Journeys with My Mother (22 page)

18

Breakout

The Germans feared lice and typhus as much as they feared the partisans. The plan for breaking free relied on this, otherwise trivial, understanding.

Planning for our escape began almost immediately after our arrival in Lida; even so, a couple of months had to pass before it could be attempted. Though the plan was simple, the logistics were not. The escape of a large group of prisoners from a closely guarded hospital, in a town full of Germans, without loss of life, called for precision and coordination with those in the forest.

Winter came early that year and from the beginning of November there was plenty of snow.

The date was set for the first week in December.

The action began when one of the nurses reported to the hospital commandant that the prisoners' quarters were infested with lice. As expected, an order was immediately issued to take all POWs, together with their bed linen, to the
bania
for delousing. In the evening of 7 December, all the prisoners, many ignorant of the plan, climbed onto the lorries. Amazingly, only one junior officer was assigned to supervise the operation. Perhaps the Germans did not fear what they considered to be a group of obedient Soviet prisoners. They had known them since the beginning of the war and trusted them, as they would their loyal employees in a time of peace. None of the prisoners was armed but it was known that one of the outbuildings was full of guns and ammunition.

While we drove towards the
bania
, four men were left behind. First, one of them broke the metal bar of the treasure trove: a cache of weapons. Romanov, a skilled electrician, disconnected all the lights, leaving the entire precinct in winter darkness. Lastly, all remaining vehicles were disabled, making an immediate pursuit impossible.

By the time the electricity was restored, the four men in a weapon-carrying lorry had reached the rest of us at the town baths. Inside, the unsuspecting officer was easily overpowered; blows to the head left him unconscious. To his misfortune though, he recovered almost immediately, ran into the street and started screaming. He was shot dead. If only he had not recovered from the blows. Why do I feel awful thinking about that killing, in the context of so many atrocities? Because it is ignoble for one person to be attacked by many? Was he trading lighthearted remarks only a moment before they pounced on him? Were they reluctant to kill him because he was a decent man and they knew him well? I am relieved not to have any memory of that event, and even more that I did not have to make decisions.

Fifty-three men, women and one child drove in German tarpaulin-covered trucks through the night streets of Lida and beyond. In the tiny village of Dokudovo we met our contact who would guide us towards Puszcza Nalibocka. Everyone was tense; I was the only one oblivious to danger. For all I know, I could have been asleep.

There were things the official reports of the escape did not mention, details of no importance to anybody, but my mother remembered them well. The Gawia, a tributary of the Niemen River, had to be crossed. As we had to avoid guarded bridges, the river had to be forded. It was a cloudless and cold December night, the sky full of stars. Perhaps the ice was too thin to support the weight of our loaded vehicles, I don't know; all I remember that that we had to walk across to the other side. Unexpectedly the ice cracked and we were plunged into the freezing river. As my mother waded through the icy waters she was largely preoccupied with holding on to her knee-length, pure-wool knickers that were gradually sliding down. She could not afford such a loss.

Once we'd crossed to safety, her hands numb, she took off all my wet clothes. I remember standing naked on the truck platform, shivering in the wintery breeze while she rubbed me with spirits before quickly putting layers of bandage over me from top to toe. Then someone, I think it was Gurgen, put his coat over my shoulders. The cold of that night, the river crossing, my mother's fast-moving hands, the weight of the coat, forms my first coherent memory. I was just over four.

It was well known that partisans were loath to take in people who did not have firearms, especially women. But in our party, all twelve women were nurses and every man was skilled at using weapons. We carried with us precious essentials: medical instruments, dressings, medications, linen, plus an impressive arsenal of weapons, ammunition, even two generators.

Valerii told me about Aleksander Malewski, one of the go-betweens for our group and the partisans that night; how he'd been diverting materials stolen by the nurses to the Polish Home Army partisans.

At the time of our escape, the Polish patrols were lying in wait for us. But after three days of waiting, they left half an hour before we turned up.

‘What would they have done with us?' I asked Valerii. According to him, there were a few possibilities: they would have taken our loot and killed us or we would have been robbed of arms and dispersed, leaving us at the mercy of fate. Even the most benign scenario – that we'd be absorbed into their forces – was risky. There was no trust or love lost between the Poles and the Russians. We were saved by mistiming. That the Polish partisans attempted to entrap us reveals the shared hunger for arms, medical materials and the complexity of a three-way struggle for dominance.

A few months later, Malewski was caught double-dealing. He was executed by our side in March 1944.

19

Partisans

We might be hunted like animals, but we will not become animals … Every day of freedom is an act of faith.

—Tuvia Bielski

To escape into the forest to join the partisans was a brave, almost senseless, move. Your mother was a remarkable woman.

—Valerii Slivkin

At the very beginning of the war when the Wehrmacht rolled across the land, laying waste to the countryside and its people, scattering those still alive in all directions, hundreds of terrified human beings – local men and boys, odd deserters, inadvertently abandoned army soldiers, Russians, Poles, Jews, Gypsies and Belorussians – sought the protection of the forests. As for the Jews: there were no concentration camps in Belorussia; death came to them where they lived. Those who understood the inevitability of annihilation summoned the courage to leave their hiding places, the ghettos, to join the fighters. They fled despite the possibility of being robbed, even murdered, by the very partisans they intended to join. For all the horrendous losses, the number of partisan fighters kept increasing.

It was an odd collection of people: professionals and peasants, artists and criminals, workers and school graduates. In normal times, they would never have dreamed of rubbing shoulders with each other. But here, united by the common enemy and the will to live, they shared food, conversations, daily tasks and the ledges of bunkers, called
zemlyankas
. When we joined the partisan forces, one of them served as our new home.

Made of logs, long and squat, the
zemlyanka
was almost entirely sunk into the ground, with natural light coming through one small window. Rough as it was, it was better than living in the open.

In the forest, of necessity, our life was primitive. Men and women slept next to each other, dressed in the clothes they wore during the day. Despite a layer of straw and burlap, sleeping on logs is something my bones still remember.

My mother and I had a place in the furthermost corner. Ola attached a piece of hessian to the wall, marking the boundary of our space. Sometimes she would bring in a sprig of spruce or wildflowers. No matter where we were, she made it home. She detested lack of privacy, grime and lice but – like everyone else – she had to find a way to deal with the circumstances.

We'd joined the forces at the very beginning of winter, which guaranteed freezing temperatures for at least three months. Just then, I grew out of my shoes and my mother, wrapped in a shawl like a peasant babushka, carried me everywhere. Her cold cheek next to mine, her breath laboured, she trod carefully through the snow. It was then, for the first time, that I sensed how hard it was for her, and I felt gratitude for everything she did for me.

Around us was a forest so dense that even wild animals – boars, deer and wolves – chose to follow the same known tracks. The myriad of lakes and rivers made the terrain marshy.

Only the locals knew how to get their bearings, how to keep away from the swamps ready to swallow you up; how to keep the wolves away. It was a perfect place to hide, but tough to survive.

My first memory of fear: in the late afternoon of a summer day, my mother and I were on the way back to our base, somewhere in the forest. When the path diverted into two, perhaps three tracks, my mother stopped, hesitating about which one to choose. At dusk every track looked the same: sinister, the trees closing in on us. It felt as if there were only the two of us in this huge forest. Her moment of uncertainty seemed to pass. Holding me by the hand, she continued to walk. I baulked, pulling her in another direction. ‘Mama, not this way, we'll get lost!'

Surprisingly, she listened to me and we found our
zemlyanka
later the same evening. I wonder why she paid attention to what I said. She, too, must have been worried.

Sometimes I think about that immense forest, its menace and its beauty.

By the time we joined this civilian army of thousands, the partisans had already inflicted significant damage on the German forces. Under Moscow's leadership, however, the wild and disparate groups were transformed into wellorganised fighting units, supported by equipment and expertise. The partisans' missions – acts of sabotage, of blowing up bridges and railway tracks to derail trains –took many days to accomplish and were rife with risks. Armed confrontation with the Germans was unavoidable. While the partisans' attacks had the element of surprise, the way back to their bases was more predictable. The partisans were hunted, making retreat the most dangerous part of the action. To shake off their pursuers, the men had to hide, sometimes for days. Then, slowed down by exhaustion and the wounded, they needed deftness or luck to avoid the swamps. Many fell in. Gurgen himself was once trapped in the bog which nearly swallowed him. Rescued, he took many weeks to recover.

It was a man's world. The highest currency was courage, physical strength and stamina. There weren't many women in the partisan forces, and fewer still took part in armed missions. Assigned to cooking, cleaning and other supporting jobs, with no say in matters of importance, they held the lowest place in the partisan hierarchy and were vulnerable to predators. None more so than those without a man.

Although rape was punishable by death, coercion was common as many fellow partisans expected consent. It must have been easier for Ola who, averse to duress by nature, enjoyed a nurse's status. No matter that she and Gurgen saw each other only rarely; the fact that they were considered husband and wife shielded her from harassment.

On the night of our arrival, my mother and I were sent to Bielski's
otryad
. This few-hundred-strong Jewish group of survivors of massacres and ghetto runaways was sheltering women, children and old men. But my mother felt out of sorts there. She missed her old companions and wanted to do what she knew best: to attend to the sick and the injured. She asked to be transferred and, a few weeks later, we were part of the
Iskra
detachment. I must have been the only child in a sea of adults.

Since the outbreak of typhus the previous year, a spacious
zemlyanka
had been turned into an isolation ward; other ones were assigned for general admissions and outpatients. For such a primitive setup, it was grandly called a hospital. And that's what it was, despite the shortage of everything: anaesthetics and scalpels, painkillers and syringes. Every procedure was a challenge. But there was a doctor, a physician who'd fled the ghetto in Lida, and several nurses, my mother one of them. Ola spent days, and sometimes nights, working in the field hospital. It never occurred to me to ask her where I was when she was on duty. When Doctor Gordon decided to carry out a trepanation – drilling a hole in the patient's skull to remove a haemorrhage, a procedure not without serious risks even in peace-time, let alone in primitive conditions – he himself designed the instruments required, and the only one who could make them was the local blacksmith. The operation was carried out on the kitchen table of the village hut. Gordon was assisted by a nurse who happened to be his wife. The patient was held in place by his brother and a party commissar.