dropping mail, to judge by the postbag sealed with wax and packed with letters that was misdelivered to our sector. It contained letters dating from the autumn. Our surmise, subsequently confirmed, was that the unit to which they were addressed had been straying about for months in one of the ‘mobile cauldrons’ before breaking out of encirclement and joining up with the German troops in Poznań. There it was finally located by the German forces’ post office and its correspondence forwarded when the opportunity arose, albeit with a substantial delay.

We greatly valued enemy correspondence at the front, because letters often contained significant information, sometimes unexpectedly important, and this all contributed to our intelligence effort. Letters also contained information about morale, facts, the climate, events, hopes, circumstances, anxieties, threats, hardship and changes – everything, in fact, that constituted our adversary’s world at the front and at home. They were studied at the level of the front headquarters, in whose operational section I was temporarily working in Poznań. I was instructed to compile a summary of these letters.

Most of them were from relatives in the western regions of Germany. That told us where the main contingent of soldiers in the unit had been recruited: on the territorial principle, as was often the case. Also that later, having suffered losses, the unit had been reinforced with soldiers from other regions.

During those months the western regions of Germany were being mercilessly bombed by the British Royal Air Force. Tales of intolerable suffering and despair were raining down from home on these front-line soldiers. But letters from the front, as we read in the soldiers’ answering correspondence, also conveyed the soldiers’ despair. Family members wrote very openly, not sparing each other, or perhaps their sufferings were already such that they were beyond being able to conceal them. Or it may be that a merciless lack of empathy was part of the way the Germans viewed the world during the war.

I still have some of the letters from that sack. Here are some excerpts:

Uncle Otto writes from Berlin to private soldier Gerhard:

‘My dear René,’ his wife writes to Grenadier Renatus Coulognie,

To Lieutenant Spiller:

To Senior Lance Corporal Ludwig Ruf, from his girlfriend:

‘Our Prince von Baruth is also behind bars in connection with the 20 July Putsch,’ Sergeant Ernst Ditschke was informed in a letter from his sister in Halbe. Another correspondent wrote:

To Senior Lance Corporal Hans Stressner from his wife in Hof on Saale:

To Lance Corporal Heinz Grumann from his father in Schönwiese:

To Lieutenant Willi Wüsthoff from a friend in Elbing-Danzig (East Prussia):

It was at this time that Bertolt Brecht wrote:

In September, and later, people were still harbouring hopes of Hitler’s promised ‘miracle weapon’, said to be all but ready for action, and set to turn the course of the war in Germany’s favour.

‘In the homeland everything is facing east and everyone is waiting to see if some decisive weapon will be put into action to stop the Russians’ advance,’ Senior Lance Corporal Damm writes from Küstrin to Sergeant Major Fritz Nowka.

To Lieutenant Willi Wüsthoff, from a friend in East Prussia:

But there are already signs of mistrust and sarcasm. Senior Lance Corporal Karl Stein’s wife writes to him from Munich-Kochel,

As I worked through that sack, reading the letters, that abstract concept ‘the enemy’, stuck in there behind the walls of the besieged fortress, began under the pressure of the different voices in these letters to separate out into the blurred figures of all these Ludwigs and Willis, Karls and Hanses. Meanwhile, the German front was retreating ever further to the west, and the transport planes were seen less and less frequently above the citadel.

An order was issued to the Wehrmacht from its commander-in-chief, A. Hitler, that soldiers who were captured, ‘if they had not been wounded or in the absence of evidence that they fought to the last,’ were to be executed and their relatives arrested.

My work on the letters was drawing to a close. I had got to the end of those dated September. Although they had not been delivered to their addressees, they had been written in response to news received from the front, with which there had still been a live connection. Increasingly, however, the western regions of Germany were being occupied by British and American troops. The names of certain cities disappear and the stream of letters becomes a trickle. Some time in October, the reciprocal contact ends, presumably because the unit is surrounded. They are getting no news from their loved ones at the front but parents, fiancées and girlfriends continue hopefully to write, perhaps from superstition, sharing their woes.

To Lance Corporal Fritz Karpanyk from his mother in Hindenburg:

There were no letters dated December, but there is one, just one, dated January. This solitary letter, written as if into the void (‘I do not know if this will reach you’), is addressed to a son with a disillusioned final injunction.

Jacob Paur from Rosenheim (near Munich) is writing in the evening of 8 January 1945 to his son, Senior Lance Corporal Lothar Paur:

The Polish population of Poznań resurrected its city, its laws and dignity with extraordinary vitality and resilience, somehow managing to disregard the citadel, although there were feverish rumours the Germans were sneaking out through underground passages, murdering whoever they come across for their civilian clothes and then, disguised, melting away in the streets with plans for murder and sabotage. There was a more straightforward version that had the same underground passages, only the Germans materialized in the streets already disguised and Poles were capturing them and taking them to military headquarters. Perhaps that was so, but none were brought to our headquarters.

For a time I was staying overnight in the apartment of the Buzinski family, and made friends with the mother, Wiktoria. The head of the family, Stefan Buziński, went out early in the morning to his job at the railway depot wearing trousers too tight for him and a patched donkey jacket. His wife, pani Wiktoria, was a dressmaker by profession and had just acquired some new customers – our traffic-control girls, who were living on the ground floor of the same house. Standing that spring in full view of the whole of Europe, they naturally found it essential to have their tunics neatly altered to fit their figures. To the delight of hospitable and sociable Wiktoria, the girls pestered her from morning till night.

The housework in the family was done mainly by Alka, Wiktoria’s daughter. Slow-moving but pretty, she casually shifted the crude, ancient chairs around and would suddenly freeze, deep in thought, with a duster in her hands. If you happened to look at such a moment into her wonderful blue eyes, the contrast was very striking between her phlegmatic outward appearance and the hidden temperament her eyes betrayed. Passionate forces seemed to be slumbering in her soul, awaiting their hour. Where would Alka direct them?

Wiktoria’s son, a chubby adolescent with curly hair, was his mother’s darling. Every day he would retire behind a partition to play the violin. He was considered musically gifted and, before the war, a teacher at the conservatory gave him lessons, in return for which Mrs Buzińska did the teacher’s laundry and cleaned her apartment. During the years of occupation, the boy could play the violin only in secret, away from the eyes and ears of the German police. One time Mrs Buzińska confided to me she was hoping that her son would be admitted now to a music school.

Standing back a little from her tailor’s dummy, short-sightedly peering with her tired, light blue eyes, which had probably once been the same colour as Alka’s, she carefully examined the darts marked on the waist and shoulders of the tunic.

All those years, ‘the German period’, her children had had no schooling. I asked in surprise if there had been no schools in Poznań. I even noted down our conversation afterwards in my diary.

There were German-language schools for Polish children, but I certainly did not want my children learning German.

But they would have been taught other subjects than just German.

Oh, no, miss! In those schools Polish children were taught only German, and how to count. The Germans said Poles should only be labourers and Knechte – servants; they had no use for educated Poles.

The ‘German period’ was truly a time of dark and wasted years. I suppose I already knew all this, because I had translated German orders and Hitler’s views on the uses of Poles and Russians, but I was astounded every time I came across them in action.

The street in the suburbs was so peaceful, so unscathed. There was no sign of bitter fighting, of people running away, of devastation. The last train to Berlin, on which the fleeing Germans departed, left when there was already heavy fighting in the city. All four apartments in the villa where our operational group was working on the ground floor, were empty. Their previous, Polish, owners had not reappeared. Were they alive? After waiting for a time, I was allocated a room on the first floor, and said farewell to Wiktoria. For the first time during the war and, to tell the truth, in my entire life, I had, if only for a time, a room of my own. It was small, came with a sofa, an SS uniform on the back of a chair, an open writing pad on the table, and a cigarette butt in the ashtray. Also a framed exhortation on the wall from Hitler:

‘Strong nerves and iron tenacity are the best guarantees for succeeding in this world.’ On a shelf with illustrated magazines there was a plastic puppy with its paw raised in something approximating to a ‘Heil!’ Posters with similar puppies hailing Hitler were to be seen on the walls of houses and in shop windows.

Not far from us was an airfield that provided our communications link with Moscow. The planes of Front Commander Marshal Zhukov were always parked there at the ready. From time to time senior figures on their way to the airfield to fly to Moscow would drop in on us, as, indeed, did emissaries of Moscow arriving at the front. On one occasion we had a phone call from front headquarters to warn us that a Yugoslav general on his way to see Stalin would stop with us for a time before leaving for Moscow.[1]

We were all feeling a sense of great responsibility. I was entrusted with receiving the general, that is, giving him lunch and looking after him because it was believed that, as a Muscovite, I would know about that sort of thing.

Cooking a respectable meal with the assistance of our neighbour, Ewa, who looked after the kitchen for us, was not a problem. Serving it properly was more challenging. We Muscovite children of the first five-year plans, of the rolling five-day working week when not everybody had the same day off, barely knew what a family meal was. When the seven-day week was restored, with Sundays off for everyone, our fathers got home from work, as was expected, after midnight, devotedly giving their all to their jobs. It was a rare Sunday when they were to be found at home. As for the war… barely a month had passed since everyone had their personal spoon tucked into the top of their boot.

In short, I had scant knowledge of how to serve a meal properly. I was also bewildered by the abundance in the sideboard of our ‘working apartment’ of knives and forks of varying calibre and shape, and all manner of smaller items of unknown purpose. Zhenya Gavrilov, a bright-eyed headquarters messenger, walked behind me, dragging a rigidly starched bedsheet along the floor and rigorously polishing with it the wine and vodka glasses and anything else I found in the dining room and kitchen that we could use. For better or worse the table was laid, my superiors inspected it and found my improvisations convincing.

The Yugoslav general was a big man of indeterminate age, in a baggy, tawdry uniform, with a straight parting in his barely greying dark hair. He seemed not to notice the elaborate setting of the table in his honour. His manner was very formal, either because that was natural to him or because he had got into the habit of being reserved. He unintentionally mortified me when, taking his napkin out of its silver ring, he stopped short and looked closely at the German monogram on it. I do not know what he was thinking, but I scolded myself. To hell with all their napkins and napkin rings, their monograms and all their other flim-flam.

The general seemed to be eating and drinking more out of politeness than because he was hungry, although he had only just got out of a German concentration camp where he would have known all about hunger. In addition, he was distracted from eating by the conversation. There was none of the usual military spiritedness in the gaze of his light grey eyes, which was slow and gentle, at times alert, at times remote. Our common language was German. As I translated what he was telling us, he looked silently and in a friendly way at everybody sitting at the table, nodding slightly. In part he knew individual words in Russian, and there were also many that were cognate with his language.

As a Yugoslav general, our guest had long been held in a special concentration camp for prominent military and political figures captured by the Germans. René Blum, the son of the sometime French Prime Minister, Léon Blum, was there, as was Yakov Dzhugashvili, Stalin’s son. The Yugoslav general spoke very warmly about him and how he had comported himself in the camp. The Germans gave Yakov no peace, constantly threatening him, trying to get something from him, to get him to do something, but he behaved impeccably and with dignity. The general was transferred to a different camp, and there heard the news that the Germans had dealt with Yakov Dzhugashvili and he was no longer alive.[1] This was reported to Stalin and he ordered the Yugoslav general to be brought to him.

A general in a tattered uniform, liberated from a concentration camp; his closeness to the captured Yakov Dzhugashvili; the fact that Stalin wanted to see him and would perhaps that very evening hear from him what he was telling us now, could not but excite his listeners’ curiosity. We bade him a warm goodbye when he and the individuals accompanying him got into a car to be driven to the airfield.

I never heard another word about him and know nothing of his fate. Stalin tended to be hard on witnesses. I was left with a liking for the general, and remember his eyes, the eyes of a man who had been through a lot, spent a lot of time thinking, and who had perhaps already resigned himself to something.

From the day the Yugoslav general appeared there began an increasing number of incidents, circumstances and events that reached all the way to Stalin. Marshal Zhukov’s pilots dropped in on us for tea and to kill time. They were so good looking, each more handsome than the one before, and they brought news of Moscow, the city so dear to us. Hearing that I lived in Moscow on Leningrad Highway, they volunteered to look up my family. ‘We’ll be going past your door,’ they said. Planes were landing at that time on the Leningrad Highway, where the air terminal is now. But I no longer had any family for them to look up: my father had left my mother, and guests would not be welcome. ‘Okay, then, let’s grab Ewa and take her for a spin round Moscow. We’ll bring her back tomorrow.’ They would have, too. They were very dashing.

All the time at the front people had joked and got up to pranks with great gusto. They had been scathing, cheery, flamboyant. Here, though, everything was different. We were hanging about as if we were less involved with the war. It really was difficult to know whether we were fighting or not. Now and again our lads would loose off some shots, but in an offhand sort of way. The citadel did not snarl back. Were the Germans all dead? Were they hiding? Or were they saving their shells to fight back when our troops mounted their assault? All was quiet. It was a long time since any German planes had come to drop supplies.

The workplaces of our cryptographer and myself, with their associated equipment, were in the third room of the apartment, a pink bedroom.

We had pink wallpaper and a fluffy pink double bedspread, rolled up but abandoned at the last moment. The cryptographer now slept in the double bed. In place of a chandelier, an open, upside-down pink umbrella was playfully attached by its handle to the ceiling. In this spacious room with two windows, the cryptographer and I were allocated our separate spaces on opposite walls: the man was after all working with codes that had to be kept secret from everyone. I, far more modestly, was working with a dictionary, sifting through that postbag of German letters or newly acquired documents, and a typewriter. The cryptographer did not say much: he was always wearing a headset and always had a cigarette in his lips, the ash from which he periodically tapped off on to the carpet. He and his secrets were not, however, so hermetically sealed off from me that I did not know a coded message had been sent ‘upstairs’ to the effect that the gold in the German bank had been found not to have been evacuated.

Each of the apartment’s three rooms was kitsch in its own way. Either that, or its German cosiness only seemed obnoxious and vulgar to us in our state of homelessness. You tried not to look in the corner where scattered children’s toys had been swept off the pink carpet. You tried not to, but you did peep, and might even find yourself looking rather closely and working out from the toys what the age of their owner must have been: just over one year old, probably. The, probably folding, cot that had stood there – there was nowhere else for it – had been taken with them. There were no other clues. But those colourful toys: the blow-up animals and wooden blocks, the plastic rings and rattles… but that’s enough of that, because first, before this baby was born, its parents had kicked a Polish family out of their own apartment. In the apartment opposite, across the landing, where other staff members now worked and slept, there had also been Polish people living before the Germans arrived.

But later, dating the entry ‘late March 1945’, when I had taken in many more impressions, I wrote in the diary again, ‘Poznań, misery here in archaeological layers: first, five years ago, Polish; now German.’

A bulky, reinforced coffer was brought from the bank and dragged up to my ‘attic’ bedroom on the first floor. This no longer boasted the SS uniform or Hitler’s helpful framed advice on the need for strong nerves but only a table and a sofa bed, and the funny little plastic puppy which, after all, could hardly be blamed for the Hitler salute imputed to it.

The top of the sofa was raised, the lower compartment where the bedding was stored was cleared, and sundry gold items emptied into it. Inventories were stacked on top of them. The mattress was lowered, entombing the contents beneath it. The reinforced coffer was removed from the premises in order not to attract attention. This was all done with great excitement, in the certain belief that precious possessions of the Soviet state had been recovered, which the Germans had stolen and exported to their Reich.

To mount a 24-hour guard with changes of sentries would have tied up too many resources, and we were short of armed soldiers. It was thought that the gold would in any case be safest in my sofa bed. I was trusted. So in Poznań I slept on a hoard of gold. Nothing special about that, eh? It was only later, after the war, when I graduated and could not get a job because of ‘Point Five’, as people said at the time (Point Five in a personnel questionnaire enquired after your ‘nationality’, which I gave as ‘Jewish’), and as I spent years in straitened personal circumstances, that I sometimes smiled wryly at myself and the twists and turns of destiny as I recalled that sofa.

One or two days later, maybe three, encrypted instructions came back from Moscow. The gold, along with the inventories, was scooped out from under me and despatched in sealed bags to the address of the government department indicated in the secret message.

‘Right, let’s go!’ said Colonel Latyshev. A wounded lieutenant general had been captured in the Frankfurt-on-Oder area. Our saloon car roared off at full speed, as it usually did when the colonel was being taken anywhere. Out in the country, indistinguishable villages flashed by, some of their dwellings destroyed, others intact. Polish men and women were pushing wheelbarrows and prams with whatever of their possessions had survived.

I glimpsed the threatening German notices with whose colour and design I was so familiar. Pasted up on ruined walls and posts, whole or in tatters, they flew by: ‘Show light – you die!’ Or ‘Light means death!’ Or ‘Pssst! Shhh! The enemy is listening! Keep quiet or die!’ Death, death, death… But everything became a blur and was left behind as the car sped on at reckless speed, as if in search of the risk and danger without which life would now have seemed bland to us.

A Polish soldier rushed to open the camp gates. The depressing, numbingly regular rows of huts stretched far inside. They had been built by Russian prisoners of war herded here to do German forced labour. They themselves had surrounded the camp with six rows of barbed wire, and then lived behind it.

The colonel disappeared through the door of the Polish commandant’s office. The prisoners of war in the camp were now Germans. A miserable, straggly tree still retained frozen leaves here and there. On the inside of the gate a German warning in Russian had not yet been torn down: ‘If passing the barbed-wire perimeter of the camp unescorted by German guards, you will be shot.’

In the nearest hut, in a partitioned-off compartment, the general was lying face upwards on an iron bed. He was covered to his neck by an army blanket and had a young adjutant attending him. They had been captured on a stretch of the railway line, in the track inspector’s lodge. As the German troops were scrambling to get away, the general had suffered a serious wound and had to be left behind. His field tunic, as if crucified on a piece of wood, hung from a nail on the wall. His toiletries – shaving kit, hairbrush, soap – were laid out on a stool.

Our colonel, stocky, burly, wearing a high grey astrakhan hat, took up a considerable proportion of the available space. The adjutant gave him a chair and quickly cleared the stool for me, sweeping everything into a field case. He looked at me in puzzlement, wondering who I was. A representative of the Red Cross, perhaps?

From the other side of the partition came the subdued buzz of conversation of the other German officers. In here was relatively quieter, and the general’s pale face was similarly at peace. Looking at him, you might have imagined the two sides in the war had been engaged in chivalrous combat and that there were no grounds for anxiety that that would not continue.

‘How do you assess Germany’s military position?’ the colonel asked. ‘The situation is extremely serious.’ He did not move: his head remained motionless, and only the bags under his eyes seemed to tense. ‘Your forecast for the immediate future?’ ‘I cannot say it is optimistic, but while the war continues anything remains possible.’

I translated and made notes, but something was troubling me. The colonel hesitated for a moment, and I suddenly asked, ‘I believe you were at Vyazma.’ Our colonel gave me a disapproving look. ‘I asked if he was at Vyazma,’ I explained. ‘I have one other question. May I ask it?’ ‘Go ahead.’ ‘Was the track inspector not anxious about you staying in his lodge?’ ‘He was German. And there are circumstances in which fear has no place,’ he said almost didactically and slightly more animatedly. He brought his white-sleeved arm out of the blanket and smoothed his hair. ‘Although I do not think I brought any additional sanctions down on him.’

I remembered the orders pasted up in the villages around Vyazma: ‘Anyone who conceals or provides lodging or food to a Soviet soldier or commander… will be hanged.’ There he was, lying in his underwear with a blanket up to his chin, and now was not the time to start enquiring whether he had been at Vyazma and whether that order was over his signature Should I continue? I let it drop.

The colonel asked if the general knew about the predicament of the garrison in Poznań citadel. He did. The colonel told him – and this was the whole point of his visit – that the general should send them a message, calling on them to lay down their arms.

The wounded man stirred. His adjutant bent forward to assist him, but was frozen with a look. He laboriously shifted his shoulder and head, turning his pale, puffy face to the colonel. He found it a considerable strain, and sweat trickled from his scalp. ‘Are you proposing to force me to do this as a prisoner?’ ‘It is your duty in the present situation. People are starving to death there now. Your compatriots. Why create needless losses on both sides when it is clear what the only outcome can be?’

‘Call on them to surrender?’ he said. ‘Impossible. That is impossible,’ he repeated after a moment’s reflection. ‘In my place would you really behave differently?’ Now it was the colonel’s turn to reflect. Getting up from his seat, he asked whether the general had any requests to the Soviet command. He had not.

‘Let’s go!’ the colonel said.

During the night a herd of cows was being driven east along a dark road. Cars coming the other way, driving slowly without lights, turned on their headlights, startling the cows which, dazzled, bumped into each other and found themselves with no room to move. Among their black and white coats were flashes of ginger from Russian or Byelorussian cows that had been rustled by the Germans and brought back to their Reich. Cars hooted, the beams from their headlights sought a path through the panicking herd, a whip whistled, lights danced in the cows’ huge eyes. For some reason it was frightening.

Soon people began to forget the enemy in the citadel; the liberated city had better things to think about. General Chuikov’s army had allocated units to storm it and moved on. Red Army troops were already advancing beyond the borders of Brandenburg and Pomerania. At this time I was still assigned to a Smersh group subordinate to front headquarters that had remained in Poznań.

Forty kilometres from Poznań, to our rear, in a shtetl away from the highways of the war, there was, we learned, a camp for captured Italian generals. We went to take a look. The German guards had fled before the Red Army arrived, and 160 Italian generals, now unguarded by anyone, just carried on living in the camp. Not long ago they had been fighting us, but after the coup in Italy, the German command summoned them from the front for a supposed meeting and promptly declared them prisoners of war. In the changed situation, they found themselves as confused as the Italian soldiers we had liberated in Bydgoszcz. How would we regard them: as prisoners of the Germans or as our recent enemies?

We drove past the barbed wire. Emptiness. Several huts. Two men sawing a log. We approached and, when they saw us, they stopped sawing. Two weary, elderly men, two pairs of eyes looked gloomily and expectantly towards us. We said hello in German. One man, dark-skinned with heavy folds on his face, with a bright woollen scarf round his neck, nodded silently. He was in the uniform of an Italian general. The other talked to us. This was Specialist Leader Walther Treublut, a German interpreter and the only member of the German camp administration to have remained at his post. He was bareheaded, grey-haired, and had a pointed nose. His upper lip was drawn inwards.

Our colonel went round the huts, accompanied by Walther Treublut, and informed the Italians, with Sonderführer Treublut translating, that they were free and, as soon as the situation at the front allowed, would be assisted to return home.

Some time later, when the weather was warmer, when the food supplies in the camp ran out and the generals had set off back to Italy, I was to talk to Walther Treublut again, after he was arrested one night in the city park where he was sleeping on a bench.

Having bade farewell to the Italian generals and not knowing what to do, he headed for Poznań, went to the house where he had lived for several years, but found that it was once more occupied by the Polish family who had lived there before being expelled during the occupation. Not wanting to get on the wrong side of anybody, he lay down on a bench in the park, because he was very tired and hungry.

I asked him why he had not fled with the camp administration and guards. He shrugged and did not reply. Then he told me about himself. He was born and lived in Reval, now Tallinn. He owned a chemical laboratory that manufactured perfume products, which he sold through his father’s chemist’s shop.

He suffered from pulmonary disease and, travelling in Italy, met a girl in the village of Domaso on Lake Como. They had known each other for only five days, and the Italian girl knew not a word of German while Treublut knew barely five words in Italian. When he got home to Reval, he swotted up on Italian, sent a stream of postcards to Domaso, and finally offered his hand and his heart to the beautiful Nereida Betetti. Their wedding took place beside Lake Como, and Treublut took his Italian bride to Reval and Estonian citizenship.

‘In German literature much was written about the faithfulness of German women and the frivolity and duplicity of French and Italian women, but I was very happy in my marriage.’

Soon the policy of ‘repatriation’ of Germans began, and he found himself in Poznań where, on this bridgehead, National Socialism blossomed in all its glory. The authorities would not register his daughter, because he had called her Fiametta.

He stopped. His eyes were dilated and motionless. He knew nothing about his family and was indifferent to what fate might hold in store for him now. He was infinitely tired of living in this world of Nazism and war.

The Poznań citadel was taken on the eve of 23 February, the twenty-seventh anniversary of the establishment of the Red Army. It seemed a significant gesture on the part of history, of which there were many on our path to victory. From the records of our interrogation of the German officers, I was able to piece together the last hours of the commander of the citadel, Major General Ernst Gonnel. He gave the order to surrender, arranged for it to be communicated to the troops, and spent the rest of the night in an armchair in the large vaulted underground hall of the citadel. He still had radio communication with the German high command, but was in no hurry to make his report.

When it was dawn, Gonnel went upstairs and headed to the southern gate, which had been designated in the capitulation terms as the point of surrender. Here, during the night, the soldiers under his command had been gathering, making no secret of wanting to get as close as possible to the gate. It was worse than he had imagined. They were no longer subject to his inexorable will and when, at the hour appointed, the gates were opened, they turned into a rabble as he watched, worn down by hunger and thirst, flinging their rifles in a heap, raising their hands above their heads, and rushed past, pushing Gonnel aside, taking no notice of him. It might have struck him that this was how he took the salute at the last parade of his troops. It lasted a long time, because the remnants of many other units had ended up in the citadel under his command. When the last stretchers with the wounded lurched through the gate, he hastily unfastened his holster, put the pistol to his temple and fired.

The surrendering troops, headed by the fortress commander, Major General Ernst Mattern, straggled in a long, glum column through the streets of Poznań. Among the ranks, tin trunks were visible above their heads where staff officers were carrying the papers of their headquarters. Those at the head of the column were already behind barbed wire, in a camp where only recently Russian prisoners of war had been confined, while those at its tail straggled through the city for a long time yet, exhausted and hungry.

To this day I preserve three blue invitation cards: to a service of thanksgiving, a parade, and an evening of celebration.

The service took place on Wednesday 7 March 1945 in the market square. There, before an altar, shoulder to shoulder, were ranks of Polish soldiers. Closer to it were the Sisters of Mercy in their white headgear. Carpets hung from every balcony. Men and women came running up the street. The voices in the square were raised in unison, and high up to the lowering sky there rose a solemn hymn of praise, thanksgiving and faith. Women with babies in their arms came out onto the balconies to join their voices to the singing.

Later, also in the market square, there was a parade. The commander-in-chief, General Michal Rola-Żymierski, reviewed a march-past of troops on the paving in front of the tribune. Beside him stood his tall, lean chief of staff, General Wladyslaw Korczyc. Banners fluttered. A dark red banner with a cow’s head and crossed poleaxes was borne by a man with a ginger moustache and a kerchief round his neck, the standard-bearer of the Guild of Butchers. The banner of the Polish Workers’ Party was carried by an old man in blue spectacles. Up there, by the tribune, a young man in a worn grey coat, raised a microphone to his lips and, removing his hat while the national anthem was played, gave a running commentary.

The tribune was covered in greenery. The safely preserved banner of the municipality was brought, escorted on both sides by women orderlies girdled with red and white brocade.

The infantry were wearing helmets, with the Polish bicolour on a Russian three-sided bayonet. Then a platoon of anti-tank gunners, a platoon with submachine guns, with girls in the front rank. Then machine-gun carriages. Then the cavalry, with bicoloured ribbons braided in their horses’ manes. Public societies came to the tribune with their banners. Flags fluttered, red, and red and white.

‘Niech żyje Armia czerwona!’ Long live the Red Army.

‘Niech żyje!’ we heard from the tribune.

Children and adults climbed up telegraph poles and trees, and stood on the church wall.

‘Niech żyje bohaterski Poznań!’ Long live heroic Poznań.

Hats were thrown in the air, bouquets of greenhouse flowers were thrown to the soldiers. The last to clatter past the tribune were six tanks, and no sooner had their clamour died down than an astonished, joyful exclamation was heard and taken up by the crowd: ‘Look! The cranes are flying back!’

Taking off their caps, their heads thrown back, the crowd gazed upwards to where, in a sky that had meanwhile cleared, cranes returning from the south soared over the city. A sign of spring!

Perhaps because there was a war on, I was still eager for challenges, but somehow no longer in the thick of the action. I was looking around to see if I could find something new and exciting.

Poznań stagnated, ever further from the front line of the advancing army, which had already forced a crossing of the River Oder. Troops of the 1st Byelorussian Front, under the command of Marshal Zhukov, had fought their way forward 400 km in two weeks.

The city was changing in front of our eyes, primarily by becoming springlike. Although that was entirely natural, many people may remember the sense of solidarity of that spring of 1945 in the West, with gentle breezes wafting the aroma of fields ploughed, for the first time in freedom, by Polish peasants, with their green, tender shoots and hopes of peace and work.

The city was coming back to a life that was still austere but enlivened by the coming of spring. The plasterers and painters were suspended on the walls of buildings in their cradles. The chimney sweeps in black top hats and with all their appurtenances rode everywhere on bicycles. The schoolchildren of Poznań hurried to get to school in time for the bell, and any one of them, with their satchel bumping up and down on their back, was sure to say good day if they met me: ‘Dzień dobry, panno lieutenant!’

Wiktoria Buzińska sewed me a green dress from the lining of a coat, and ornamented it with a yoke from a piece of polka-dotted satin. How amazing that was, what luxury suddenly to be wearing, if only for a moment, a light, feminine dress with short sleeves, after three-and-a-half years of constantly wearing a tunic. What a delight to lock my door and secretly put it on. The SS man’s room had no mirror, and I tried as best I could to make myself out in the glass of the windows when evening darkened them. There is no describing how enchanted I was by my own appearance.

Later, in May, I wore this dress when I was photographed in Berlin at the monument to Bismarck, at a hoarding with portraits of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill, and in various other temporary or permanent historic settings.

At New Year 1945, when our army was redeployed from the Baltic states to Poland and had its headquarters in Kaluszyn, something between a town and a shtetl, Major Bystrov had told me when no one was listening that he would try from now on to carve out a ‘creative day’ for me, because the war was coming to an end and I would find myself trying to get back into the Literary Institute with absolutely no new qualifications. Pulling my desk over to one corner and spreading out some unimportant German papers to make it look as if I were translating, I made a conspiratorial start under Bystrov’s watchful eye. In a slim, blue Polish school notebook I wrote down the title of a story, ‘The “Son-in-Law”’. I had had it in mind for a long time: there was something secretive about it that moved and excited me. I had been imagining everything that would go on in the story. All I needed was an opportunity to sit down and write it.

And now I had it. ‘The “Son-in-Law”’. I wrote it once more, this time as part of the text. ‘…that was the name they gave to young Russian deserters in encirclement who shacked up with grass widows in nearby villages whose husbands were absent in the war.’ Now what?

I decided the first sentence was not quite right. It sounded like a dictionary definition. I crossed it out. Something more ‘literary’ was needed. In the end I wrote down, ‘A cow was pulling an oxcart,’ then improved it to ‘a spotted cow was pulling an oxcart.’ And that was the fruit of a day’s work.

Bystrov’s sound pragmatism saw no signs of promise in this, and he said frankly that with such a woeful level of productivity he could not justify further diversion of the war effort. He stripped me of my creative day, and was right to do so. The notebook survives as testimony to my incompetence. I was able to write ‘The “Son-in-Law”’ as I had imagined it, about the tensions of life behind German lines, only after I got home when the war was over.

How easily and willingly I would jot down this and that as it happened (when, that is, I was allowed to), and how difficult it proved to sit down and just write.

Captured Germans were sent, over time, in echelons to the east. Fearing the hatred of the Poles, they always asked to be escorted by Russian soldiers.

Studying German staff headquarters documents from the captured citadel was becoming less operationally valuable, and had not yet become of historical interest. It was also thoroughly depressing. Our army was standing 80 km from Berlin, and here we still were putting on weight in Poznań where nothing serious was happening. Little did I know how merciful fate was being, holing me up in Poznań for the whole time the Red Army was advancing through Germany, right up until the assault on Berlin. But that is an aside.

Already in Poznań the war was covertly preparing to withdraw and allow the return of what is, perhaps, the truly dominant feature of human existence: love – personal, intimate feelings. There was danger in those, there was risk, but also all the radiant wonder of being alive. Since we were in Riga I had been collecting slim volumes of Ivan Bunin’s poetry, and magazines with Marina Tsvetayeva’s poems, whenever I came across them. I carried some with me wherever I went. They were pulsating with a life that had unfamiliar facets, a different sadness, different passions.

What a blow was coming my way! A famous writer flew in from Moscow and called on us when I was not there. He asked the colonel hospitably welcoming him whether, by chance, we had any emigré literature, because he would really like some to read. That was our visiting celebrity’s only request to us.

I can imagine our Colonel Latyshev regretfully shrugging his shoulders as he explained he had nothing to offer. Being a generous man, he no doubt imagined others were equally generous. He called Zhenya Gavrilov in from the kitchen. Zhenya was always pottering around there, drying dishes with his bedsheet, because we never had any shortage of people looking for a meal, or of dishes to wash when they left. Zhenya, keen to make a good impression on Ewa, helped her out when he had time to spare, which was more or less all the time except, of course, when he was spending late evenings with Ewa’s neighbour, young Zosia.

The colonel told Zhenya to go up to the translator’s room and see if there was any literature there in Russian. The impatient writer followed him up the stairs, and there the literature lay, on the wide, deep sill of the window at which the SS officer used to sit.

My diary entry reads: ‘On 28 March, visit from so and so, who helped himself to my Bunin and Tsvetayeva.’

My resentment and indignation were such that I could write nothing more. A few days later I again wrote in my diary, ‘On 28 March, visit from so and so…’: exactly the same entry.

I would probably not have felt so intensely about this if I had known that for me the war would not be ending in Poznań, and that destiny was about to move me to the very epicentre of events as it did.

Our troops, having overcome what the Germans had supposed to be their impregnable defences on the River Oder, were by this time already fighting on the plateau near Berlin. How eager we were to be there and not in Poznań! At last an order was received that we should all return to our units.

When I heard the news, I ran outside, round our house and turned in at the gate. It was late, but in the courtyard I could see the black silhouettes of our cars and, under one of them, the bright light of a torch shining on and off.

I called to Sergey. The hand holding the torch appeared from beneath the car, and then Sergey, our driver, emerged wearing the dark blue Gestapo uniform he used as his overalls. I advised him that we were leaving for Berlin, and that he was to have the cars ready for six in the morning. Sergey put out the torch and we stood silently in the dark.

Who in those days was not only too eager to get to Berlin? Of course, Sergey was too, but we had been stationed in Poznań for over two months, a lifetime during a war, and Sergey, after a whirlwind romance with a Poznań girl, had contrived to marry her secretly in church. Ever since there had been a slightly crazy, mischievous expression on his likeable, thoughtful face.

He wiped his hands on the Gestapo uniform, clicked his cigarette lighter – his broad, Slavic face paled, he frowned and said, lighting a cigarette: ‘Ah, wszystko jedno – wojna!’ What can you do about it? That’s war! It was something you often heard in Poznań at that time.

At dawn we prepared to leave and, just before we did, I observed the customary moment of reflection before setting out on a journey. I went to the front garden of our house and was suddenly transfixed by the sight of the apple tree, alive with white blossom, by a square of bare, damp earth through which, here and there, delicate young blades of grass were sprouting, and by the sight of last year’s leaves decomposing underfoot. A gusting breeze brought such a sense of spring in the air.

Along the street on his bicycle, clad in black, came a chimney sweep, complete with his top hat, stepladder and brush slung over his back. The feeling of safety, which had been becoming oppressive with its overtone of stagnation and a kind of emotional turmoil, gave way to a sense of melancholy now at having to leave.

Sergey cast a farewell glance at the old Molotov saloon painted a ghastly, muddy, camouflage colour, with an unbroken red edging the length of its bodywork and on the wheel rims, which he had constantly retouched. He had driven this battered, bullet-scarred car for the first four years of the war. Now he drove out to the roadway in his new baby – a captured, highpowered Ford 8 he had rescued from a ditch near Poznań and lovingly repaired. His fresh black paint had run and grey showed through in places, but the bodywork and the wheel rims sported the same ostentatious red edging. He was incorrigible.

Next Vanya came out to the road, a taxi driver from Riga, brought against his will by the Germans to work in Poznań. He was shivering in a short, once dapper but now bedraggled, suede jacket, and inspected the Ford approvingly. Unfastening his shoulder strap, Sergey took a flask of vodka and presented it to him.

Sergey looked first at one then at the other side of the street A lone figure was conspicuous on the pavement, a girl in a short checked skirt, with large legs and a scarf on her head. She was watching tensely as we prepared to leave. The cars were already moving off. Sergey said quietly, ‘Go home. Why do I have to say it. For heaven’s sake, idz do domu.’

She turned and walked slowly away, turning to look back again and again. Sergey stood there, unable to move, then straightened the folds of his tunic under his belt and yanked the car door open.

With the flask tucked under one arm, Vanya the taxi driver smoothed his sparse fair hair with the other and waved us goodbye. The Ford’s wheels screeched furiously, but the engine immediately settled down and we drove smoothly on our way. I was sitting behind Sergey. To either side of the street a white surf of apple trees in bloom was foaming. The city was waking. The girl directing traffic at the city gate gave a signal and the barrier floated up. A schoolboy with a satchel on his back came out of a house and politely took off his little kepi to wish us, ‘Dzień dobry’.

The car emerged onto the highway to Berlin. Sergey lowered the window and took off his cap.