The Day World War II Began

The day World War II began, I was at a farm outside Czestochowa, a Polish city about 30 km from what was then the German border. The Germans took the city on the second day. No, this is not the story of another inmate of Auschwitz , the 60th anniversary of liberation of which was marked last week. We were not just victims, to whom things were done, as might be concluded from the way the period is recalled over and over; in writing, on television. We also did things. And we were victors; along with people from other communities in many countries and armies.

It would be much healthier, if there could also be an occasional note of celebration to forestall boredom over a monotonous wailing ritual. The anniversary of liberation of the Auschwitz survivors, incidentally under the command of a Jewish officer in the advancing Soviet army, could well have been an occasion for that. I certainly hope that public observance of the imminent 60th anniversary of final victory over the Nazis in May will not be confined to the victimization theme. We/I had horrible losses. But we won. Hurrah! (At least for a while).

A more appropriate occasion for the mourning would be one marking the day recalling that in 1939 when the calamity got started. That day began like others. As usual, we had got up early to get used to practice in a kibbutz in (then) Palestine, in fact earlier, and began picking tomatoes. Planes flying overhead very low seemed strange, but I don't believe we thought they were German. After all, there had been no declaration of war, as nice civilized aggression was still expected to start. It must have been about 8 o'clock, when we listened on the radio to a pre-announced Hitler speech, according to which German planes had been responding to Polish border provocations. After breakfast, we went back to work and passed a fairly normal day, until late that evening.

That night, however, we began to walk; a very long and eventful walk, most of it just ahead of the fast moving German army. I have long felt that I ought to tell what I can well recall of that. Even though I can't have been the only one who survived the war, I saw only one short paragraph written about it. It wouldn't make sense as part of this posting, but something I had written as an exercise about the early stage should meanwhile serve as a beginning.

(The following was written to introduce it when I previously posted it on the web: "Last year I took a course in "creative writing" which included home assignments. One of them was to write a story taking off from (a feature of) some well known painting. Finding it hard to do a fictional one, I told about a particularly vivid memory from that march; which follows here.")
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An exhibit in the 50s at the New York Museum of Modern Art of Pablo Picasso's sketches for his "Guernica" went some way to help me appreciate such abstraction in art. The painting also evoked some memories. Among the details depicting the bombardment of the Basque town by Nazi-German planes in 1937 during the Spanish civil war was a burning house. The attack has been viewed as dress rehearsal for the bombing of civilian targets in World War II, two years later.
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At age 14, I had experienced the first bombardment on the second day of that war, September 2, 1939. We had left our farm outside Czestochowa, about 30 km from the old German border, in the middle of the first night. It was a preparation ("hakhsharah") kibbutz, a commune of about 100 people. Twenty of us were youngsters up to age 17 from Jewish families that had been expelled from Germany the previous year, the others from Poland, about 20 years old. The plan was to walk to Kielce, 140 km to the east, where there was another kibbutz of the same left Zionist youth organization. The term "Blitzkrieg", or lightning war, was not known yet; but by the time we reached Kielce 3 or 4 nights later, the sound of approaching gun battle was almost continuous. The kibbutz there had already left, but they had prepared food for us, our only real meal. We continued immediately, now toward Lublin. In view of the unexpectedly rapid advance of the motorized German army, it became urgent to quickly get beyond the river Vistula, where that advance could be expected to encounter serious resistance; so we began to take short-cuts over difficult terrain and longer distances between rests. When we finally approached the bridge across the Vistula, the night was lit up by a town in flames. All the way to the bridge, the houses on both sides of the road were burning fiercely, hotly, but at least we were getting to that bridge. When we did, it turned out to have been destroyed by bombs. We had to go back again through that inferno, a weird sight. Apart from us, not a soul was to be seen. After walking another 50 km south, we reached the ancient town of Sandomierz the next day and found two bridges intact. No civilians were allowed onto the first, a railroad bridge. Before we reached the other, Stuka dive bombers had begun to bomb it; but the decision was made to cross anyway, running as fast as we could, also some way beyond the bridge. Then a noisy rumble, different from exploding bombs, more like an earthquake, as the bridge went down, and we went to sleep by the roadside. Had we not crossed, I probably would not be here to tell about that little town aflame.

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(I am sorry about the state of the map, and intend to substitute a better one, which may not, however, show as well one major reason why the Polish army had little chance against the German advance. They did not just attack from the West, but also from "East Prussia" (now part of Russia ) to the north and from Slovakia which they controlled following the takeover after the Munich agreement for "peace in our time"; i.e. from all the striated areas.)

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