In Dzhambul

Seeing the hope­less situ­ation we were in, Mother decided that we must move to Dzh­am­bul (Taraz) at once. To do so, she went to the town to look for lodgings. She found cheap lodgings in a private house on the out­skirts of the south-east­ern dis­trict of Dzh­am­bul, on Molokan­ovka Street. She had no trouble arran­ging with the kolk­hoz chair­man the form­al­it­ies for our leav­ing the aul, hired a cart, and we moved to our new home. This was in the last days of Decem­ber 1941. Our stay in the kolk­hoz had lasted one month, and it must be said that it was the hard­est and worst month since the deport­a­tion. Molokan­ovka Street was unpaved, a dirt road that turned to mud in the rain, lined with small single-storey wooden houses. The house where we were to live con­sisted of one room, a kit­chen and a spa­cious entrance hall through which one entered the kit­chen. The four of us lived in the kit­chen, while our land­lady, the owner of the house, stayed with her chil­dren in her room and also used the kit­chen when she wanted to cook. At night we spread our bed­ding on the kit­chen floor, although there was not much free space there. Our land­lady, our khozyayka, was a Rus­sian with three boys aged three, six and ten. Her hus­band had recently been called up and was in the nearby town of Lugo­voye for mil­it­ary train­ing, after which he was to go to the front. We had to pay rent for our modest lodgings, but I do not remem­ber how much; I think it was not much.

Our life on Molokan­ovka was incom­par­ably better than during the seven weeks spent in the wagon or the last month in the kolk­hoz. What was very import­ant was that here we received bread ration cards for the whole family. The cards were issued by the ULKOM, the com­mit­tee man­aging the affairs of the street's res­id­ents. It was a one-person com­mit­tee, with whom our land­lady was on friendly terms, as shown by the double bread cards she received for her family.

Our land­lady was about thirty, a slim, pretty woman who played the guitar beau­ti­fully and sang nicely. She began teach­ing me to play the balalaika, a three-stringed Rus­sian instru­ment some­what like a man­dolin. I learnt to play sev­eral tunes on the balalaika quite well. All the while our land­lady was wait­ing for the train in which her hus­band, having fin­ished his mil­it­ary train­ing, would pass through Dzh­am­bul on his way to the front. Besides her, many women in Dzh­am­bul were pre­par­ing to meet their hus­bands on their way to the front, but the date of this meet­ing (vstrecha) kept being put off. At last word came that the troops were already trav­el­ling towards Dzh­am­bul. The meet­ing and farewell took place, and our land­lady came home at peace.

We got on well with our land­lady's boys. At night I wore a night­shirt to bed, as was the Polish custom, but the Rus­sian boys were always sur­prised that I slept without trousers (on bez shtanov spit). The boys, as was the Rus­sian custom, went to bed in their trousers, the same trousers they wore by day. The young­est, three-year-old Kolya, had a very big belly and went about the house with no trousers at all, his belly on show; it must surely have swollen from poor nour­ish­ment. Living in the kit­chen had the advant­age for us that it was quite warm there. As soon as our land­lady had said good­bye to her hus­band on his way to the front, she began hold­ing fre­quent drink­ing parties in her room. Sev­eral people would gather there; they drank spirit diluted with water, which was very cheap here, and she played the guitar and sang merry songs. I remem­ber one of these songs; it went like this:

The money we had got for the things sold in the kolk­hoz began to run out, and we were short of cash to buy food. Evid­ently our diet was very poor, because Mother fell ill again: she showed symp­toms of hunger oedema, the same as she had had at Kat­iszcze. We young ones some­how coped better with the lack of vit­am­ins and pro­tein, because the swell­ing did not attack us. The only sign of mal­nu­tri­tion I noticed in myself was unheal­ing sores on my body where I had cut or scratched myself. This vit­amin defi­ciency of mine had appeared earlier, during our time in the Arkhangelsk Oblast. For a long time, too, I could not get rid of the effects of a frost­bit­ten ear I had suffered in the winter of 1940/1941. Since Mother was unwell, which showed not only in swollen legs but also in loss of strength, my brother and I had to take charge of selling things at the market. My prob­lem, how­ever, was that my shoes had com­pletely fallen apart and I had noth­ing to put on my feet. For­tu­nately spring came quickly, and by mid-March I could walk to town bare­foot. My brother and I went to the market, where we spread out a sheet and laid on it the things for sale. They were not valu­able things, so the money we got for them was not much. Food sup­plies at the market were fairly good: one could buy veget­ables and fruit, and also kish­mish, or rais­ins. Of the meat on offer, mutton pre­dom­in­ated, because the Kaza­khs bred sheep on the kolk­hozes. Their rams and ewes had no tails, only large fatty rumps hanging down.

Mother's health worsened and we did not know what to do. It would surely have gone very badly had someone not appeared to help Mother and all of us. This was Mr Józef Korzeniowski, whom I met by chance in the town. Mr Korzeniowski was living in Dzh­am­bul with his wife and daugh­ter, and with him, in a couple of rented houses, lived a larger group of Poles, includ­ing three fam­il­ies from Szom­boziero: the Rozwad­owskis, the Labochas and Mrs Wróblewska with her chil­dren. They had trav­elled with us in the same trans­port, only in a dif­fer­ent wagon, from Karshi to Kaza­kh­stan, and had man­aged to get off at Dzh­am­bul, so they did not end up in a kolk­hoz as we did. When I met Mr Korzeniowski I told him about Father's death and Mother's ill­ness. He decided at once to come with me to our lodgings to see how things stood. First of all he helped us fin­an­cially, giving Mother five hun­dred roubles and taking in exchange a kilim of roughly the same value, which he inten­ded to sell at the market. He told us to buy as much food as we could and feed Mother well. Mr Józef also gave me his address, 2 Karasu Street, and invited me to visit him. The money was indeed badly needed, because with it we could buy plenty of nour­ish­ing food, and Mother's swell­ing soon began to go down. Among these pur­chases we once bought a live rabbit, which was kept in the entrance hall for a few days, and there was the ques­tion of who would know how to kill it. I remembered some­thing about a rabbit sup­posedly being easy to kill with a blow of two fin­gers between the ears. I tried to kill it that way, but the rabbit did not react to my blow between the ears. It had to be fin­ished off with a thick log instead of two fin­gers.

Having Mr Korzeniowski's address, I decided to go to Karasu Street to visit him. He lived with his wife and daugh­ter, together with the Labocha family, in a small one-room house of the Kazakh kib­itka type. Next door was a second, larger house rented by Poles, among whom I found Mrs Jad­wiga Wróblewska with her daugh­ter and son and Mr Rozwad­owski with his wife and daugh­ter. There were also three more fam­il­ies: Mrs Jez­i­er­ska with two small chil­dren, whose hus­band had owned an agri­cul­tural machinery repair work­shop in Wołkow­ysk; Mrs Stasia Szcza­w­ińska with her mother and her son Jurek; and Mr Mick­iewicz, a rail­way engine driver, with his wife. Mrs Jez­i­er­ska and Mrs Szcza­w­ińska were well off, because they had spent a year and four months less in exile than our group from Szom­boziero and so still had plenty of things to sell. Alto­gether twenty people lived in the two houses, twelve of whom had come from Szom­boziero and Kat­iszcze, so it was quite a size­able Polish colony. When I got home I told Mother how the Poles in this colony lived, and the idea quickly arose that we should live there too. Soon Mother went to Karasu Street, where she met Jadzia Wróblewska, with whom she had been friends since Kat­iszcze, and it was quickly decided that we would share a room with Mrs Jadzia. The move soon took place. We said good­bye to our land­lady, with whom we had lived for more than four months, from Janu­ary to the begin­ning of May, and settled in our new home. In our room Mrs Jadzia slept with her two chil­dren in one bed, and we took the other bed, where Mother, Zbyszek and Hania slept, while at night I spread a cotton rug on the floor and covered myself with a sheep­skin coat. For­tu­nately our room had a wooden floor, unlike the kolk­hoz!

Our new home was near the goods sta­tion, which was a very handy loc­a­tion, because there were heaps of coal at the sta­tion, and we needed coal for heat­ing and cook­ing. My brother Zbyszek and I soon became the coal sup­pli­ers for some of the occu­pants of our house. It must be admit­ted, though, that Mrs Jadzia tried steal­ing coal on her own account, and a few times she suc­ceeded. On one such exped­i­tion she took my Mother along for com­pany, and when they reached the coal heap a watch­man appeared. The watch­man tried to grab Mrs Jadzia, but she pushed him and he fell. Both of them star­ted to run, Mrs Jadzia, younger and fitter, in front, while my Mother, weaker in the legs, fell behind and was caught by the watch­man. The watch­man called the mili­tia, and the mili­tia put Mother in the cells. Our men tried to get her out. She was indeed facing a prison sen­tence for steal­ing public prop­erty. A rep­res­ent­at­ive of the Del­eg­a­tion of the Polish Embassy, which had its office in Dzh­am­bul, took up the matter of her release, and his inter­ven­tion proved suc­cess­ful: after a few days Mother was released.

Besides coal, another valu­able fuel was saxaul, a desert and steppe shrub. Our Polish colony was near the air­field, where large stacks of saxaul were piled. One of the men sug­ges­ted going to the air­field one even­ing for saxaul. My brother and I were co-opted into the party of three men organ­ising the exped­i­tion. We had not stolen much saxaul when a watch­man appeared, and then someone more import­ant from the air­field guard, and we were taken to an office and told to wait for the mili­tia. But our resource­ful men settled the matter amic­ably by hand­ing the guards what was prob­ably a small sum, and thanks to that everything ended hap­pily.

While living in our Polish colony I often went into town alone or with my brother, mostly to the market square to sell what was left of our belong­ings. One day I went to the market to sell some­thing; I spread a small blanket on the ground and laid out a few odds and ends on it, among them one fairly valu­able item: a shirt of Father's. At a cer­tain moment I noticed that the pre­cious shirt had dis­ap­peared; someone must have stolen it. Without much thought I rolled up my blanket with the goods, tied it in a bundle and began walk­ing round the market look­ing for my shirt. Sud­denly I noticed a tall young man stand­ing in the square hold­ing out a shirt for sale. I real­ised at once that he was wear­ing my shirt, which he had stolen, and was selling his own rather wretched one, which he had taken off. I went straight up to him and began shout­ing: “Otday moyu rubashku!” (Give me back my shirt!). He told me to clear off and began threat­en­ing to beat me, and even raised his fist, but by then a size­able crowd had gathered round us in a circle, and every­one was on my side: they believed he had stolen my shirt. A moment later a mili­tia­man appeared and made the thief give back what he had stolen. Another time, on my way into town, I ran into a Kazakh boy, bigger than me, who blocked my way and clearly wanted to fight me, because some­thing about my beha­viour did not please him. There was no way out; a fight ensued and went on for a very long time. There was no winner: both of us blood­ied and with torn shirts, we broke off the fight from exhaus­tion.

Dzh­am­bul was a large oblast cap­ital, and there was a larger con­cen­tra­tion of Poles living in the kolk­hozes in its region, while in the town itself a Del­eg­a­tion of the Embassy of the Repub­lic of Poland was set up, whose task was to help Poles who came to it and also to take part in dir­ect­ing men to the recruit­ing points of the Polish Army then being formed. The mil­it­ary agree­ment that provided the basis for form­ing a Polish Army on Soviet ter­rit­ory was signed on 14 August 1941. The com­mand of the army being formed was placed at Buzu­luk, a town between the middle Volga and the south­ern Urals, and three infantry divi­sions were organ­ised there. At the begin­ning of 1942 the headquar­ters of the Polish Army moved to Yangiyul, a town in Uzbek­istan 30 km south of Tashkent, the cap­ital of Uzbek­istan. With the influx of large num­bers of Poles released from labour camps and spe­cial set­tle­ments, and of sol­diers who had been taken pris­oner by the Sovi­ets in 1939, fur­ther divi­sions and other units were organ­ised, and at the same time the first three divi­sions were moved from the Buzu­luk area south to Uzbek­istan and Kyrgyz­stan. The army also accep­ted young people aged 14 to 18, for whom junak (cadet) units were formed. Three thou­sand young people were accep­ted into the junaks. The com­mander of the Polish Army was Gen­eral Władysław Anders, who worked to have the Army with­drawn from the Soviet Union. He obtained Stalin's con­sent to evac­u­ate part of the units already formed (the 8th, 9th and 10th Infantry Divi­sions) to Iran. The evac­u­ation took place at the turn of March and April 1942 and covered 33,000 sol­diers and 11,000 civil­ians, 44,000 people in all.

Although we lived in Dzh­am­bul, where the Embassy Del­eg­a­tion had its office, and among well-informed Poles, we knew very little about the Polish army being formed. Mother often went to the Del­eg­a­tion, from which she received a little help in the form of blankets, but her main aim was to get the Del­eg­a­tion to take her chil­dren into its care, since our mater­ial resources were exhausted and there was noth­ing left to sell. The Del­eg­a­tion decided that my brother and I would go to where a Polish divi­sion was sta­tioned, where the army would prob­ably take care of us and we would be accep­ted into a junak unit. On the appoin­ted day we boarded a train with a rep­res­ent­at­ive of the Del­eg­a­tion and set off west­wards, though our guard­ian did not tell us where we were going. After a few hours we reached a sta­tion called Chok Pak, where the Polish divi­sion was sup­posed to be sta­tioned. We got off at this small sta­tion among high moun­tain slopes, but unfor­tu­nately the Polish army units were no longer at Chok Pak. Only a dozen or so sol­diers remained, clear­ing up after the 8th Infantry Divi­sion, which had been evac­u­ated to Iran at the turn of March and April. That a Polish divi­sion had been sta­tioned at Chok Pak was shown by a size­able cemetery, a forest of crosses telling that not every­one accep­ted into the army had sur­vived. These exiles usu­ally arrived in rags, starved and exhausted, and easily fell victim to the infec­tious dis­eases spread­ing through the units, such as typhus and dys­en­tery. Since there was nobody at Chok Pak to take us in, we had to go back, and our trip there, some­what “blind”, showed that our Del­eg­a­tion did not know that the divi­sion sta­tioned only a hun­dred kilo­metres from Dzh­am­bul had been with­drawn. Though it is pos­sible that the Del­eg­a­tion did know and was trying to force us onto the small group of sol­diers who had stayed behind at Chok Pak. To get into the junaks on our own we would have had to travel all the way to Uzbek­istan, where fur­ther recruit­ment into the army and the junaks was taking place, but that was not con­sidered, because of the great dis­tance sep­ar­at­ing us from the Tashkent area and the high risk of set­ting off into the unknown and the family being split up.

The summer of 1942 in Dzh­am­bul was scorch­ing. Leav­ing the house I had a view of the nearby goods sta­tion, which was busy and noisy with shunt­ing trains. Look­ing the other way, to the south, I saw a mighty moun­tain range with snow-capped peaks four thou­sand metres high. These were the Tien Shan Moun­tains, and the snowy peaks were fifty kilo­metres from Dzh­am­bul, although they seemed very close. The advant­age of our new home on Karasu Street was that a stream of very clear water flowed close by, and in that scorch­ing summer it was a splen­did place to bathe. Zbyszek and I bathed end­lessly, swim­ming and diving head­first from the high bank.

At that time sol­diers of the Polish Army began to appear in the town. They were sol­diers look­ing for their fam­il­ies or liaison officers search­ing for sol­diers' fam­il­ies and organ­ising their depar­ture as part of the planned evac­u­ation to Iran. Army headquar­ters was in Uzbek­istan, in the town of Yangiyul. Thanks to Brit­ish sup­port and Gen­eral Anders's efforts, on 8 July 1942 Stalin agreed to the evac­u­ation of the entire Polish army to Iran. In this second stage of the evac­u­ation Gen­eral Anders also inten­ded to take with the army as many civil­ians as pos­sible. So sol­diers were sent to the larger con­cen­tra­tions of Poles in Kaza­kh­stan and Uzbek­istan to look for their fam­il­ies and for other people eli­gible to leave. For some reason, news about the pos­sib­il­ity of leav­ing did not reach us in Dzh­am­bul, and the Del­eg­a­tion showed no ini­ti­at­ive in the matter either. One day in town, near the Del­eg­a­tion, Mrs Jadzia met a Polish sol­dier and got talk­ing to him, and the sol­dier told her proudly that he had just found his wife and chil­dren in a kolk­hoz 10 km from Dzh­am­bul and that his family would soon leave for an evac­u­ation point in Uzbek­istan, from where it was pos­sible to go on to Iran. Mrs Jadzia told him about her dif­fi­cult situ­ation, alone with two chil­dren and without means, and asked for help so that she too could go to an evac­u­ation point. Mr Nadański, for that was the sol­dier's name, prom­ised that he would come back to Dzh­am­bul in a week and bring tick­ets for Mrs Jadzia and her chil­dren to travel to Shahris­abz in Uzbek­istan, where his 6th Infantry Divi­sion was sta­tioned. Sure enough, a week later he came and brought a doc­u­ment author­ising the pur­chase of nine tick­ets: three for Mrs Jadzia and six extra ones at her dis­posal. Mrs Jadzia gave the extra tick­ets to Mrs Szcza­w­ińska and Mrs Jez­i­er­ska, who lived in the next room. Unfor­tu­nately there were no tick­ets left for the Bach­mińs­kis. My Mother would not leave Mr Nadański alone, arguing that she was in a hope­less fin­an­cial situ­ation and moreover deserved to leave as the wife of a dis­tin­guished legion­ary dec­or­ated with the Cross of Inde­pend­ence. She showed her hus­band's doc­u­ments con­cern­ing his ser­vice in the Legions. Mr Nadański prom­ised to arrange tick­ets for us too and said someone from his unit would soon bring them.

Within a few days Mrs Jadzia and Mrs Szcza­w­ińska and Mrs Jez­i­er­ska left; this was some time in mid-July 1942, and we were left wait­ing to see whether anyone would come with tick­ets for us. But luck was on our side! Around 10 August a liaison sol­dier came to us and brought from army headquar­ters a doc­u­ment entitling us to buy rail­way tick­ets at the sta­tion, from Dzh­am­bul to Yangiyul, for the number of people it spe­cified. At that time one could not travel in the USSR without the author­it­ies' per­mis­sion, so to leave Dzh­am­bul we needed con­firm­a­tion from the Polish author­it­ies that our jour­ney by rail was jus­ti­fied. Accord­ing to this requis­i­tion there were to be enough tick­ets for all the occu­pants of our house, but in fact it turned out that two tick­ets were miss­ing. For every­one to be able to leave, someone had to travel without a ticket, as a stowaway. It fell to the young­est, my eight-year-old sister and me: we were to be smuggled on board without tick­ets. We left on the after­noon of 13 August. When the con­ductor checked tick­ets, my sister was hidden under the bench on which Mother and Zbyszek were sit­ting, while I, the second pas­sen­ger without a ticket, hid some­where, and the con­ductor did not catch me once during the jour­ney. The two tick­ets, priced at 29 roubles 10 kopecks each, on which the four of us trav­elled, I have kept as the only mater­ial souvenir of that period.

Yangiyul was about 350 km away and our jour­ney did not take very long. It was the site of one of the evac­u­ation points from which Poles left by train for the port of Krasno­vodsk (Türkmenbaşy), and from there went on by ship across the Caspian Sea to Iran. When we got off the train at Yangiyul we easily found our way to the regis­tra­tion point for Polish cit­izens due for evac­u­ation. After regis­ter­ing we went to our quar­ters, where we were to wait our turn. Our quar­ters were a nearby park, where we took a place under a tree beside the other people gathered there. For­tu­nately August 1942 was warm and fine, it did not rain, so we spent sev­eral days and nights in that park without com­plaint. We slept on a sheet spread on the ground. Yangiyul was a town of sev­eral tens of thou­sands of inhab­it­ants, mainly Uzbeks, on the Chirchiq River, which flowed through the area occu­pied by the Polish units and the civil­ians wait­ing to leave. We waited patiently for a whole week, and having plenty of free time and free food we often went into town (of course one person had to stay with our belong­ings), where in the bazaar one could buy vari­ous south­ern fruits such as peaches, water­mel­ons and melons. The draught anim­als in the town were don­keys and camels. Near where we were camped there was also a Polish bazaar, where sol­diers sold their food rations and other things. One day I bought from such a Polish sol­dier two metal tins of chocol­ate, of the kind that in the Brit­ish army formed the “emer­gency” ration, eaten when a sol­dier at the front is facing star­va­tion. The price was excep­tion­ally low, so I bought two tins without check­ing what the chocol­ate looked like. A moment later, when the sol­dier had dis­ap­peared, I opened one tin and found only half a bar of chocol­ate inside. I checked the second tin, and it con­tained clay. Oh well, I had been taken in.

Our stay in Yangiyul came hap­pily to an end. A long pas­sen­ger train was brought to the sta­tion to take us to Krasno­vodsk. A whole week of camp­ing in the open was over, and now a jour­ney lay ahead of us towards the Caspian Sea, 1,800 kilo­metres away. We trav­elled via Samarkand and Bukhara and then entered the ter­rit­ory of Turk­menia, a desert coun­try, where for many hun­dreds of kilo­metres the train ran along the edge of the Karakum Desert and noth­ing but sand could be seen from the train to the hori­zon. We passed the cap­ital of Turk­menia, Ashgabat, and after many more hours we found ourselves near the Caspian Sea. The train stopped a few kilo­metres from Krasno­vodsk, the port from which we were to sail to Iran, and we were ordered to get off straight onto the desert sand. There was no sta­tion or plat­form, only an ordin­ary rail­way embank­ment run­ning across the desert. It turned out that we were to wait on the sand until word came that a ship was in port for us. We camped on the sand for two days and nights, I think, and the worst thing was that there was no drink­ing water, while by day the sun blazed mer­ci­lessly. Local Turk­mens went round selling water at astro­nom­ical prices. Soviet cus­toms offi­cials also appeared, demand­ing that we hand over our roubles, which could not be taken abroad, and claim­ing at the same time that noth­ing could be bought with roubles in Iran. A few Poles handed over their roubles, afraid that they would be searched when board­ing the ship and that their depar­ture might be put in doubt. The sea was a few hun­dred metres from where we were camped, and I decided to go bathing. My first swim was rather sym­bolic: I went into the water in my short pre-war trousers, which were full of holes, and after swim­ming in the sea and coming ashore I put on the new shorts I had been issued before leav­ing Yangiyul.

At last our ordeal on the sand and in the heat came to an end. The order came that we were to go to the port of Krasno­vodsk, because a ship had docked. The march was very hard, because we had to carry all our belong­ings on our backs and in our hands in one go. We reached the port worn out by the heat and the car­ry­ing. A cargo ship of no great size was moored there; we went aboard up a gang­way and were then dir­ec­ted down a stair­case into a large cargo hold. So many people ended up in that hold that arms, legs and other parts of bodies were tangled together and people lay on top of one another. One could get used to the crush, and everything was more or less bear­able until the ship put out to the open sea. Then it began to roll heav­ily and people star­ted vomit­ing. The upper deck was occu­pied by the army and was so crowded that walk­ing on it was almost impossible. There was a toilet some­where up on the upper deck, but it could not serve so many pas­sen­gers, and get­ting to it required the skills of an acrobat. The port in Iran was five hun­dred kilo­metres away, and our voyage across the sea in these dif­fi­cult con­di­tions lasted two days and nights.