My Family and My Town

I was born in 1928 in Klonów, in the Kielce dis­trict, where my Father worked as a for­ester for the State Forests. From 1930 to 1934 we lived in east­ern Poland, in the Kosów Poleski dis­trict, where Father had been appoin­ted dis­trict for­ester. In 1935 Father was trans­ferred to Białow­ieża, where he worked at the State Forests Dir­ect­or­ate, and towards the end of 1936 we moved to Wołkow­ysk in the Białys­tok Voivode­ship, where Father was given the post of for­ester. There were five of us in the family. Mother was a teacher by pro­fes­sion, but from 1930 she no longer worked, as she devoted her­self to bring­ing up three chil­dren. I had a brother, Zbyszek, a year and a half older than me, and a sister, Hania, six years younger. I star­ted the first year of primary school in 1935 in Białow­ieża, and from 1936 to 1939 I con­tin­ued in the second, third and fourth years in Wołkow­ysk.

Speak­ing of the family, I would like to give a few details of my Father's life. His bio­graphy con­tains a fine record of the struggle for inde­pend­ence. In June 1915, at the age of 22, he volun­teered for the First Bri­gade of the Polish Legions com­manded by Józef Piłsud­ski and was assigned to the 1st Infantry Regi­ment. The First Bri­gade fought on the Austro-Hun­garian side against Russia. In August 1915 Stan­isław Bach­miński was wounded in the battle of Wyso­kie Litewskie. A rifle bullet passed through both his legs and he ended up in hos­pital. After his wounds had healed and he had recovered, he returned in Novem­ber 1915 to his regi­ment, which was fight­ing in Vol­hynia. The First Bri­gade was then taking part in a suc­cess­ful offens­ive against Russia and reached the Styr, a south­ern trib­u­tary of the Pripyat, where it fought heavy battles with the Rus­si­ans. Father fought on the Styr and the Stokhid until August 1916, endur­ing great hard­ship in the trenches, often under heavy artil­lery fire, as a result of which he suffered con­cus­sion. Father served in the First Bri­gade for 25 months, until the Oath Crisis of July 1917. The Oath Crisis arose because the Polish Legions were to be placed under German com­mand and the legion­ar­ies were required to swear an oath to the German Emperor. Like most sol­diers of the First Bri­gade, Father refused to take the oath and was con­sequently to be interned. As he told it, while being trans­por­ted to Szczypi­orno (a vil­lage near Kalisz), he and a com­rade jumped from the moving train and so escaped intern­ment. After this escape he went to Lwów in the hope of con­tinu­ing his stud­ies at the Col­lege of Forestry. Between 1917 and 1919 he stud­ied with inter­rup­tions, living in lodgings and earn­ing his keep by giving private les­sons. The Col­lege of Forestry was an inde­pend­ent school, and in 1919 it became one of the fac­ulties of the Lwów Poly­tech­nic.

In Novem­ber 1918 Polish–Ukrain­ian fight­ing broke out over Lwów. Sol­diers of Ukrain­ian nation­al­ity serving in the Austro-Hun­garian army, seeing that the war was coming to an end, seized a number of key points in Lwów on 1 Novem­ber 1918 and took over the admin­is­tra­tion, intend­ing to make the city part of the newly form­ing West Ukrain­ian People's Repub­lic. In the dis­trict where Stan­isław Bach­miński lived, Ukrain­ian units car­ried out an oper­a­tion against the young Poles living there, aiming to elim­in­ate them, since most were trained sol­diers who could rein­force the Polish units defend­ing Lwów. Accord­ing to Father's account, the Ukrain­i­ans searched his home and then led him out to a square where a group of Poles had been gathered, prob­ably to be shot. For­tu­nately a Polish air­craft appeared and fired on the Ukrain­ian sol­diers assembled in the square, and every­one scattered. Taking advant­age of the con­fu­sion, Father escaped from the square and hid in a cemetery, where he stayed for sev­eral days until Polish units drove the Ukrain­i­ans out of that dis­trict. The fight­ing for Lwów lasted until 22 Novem­ber 1918 and ended with the Ukrain­i­ans being driven out of the city, but until May 1919 Lwów remained encircled and shelled by units of the Ukrain­ian Galician Army. In April 1919 Father returned to mil­it­ary ser­vice in Lwów, serving for five months as a cor­poral in a Polish Army guard bat­talion. After com­plet­ing his stud­ies he began work in 1920 as a for­ester for the State Forests in the Kielce Voivode­ship. In 1933 Stan­isław Bach­miński was awar­ded the Cross of Inde­pend­ence by the Pres­id­ent of the Repub­lic. I should add that Father's two younger broth­ers, Wacław and Józef, also fought in the First Bri­gade of the Legions. Józef went on to serve in the Polish army after inde­pend­ence and was badly injured in the fight­ing against the Ukrain­i­ans near Lwów, losing an eye in battle. As a war invalid he received sup­port from the State: an allot­ment of land and a post at the Corps Com­mand in Grodno.

I would also like to men­tion my great-uncle, Stan­isław Bach­miński, who took part in the Janu­ary Upris­ing. He was a stu­dent at the Main School in Warsaw and when the upris­ing broke out he joined the insur­gent unit “Chil­dren of Warsaw”, in which he held the com­mand of a sotnik (com­pany com­mander). He was killed on 14 April 1863, aged 21, in a clash with the Rus­si­ans at Buda Zaborowska in the Kampi­nos Forest. In all, 73 insur­gents died there, includ­ing Major Remiszewski, the unit's com­mander. There is a mass grave of the insur­gents who fell in that battle at Zaborów Leśny.

We lived in Wołkow­ysk from 1936, and I would like to say some­thing about the town and about events of that time which have stayed in my memory to this day. It was a county town with about 17,000 inhab­it­ants in 1939. The town had a Public Gen­eral (primary) School, a State Gym­nas­ium and Lyceum, a private four-year Com­mer­cial Gym­nas­ium, and also a private primary school known as Mrs Pawęska's School. Pupils of all the schools wore peaked caps of dif­fer­ent col­ours and shapes, from which one could tell which school they atten­ded. I should add that fees were paid at the State Gym­nas­ium and Lyceum, although the chil­dren of civil ser­vants received a 50 per cent dis­count. Near the town centre there was a Roman Cath­olic church and an Ortho­dox church. We had a foot­ball team, Strzelec, which must have been quite good, because I remem­ber being at a match when Strzelec beat the Jewish team Makabi 12:0. The Stan­iewski Circus and the Pop­u­lar Circus came to town, and I never missed a chance to see their per­form­ances. There was also a cinema. The Reduta Theatre came to us from Warsaw, and my par­ents always made a point of attend­ing its per­form­ances. Wołkow­ysk was a rail­way junc­tion with two sta­tions, Wołkow­ysk Miasto and Wołkow­ysk Cent­ralny, and a halt, Wołkow­ysk Przed­mieście. Remark­ably, twice a week an inter­na­tional train ran along this line east­wards towards the USSR and back, from Calais via Paris, Berlin and Warsaw to the border sta­tion of Stołpce–Negoreloye. At Negoreloye pas­sen­gers changed to a broad-gauge train and went on to Moscow. The return jour­ney fol­lowed the same route west­wards. The train made a great impres­sion on me as it sped past, its wheels clat­ter­ing loudly on the rails along a line run­ning close to my school, before curving away along the edge of the forest towards the east­ern border.

The Third of May hol­i­day was cel­eb­rated with cere­mony in Wołkow­ysk. The 3rd Moun­ted Rifles Regi­ment held a parade, and vet­er­ans of the struggle for inde­pend­ence, in their best clothes and wear­ing their mil­it­ary dec­or­a­tions, went with many of the townspeople to watch it. I remem­ber well one such parade in 1938, which I atten­ded with Father. Wołkow­ysk is a town with a long his­tory con­nec­ted with import­ant events. In 1386 the Grand Duke of Lithuania, Jogaila, stopped in Wołkow­ysk, where he met a Polish del­eg­a­tion from Kraków, and together they con­firmed the terms agreed at Krewo for Jogaila's acces­sion to the Polish throne and his mar­riage to Jad­wiga, who then occu­pied it. Wołkow­ysk, part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, was cap­tured and burnt by the Teutonic Knights in 1410. A reminder of the Polish–Swedish war known as the Deluge, in which the town suffered, is the name Swedish Hill given to Castle Hill, because the Swedes built a redoubt on that height and defen­ded them­selves there against the Poles. Swedish Hill is the highest point and a view­point on the edge of the town. During Napo­leon's march on Moscow in 1812 the town burnt down. After Poland regained inde­pend­ence, the bar­racks built in tsar­ist times were taken over in 1922 by the 3rd Moun­ted Rifles Regi­ment.

Like most towns in the east of the Poland of that time, Wołkow­ysk had a large Jewish pop­u­la­tion. In 1939, 6,900 Jews lived in the town, 40 per cent of its pop­u­la­tion. In my class there was only one girl of the Jewish faith, with a Polish sur­name, Zel­wiańska. Nobody dis­crim­in­ated against her; during the morn­ing prayer that we said at the start of the first lesson she stood up with the rest of the class, but did not take part in the prayer. The Jews had sev­eral Talmudic schools of their own in the town, so there were few of them in the public school. As I remem­ber it, there was no con­spicu­ous anti­semit­ism in the town. The Jews dom­in­ated trade, as in most towns in east­ern Poland. How­ever, when Polish shops began to open, their owners often dis­played the slogan: “Don't buy from Jews.” Poles did not avoid buying in Jewish shops, all the more so because they could buy there on credit. I once saw a well-dressed Polish woman, prob­ably an offi­cial's wife, walk into a Jewish gro­cery, pick out a good many goods from the shelves, and instead of paying in cash hand the shop­keeper a note­book in which he wrote down the goods sold on credit.

In Wołkow­ysk we first lived for a year in a large two-storey house at 5 Zast­awa Street, where we occu­pied the ground floor, while the owner, Mr Gołgowski, lived upstairs with his wife and three sons. The owner's boys, the same age as my brother and me, were very sporty, and we prac­tised vari­ous events with them in the yard, such as the long jump, the high jump and the pole vault. A hun­dred metres from our house flowed the little river Wołkow­yja, and in the hot summer of 1937, during the hol­i­days, we ran across the meadow many times to bathe in it. That was when I learnt to swim, and the fol­low­ing year I improved by swim­ming in the reser­voir formed by a dam on the Wołkow­yja and in the town swim­ming pool. On Mr Gołgowski's prop­erty there was a pond which, when it froze in winter, was a good place for us to skate close to home. In the autumn of 1937 we moved to a newly built house at 40 Wileńska Street, owned by Mr Zaleski, a sworn sur­veyor. It was a single-storey brick house for two fam­il­ies; the owner occu­pied one half and we took the other, equal half. We had three rooms and a kit­chen; water was drawn from a well, and there was an out­door privy in the yard. The rent for this flat, as for the pre­vi­ous one, was paid by the State Forests Dir­ect­or­ate. Our house was the last but one on Wileńska Street; beyond it fields stretched as far as the Castle Forest, two kilo­metres away. The Castle Forest was under Father's super­vi­sion as for­ester, and he usu­ally cycled along the gravel road to inspect the forestry work.

Our close neigh­bour was Mr Gab­rowski, who ran a shoe­maker's work­shop; I was in the same class as his son Władek and shared a two-seat desk with him. A neigh­bour a little fur­ther off was Mr Ciepłowski, a friend of Father's, with whom Father cor­res­pon­ded in 1940–1941 when we were in the Arkhangelsk Oblast. Beyond Mr Ciepłowski's house there was a large sand pit, and I men­tion it because in winter I learnt to ski on its slope. From Wileńska Street to school was about a kilo­metre and a half, which I walked, usu­ally with my neigh­bour and friend Władek Gab­rowski. As a curi­os­ity I might add that one of my class­mates, the son of a dis­trict for­ester, rode to school on a pony from some­where out­side Wołkow­ysk. He had to, because there was no bus ser­vice in the area. When the war broke out on 1 Septem­ber 1939, Wołkow­ysk was far from the front, but we lived through the war intensely, because the radio broad­cast news of the Polish army's retreat and, most often, con­stantly repeated warn­ings of yet another air raid on Warsaw: “Atten­tion, atten­tion, eR-A koma 3 is approach­ing,” or: “Atten­tion, atten­tion, RA-DA has passed.” These coded mes­sages were surely under­stood by the people of Warsaw, although we too knew that they meant Warsaw was about to be bombed again, or that a raid was over. Wołkow­ysk was bombed once, near the rail­way sta­tion, but the bombs hit neither the tracks nor the sta­tion build­ing, though the three bombs dropped left deep craters right beside the tracks, a few dozen metres from the sta­tion, and blew out the win­dows in nearby houses. I went there and saw the damage. From then on many townspeople began taping narrow strips of paper across their window panes, believ­ing that the strips would stop the glass from shat­ter­ing during a bomb­ing. I do not know whether the taping made any sense, but there were no more bomb­ings, so its effect­ive­ness could not be tested. On one occa­sion a German bomber dropped its bombs on a field near the Castle Forest, and I ran there with Zbyszek and a whole crowd of people to look at the craters left by three bombs. People picked up the sharp pieces of metal that had filled the bombs. It was clear that the pilot had got rid of his bombs so as to return to base without a load. I also remem­ber a Polish fighter plane land­ing in a field near the forest, prob­ably with engine trouble. Again we all ran to see what had happened. These were the sounds of war that reached Wołkow­ysk. News also came that the ply­wood fact­ory in Mosty, 25 kilo­metres from Wołkow­ysk, had been bombed. I had vis­ited that fact­ory in 1938 while at a scout camp on the Niemen near the town, so the news of the bomb­ing upset me greatly. Ply­wood was used in build­ing air­craft, which is why the Ger­mans tar­geted the fact­ory in Mosty.

Septem­ber 1939 was fine and cloud­less, and German air­craft appeared quite often in the sky, flying very high, at about 8,000 metres, but they posed no threat to us. Soon anti-air­craft artil­lery arrived in our area to defend the town. Two anti-air­craft guns were emplaced and dug in right behind the fence of our garden at 40 Wileńska Street. But those guns never once fired at the German planes, prob­ably because the planes were flying too high and did not intend to bomb the town, having some more dis­tant target. Our guns held test fir­ings sev­eral times, which we could watch from close by. Fore­see­ing that the front might reach Wołkow­ysk, and fear­ing air raids too, Father began dig­ging an air-raid shel­ter in the garden, and my brother and I helped him. The shel­ter was a rect­an­gu­lar trench a metre and a half deep, covered with boards and a layer of earth. At the entrance there were steps rein­forced with boards for going down and climb­ing out. The front was still far away, although it was approach­ing fast. One day I saw a cav­alry­man appear in town on horse­back, evid­ently wounded, for his head was band­aged; a crowd gathered around him and the sol­dier announced that the Poles were win­ning and that Gen­eral Bort­nowski had taken Pom­er­a­nia. Today one can say that this news, though it raised our spir­its, had noth­ing to do with the real situ­ation at the front.

We lived quite com­fort­ably in our three-room flat, but the com­fort­able life ended around the middle of Septem­ber 1939, when a large family arrived at our house, having fled to Wołkow­ysk ahead of the advan­cing front. It was a dis­trict for­ester from cent­ral Poland with his wife, his wife's sister and two grown-up sons, twins who had already passed their school-leav­ing exams, Tadzik and Zbyszek. On reach­ing Wołkow­ysk they decided to go no fur­ther, and the dis­trict for­ester asked my Father to take them in. Father did not know him, but fol­low­ing the prin­ciple that a for­ester is duty-bound to help a for­ester, he let him and his family live with us. They stayed with us for about a month. Only in the middle of Octo­ber did they leave Wołkow­ysk and cross the “green border” into the German-occu­pied zone. My Father's decision to take a fellow for­ester under his roof was, in my opin­ion, a praise­worthy act, con­sid­er­ing that our guests not only lived and slept in our home (there were ten of us alto­gether in a three-room flat) but also had to be fed. Food sup­plies had become much worse, espe­cially after the Soviet troops arrived. Polish cur­rency went out of cir­cu­la­tion and our guests had no roubles, though I do not rule out that they may have sold valu­ables. But things cannot have been all that bad yet, because I remem­ber Tadzik and Zbyszek urging my Mother, who was cook­ing dinner, to make the broth with two chick­ens rather than one, as she had sug­ges­ted. I remem­ber Tadzik and Zbyszek as like­able people. Zbyszek had a good voice and often sang pop­u­lar songs, most often “Mari­anna, Mari­anna, ta cudna panna” (Mari­anna, that lovely girl). Tadzik tried to be a good friend to me, an eleven-year-old, but our friend­ship ended when he told Father that I was smoking cigar­ettes.

The German armies advanced relent­lessly.

We knew that Warsaw was besieged and hold­ing out, while things were fairly quiet where we were, though every­one knew that total defeat was near, when unex­pec­tedly, on 19 Septem­ber, units of the Soviet army appeared in Wołkow­ysk. Long columns of infantry marched along the high­way from the north-east, from the dir­ec­tion of the Castle Forest, and on down our Wileńska Street towards the town centre. Between the infantry units one could see guns towed by tract­ors. The troops marched along the street past our house, which stood a dozen or so metres back from the road. One Red Army sol­dier, walk­ing bare­foot and car­ry­ing on his shoulder the boots that had rubbed his feet raw, came in through our gate and asked for the well, because he wanted a drink of water. Soon a long column of tanks arrived. When the tanks entered the town they badly dam­aged the streets, tear­ing up the cobbles, espe­cially on the corners, which were made of round field­stones known as “cats' heads”. That day and on the days that fol­lowed, huge four-engined Soviet air­craft appeared over­head with a char­ac­ter­istic power­ful drone. At home my par­ents and our refugee guests dis­cussed Poland's lost war and wondered what hope there was of undo­ing what had happened. A rhymed proph­ecy appeared in the town, copied out by hand and passed from hand to hand, which gave hope that Poland would regain its inde­pend­ence. To this day I remem­ber frag­ments of this proph­ecy, which I learnt by heart at the time. I shall quote some of them here.

Two decades on, those times shall come to pass,
When fire shall burst down from the sky,
Then Wernyhora's songs shall be fulfilled,
The whole world shall choke on blood.
Poland shall rise from the world's great blaze,
Two eagles shall fall, shattered,
Yet long her fate shall still be dark,
Her dreams still unfulfilled.
The defiled cross shall fall together with the hammer,
Nothing shall remain to the partitioners,
Masurian land shall come to Poland again,
And at Gdańsk our port shall rise.

People tried to inter­pret the words of the proph­ecy in vari­ous ways, but gen­er­ally optim­ist­ic­ally. The words lifted people's spir­its, because they held out hope that all would end well.

After the Soviet troops arrived, the town began to adapt to the new author­it­ies. At the begin­ning of Octo­ber my primary school reopened. I star­ted the fifth year by the Polish reck­on­ing, although offi­cially it was called the fourth year, to fit our twelve-year course of primary and sec­ond­ary edu­ca­tion to the Soviet ten-year school system. My form teacher, who taught most sub­jects, was Mrs Wikt­oria Rogowska, the same teacher who had taught us in the lower years. Belarus­ian was intro­duced as an addi­tional sub­ject, and since the school had no spe­cial­ist in the lan­guage, Mrs Wikt­oria was obliged to teach it. As she did not know Belarus­ian her­self, she had to pre­pare hard for the les­sons. Unfor­tu­nately it went very badly, and one could see how she struggled read­ing to us from a Belarus­ian text­book. I remem­ber that one day Mrs Wikt­oria came into class in tears, red-eyed and unable to teach. She told us that her hus­band, who worked at the county office as a school inspector, had been arres­ted by the Soviet author­it­ies. My Father was summoned to the town hall, where the new Soviet admin­is­tra­tion now sat, and was told that he was to carry on as for­ester and would work for the Lesk­hoz, the body man­aging forestry. Soon a Rus­sian, the head of the Lesk­hoz, arrived and Father began work­ing with him. Father received a salary of 600 roubles a month, and the rent for our flat was also to be paid by the Lesk­hoz, which had taken over the func­tions of the former State Forests Dir­ect­or­ate.

In the first days after the Soviet troops entered the town, some Jews wel­comed the invaders with great enthu­si­asm. In the town centre I saw a small group of Jews march­ing with a red flag, laugh­ing and singing the war song “Esli zavtra voyna” (If War Comes Tomor­row). The sat­is­fac­tion vis­ible on their faces may have shown that they expec­ted great bene­fits from Soviet rule. It cannot be ruled out, how­ever, that they had pre­vi­ously suffered dis­crim­in­a­tion from Poles and were there­fore happy and hope­ful that Soviet rule would give them equal rights. But it seems they mis­cal­cu­lated, for in the third deport­a­tion of Polish cit­izens, of the so-called bezhentsy (refugees), which took place on 29 June 1940, the Sovi­ets depor­ted about 79,000 people from the Polish ter­rit­or­ies annexed to the USSR, of whom about 71,000, over 90 per cent, were Jews. The bezhentsy were people from west­ern and cent­ral Poland who had fled the advan­cing German army and found them­selves after 17 Septem­ber 1939 in ter­rit­ory occu­pied by the USSR. The deport­a­tion of some 71,000 Jews clearly shows that the Sovi­ets did not treat Polish Jews as priv­ileged but, without any scruple, con­demned them to exterm­in­a­tion just as they did the Poles.

Life in the town grew much worse because of food short­ages. One had to stand in long queues for salt and sugar. I stood in such queues myself sev­eral times. In the town centre one saw many Soviet sol­diers, mostly officers. The bar­racks left by the 3rd Moun­ted Rifles Regi­ment were prob­ably now occu­pied by a larger Red Army unit. At the begin­ning of Septem­ber 1939 the 3rd Moun­ted Rifles Regi­ment had left its bar­racks to join Oper­a­tional Group “Narew”. The regi­ment received its bap­tism of fire on 9 Septem­ber and then fought until 5 Octo­ber, taking part in many clashes with the Ger­mans.

One day, towards the end of Octo­ber, a lady came to see us, bring­ing a ped­i­gree dog and asking my par­ents to look after it, because she had sev­eral dogs and could not feed them. I do not know who gave her our address, but evid­ently Father was known in the town and someone had recom­men­ded him. She and her sister had fled before the approach­ing front. The ladies reached Wołkow­ysk and there was nowhere fur­ther to flee. They had fled together with ten ped­i­gree dogs. Here in Wołkow­ysk they rented a flat, but the pack was too large to feed, so they began giving the dogs away to good homes that had been recom­men­ded to them. We took in a white spitz called Laluś, and he stayed with us for a couple of months without caus­ing much trouble, except that he was an aris­to­cratic dog: he occu­pied the arm­chair and would not eat just any­thing, while good food was becom­ing ever harder to find. Once his owner came to visit her pet and fed him saus­age, but in our house he could not count on such del­ic­acies every day. In the end my par­ents decided that the dog had to be returned to his owner. I was given the task of walk­ing Laluś on his lead to her lodgings. When I reached the address, I saw how the refugee ladies lived. It was a single room, which the two ladies shared with sev­eral dogs. There was a very strong smell of dog in the room. Laluś was happy to be back among his own. I do not know how long those ladies man­aged to sur­vive with their pack of dogs under Soviet rule.