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When God Looked the Other Way

University of Chicago Press

Chapter One

... The atmosphere in and around our home began to change, becoming more gloomy and secretive. Army officers came to our apartment to speak with Father privately, and young people came to our door to collect empty cans and other metallic objects we no longer needed. My parents and nanny took to speaking in whispers when I was around and refused to explain why. Even Zosia began acting toward me the way Mother did, telling me not to be concerned and abruptly changing the subject.

Now and then I overheard my parents talking about imminent war with Germany. The uncertainty of what life would be like frightened me. Would the war last only one day, like the battles of old my father told me about? I wanted to know, but nobody would give me an answer.

On the first day of September 1939, the Germans attacked Poland across its western border. I did not understand what being at war meant, so I asked Mother. She only held me close and said she would explain some other time. Later that day, I overheard Father say to her, "Do not tell the children yet. Do not tell them what might happen."

That evening I overheard Father expressing his fear that the German attack might spread into a wider war. He explained that the Soviets could easily take advantage of this situation to also attack Poland in an attempt to get back the land Poland had recovered after the victory over the Bolsheviks in 1920. If that happened, Poles could be in grave danger from local Belorussians and Ukrainians, whose relationship with the Poles was uneasy at best. For the first time in my life, I had the scary feeling that all the good things I took for granted-my family, my home-could be lost.

Several days after the German invasion, this feeling intensified as our nanny left our home in Luck, advised by Father to stay with her relatives in Warsaw. Then Mother told us that our father, a captain in the Polish Army, would be leaving us to join the troops. That evening, a short time after my parents told me to go to bed, papa came to my room.

"Dear Wiesiu, I must say good-bye to you." He picked me up and kissed me. "Take care of your mother," he said. Overcome with fear, I felt that our life would never be the same again. Somehow I knew that I would never forget the moment when my papa kissed me, and I hoped it would not be for the last time. Even today, when I recall that moment, I am filled with a boyish wish that I could have stopped the clock and given Father another chance at life.

After he left, our life began to unravel. The Germans attacked with warplanes. Sirens blared, bombs fell, and we ran and hid in previously dug trenches by the river Styr. During the bombing I could taste the dirt that fell on us while Mother held my head close to her body to protect me. For the first time, I feared for my life and the lives of my family. Although the German Army did not advance as far as Luck, the bombing raids continued, and Mother decided we should return to our country home in Sarny, which was smaller and less likely to be a target.

On September 17, however, a second horror began. The Soviets, despite having signed a treaty of nonaggression with Poland and without declaring war, entered from the east on the pretext of helping the Poles fight the Germans. With the Germans winning and occupying the country in the west, chaos had ensued, and the Soviet double-cross worked. Small Polish Army units, composed mainly of reservists, that were scattered along the eastern border were surrounded by massive Red Army forces and were forced to lay down their arms or die. In the confusion some furious fighting broke out, but it was too little too late. Within a very short time, the Soviets took about two hundred thousand Polish soldiers prisoner.

Officers, including my father, were separated from the others. For months we knew nothing of what happened to him. Some time later we started receiving letters from him and learned of his capture. He had been taken to the Starobelsk prison in the Soviet Union along with other officers.

Just as the Gestapo followed in the wake of the advancing German Army, the Soviet secret police followed the Soviet troops and began to plunder villages and arrest, torture, and murder civilians. Soon after entering Poland the Soviet story changed from "We are protecting you from the Germans" to "We have come to liberate the workers from the Polish bourgeois oppressors." The Soviets also announced that the liberated lands would be annexed to the Soviet Union to satisfy "the will of the people." Suddenly the battle's theme changed from defending Polish territories from the Germans to class warfare. The intent now became clear: it was to take over Poland permanently and to spread the Communist revolution westward, something the Bolsheviks had failed to do twenty years earlier.

The Soviet secret police, or NKVD, was equivalent to the Gestapo. In the beginning the NKVD sought out professionals and army officers and then their families. Because our father was a banker and an army officer, we were prime targets for arrest. I sensed how my mother's fear for our safety intensified, which made me more afraid. I had the horrible feeling of being hunted. I could not, however, understand why I was anybody's quarry, nor could I understand why people would want to kill other people.

In February 1940, shortly after my seventh birthday, word began to spread that the Soviets were forcibly deporting Poles to the Soviet Union, particularly those whom they viewed as a threat to the Communist takeover. The time soon came when persons with any kind of material possessions, including peasants who owned small plots of land, were targeted as well. All were considered members of the bourgeoisie and thus "enemies of the people" who were prime subjects for deportation.

Our family's bank account was seized for the benefit of the Soviet treasury. Firearms, if found, were confiscated, too. Late one night, Jurek gathered all of Father's guns, oiled them, wrapped them in rubber sheets, and placed them and some jewelry in a steel box, which he buried among the fruit trees in our orchard. At that point I realized that we would soon be leaving our home behind and had to prepare for that day. Mother busied herself designing ways to hide our jewelry from the invaders. Since our return to Sarny, she had been making dried bread. "It is for emergencies," she would say. But I watched her insert into the dough many pieces of jewelry including her grandmother's gold earrings, a gold crucifix, and gold bracelets. After the bread had baked, I helped her and Zosia cut it into large pieces. Later the bread was dried in the oven and packed into large potato sacks. How Mother identified the pieces with jewelry hidden inside, I have never learned. Mother and Zosia sewed other small pieces of jewelry and gold coins inside hems of dresses.

We had heard that watches and clocks were of great value in the Soviet Union and had observed for ourselves that the Soviet soldiers walking the streets would ostentatiously wear many watches on each arm, some proudly displaying many alarm clocks attached to their belts. We gathered together all the family's watches, even those that didn't run, and I watched as Mother and my sister spent long hours sewing them into the hems of winter coats.

On the night of May 14, 1940, we went to sleep anticipating the next day's...