To the Vistula and San Rivers
The cyan line on the map below traces the route we took starting the first night of WWII in Czestochowa {1} (the bracketed numbers here refer to the illuminated numbers on the map). The walk, up to the crossing of the two rivers, took about a week, maybe a day or two more.
The purple line is an attempt to reconstruct the route of my brother's group of the Grochow kibbutz of He-Halutz Ha-Tzair, starting from outside Warsaw a week later, and based on the account in the (Zuckerman) "Antek" memory book. He referred to that group as the "children of Zbaszyn", and a footnote (probably by the editors or translators, not ideally informed) tries to inform that these were young members of his outfit who had been expelled from Germany the previous year and long confined to the small Polish border town of Zbaszyn. Although their walk seems to have been less strenuous, there were several things remarkably similar to our experience. Here only the first bombing which they also got in a forest without any of them getting hit. Antek continues that it later turned out that, unbeknownst to them, there was a Polish army unit in the forest and also German spies signalling that to the planes so they could attack the soldiers; who did suffer casualties. So it can't be excluded definitely that in our first bombardment, too, we and the civilians with carts nearby were not the intended targets; and that there could also have been soldiers there. I still consider that very unlikely.
A major difference from the Grochow march was that our youth group of about twenty people , who also had been expelled from Germany in October 1938 through Zbaszyn (the action that led to the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris, thus indirectly to the Nazi pretext for the "Kristallnacht" atrocities), went together with the older members from Poland; while their "Zbaszyn children" went separately, with only two or three older Polish members, including Antek after he encountered them.
After that bombing, we continued toward Kielce {5}, where we expected to await the outcome of (WWI type) trench warfare at the Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair kibbutz there. For sleep, we just lay down next to the road. When passing through villages/towns, where some people had radios, we (the older Polish-speaking ones) kept asking whether England and France had entered the war yet, as per treaty. An attack from these major powers ought to make the German army scurry back to defend the Siegfried Line. War was indeed declared {3}, but the German advance was not slowed by those declarations.
To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image.
based on MSN Encarta - World Atlas - Map of The World
I had been ill with dysentery in Czestochowa and had left the kibbutz sick room just five days before the war and our taking off. It now returned quite suddenly, and I had to pass stool -with blood- so urgently that a halt had to be called for that {4}. Maybe because I was also the youngest, I then was made to ride on the horse drawn cart we had taken along. But I felt really bad about it in view of some who had real difficulty walking and insisted on getting down. While the dysentery continued, that was the only time that a pause had to be called for my benefit. I developed a special way of walking, with which I could restrain my guts until the next general time out.
Increasingly there were cars on the road that evidently had run out of gas and been abandoned by the owners; but ever fewer of the masses of people with -and without- carts that had been streaming east at first. The first indication of ground fighting, in the form of remote cannon fire, came as we were reaching Kielce {5}. The motorized German army must have been approaching by a different road; and may have been in the process of getting ahead of us.
Until then we had occasionally -when enough could be bought- had a slice of bread each, which we ate while walking. So the warm meal that the people of our Kielce kibbutz had left for us before they left in the direction of Radom, where we had another hakhsharah kibbutz, was a real treat; hurried, but we did sit down at a genuine table.
We now were going toward Lublin {11}, and there was talk of just continuing to "aliyah" (the dream of going to Palestine) immediately. We no longer went along the highway, so the cart must have been left in Kielce. There certainly was no way horses could have pulled it when we went over a mountain (a rare sight in Poland that far north of the Carpathian foothills) on a "road" strewn with sharp stones {6}. They were supposed to obstruct the escape of prisoners from the jail allegedly up there. They also obstructed us, but the shortcut it represented must have been worth that. Two of us youngsters from Germany had to be left in hospital nearby, one of whom then died.
It may have been that same night that we reached the burning town on the Vistula {7} described earlier. Finding the bridge destroyed was a sharp disappointment, but there was no hesitation in turning around and walking another ~ 50 km south without sleep to Sandomierz {8}. There was a little hesitation when we reached the bridge to be crossed as Stukas started to bomb it; just a little, then: "let's run across as fast as we can!".
(If you are enjoying a meal, you'd better skip the next paragraph!)
As I ran, the method I had developed to hold the stool while walking became inoperative, and out it flowed, a completely liquid mess. What is worse, I was so dumbfounded that I stopped running and just stood there, oblivious to those planes and their droppings. But one of the Polish members ran back and pulled me out of the stupor, and then I did complete the run across before the bridge went down.
After getting our well deserved sleep, we continued, but now the aim was supposed to be that we gradually disperse.Whenever on that way east people came closest to where their families were, they were to separate and go there. By that criterion, I was the first to take off, my parents having been allowed to leave Zbaszyn shortly before the war for Dynow, the town where my father had been born when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg) empire. It is on the river San, which flows into the Vistula just north of Sandomierz. Two of the Polish speaking members went with me to the nearest San ferry crossing.
As soon as I got off the small ferry, people there asked me where I was going. That I could still answer in Polish, since I had heard the same question and corresponding answer many times along the way. But to the next question I had to answer that I don't understand Polish (in Polish), and I had to go with them. I managed to transmit the gist of my story through a gymnasium (~ high school) student two years older than I, in what must have been the first real use of French, rather than school exercises, that either of us ever had. Not much later, a Polish army officer, riding by on a horse, after hearing one sentence, and obviously indifferent as to whether I am a 14 year old Nazi spy or Jew, without a word drew his revolver{9}.
No, this is not being written by a dead man. The photo that will be added below shows that I not only survived that episode, and other hazards of that war; that I still managed to be part of one of the victorious Allied armies whose soldiers were received in audience and then blessed by the pope; which he had not done for the axis soldiers. Judging by the army overcoat I am wearing, the St. Peter's square photo (with another of my company I just happened to meet there) must have been taken a few months (weeks?) before VE day; the 60 anniversary of which is imminent. Wadowice, the birthplace of Karol Wojtyla, just deceased as Pope John Paul II, is marked on the map with an illuminated W.
The purple line is an attempt to reconstruct the route of my brother's group of the Grochow kibbutz of He-Halutz Ha-Tzair, starting from outside Warsaw a week later, and based on the account in the (Zuckerman) "Antek" memory book. He referred to that group as the "children of Zbaszyn", and a footnote (probably by the editors or translators, not ideally informed) tries to inform that these were young members of his outfit who had been expelled from Germany the previous year and long confined to the small Polish border town of Zbaszyn. Although their walk seems to have been less strenuous, there were several things remarkably similar to our experience. Here only the first bombing which they also got in a forest without any of them getting hit. Antek continues that it later turned out that, unbeknownst to them, there was a Polish army unit in the forest and also German spies signalling that to the planes so they could attack the soldiers; who did suffer casualties. So it can't be excluded definitely that in our first bombardment, too, we and the civilians with carts nearby were not the intended targets; and that there could also have been soldiers there. I still consider that very unlikely.
A major difference from the Grochow march was that our youth group of about twenty people , who also had been expelled from Germany in October 1938 through Zbaszyn (the action that led to the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris, thus indirectly to the Nazi pretext for the "Kristallnacht" atrocities), went together with the older members from Poland; while their "Zbaszyn children" went separately, with only two or three older Polish members, including Antek after he encountered them.
After that bombing, we continued toward Kielce {5}, where we expected to await the outcome of (WWI type) trench warfare at the Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair kibbutz there. For sleep, we just lay down next to the road. When passing through villages/towns, where some people had radios, we (the older Polish-speaking ones) kept asking whether England and France had entered the war yet, as per treaty. An attack from these major powers ought to make the German army scurry back to defend the Siegfried Line. War was indeed declared {3}, but the German advance was not slowed by those declarations.
To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image.
based on MSN Encarta - World Atlas - Map of The WorldI had been ill with dysentery in Czestochowa and had left the kibbutz sick room just five days before the war and our taking off. It now returned quite suddenly, and I had to pass stool -with blood- so urgently that a halt had to be called for that {4}. Maybe because I was also the youngest, I then was made to ride on the horse drawn cart we had taken along. But I felt really bad about it in view of some who had real difficulty walking and insisted on getting down. While the dysentery continued, that was the only time that a pause had to be called for my benefit. I developed a special way of walking, with which I could restrain my guts until the next general time out.
Increasingly there were cars on the road that evidently had run out of gas and been abandoned by the owners; but ever fewer of the masses of people with -and without- carts that had been streaming east at first. The first indication of ground fighting, in the form of remote cannon fire, came as we were reaching Kielce {5}. The motorized German army must have been approaching by a different road; and may have been in the process of getting ahead of us.
Until then we had occasionally -when enough could be bought- had a slice of bread each, which we ate while walking. So the warm meal that the people of our Kielce kibbutz had left for us before they left in the direction of Radom, where we had another hakhsharah kibbutz, was a real treat; hurried, but we did sit down at a genuine table.
We now were going toward Lublin {11}, and there was talk of just continuing to "aliyah" (the dream of going to Palestine) immediately. We no longer went along the highway, so the cart must have been left in Kielce. There certainly was no way horses could have pulled it when we went over a mountain (a rare sight in Poland that far north of the Carpathian foothills) on a "road" strewn with sharp stones {6}. They were supposed to obstruct the escape of prisoners from the jail allegedly up there. They also obstructed us, but the shortcut it represented must have been worth that. Two of us youngsters from Germany had to be left in hospital nearby, one of whom then died.
It may have been that same night that we reached the burning town on the Vistula {7} described earlier. Finding the bridge destroyed was a sharp disappointment, but there was no hesitation in turning around and walking another ~ 50 km south without sleep to Sandomierz {8}. There was a little hesitation when we reached the bridge to be crossed as Stukas started to bomb it; just a little, then: "let's run across as fast as we can!".
(If you are enjoying a meal, you'd better skip the next paragraph!)
As I ran, the method I had developed to hold the stool while walking became inoperative, and out it flowed, a completely liquid mess. What is worse, I was so dumbfounded that I stopped running and just stood there, oblivious to those planes and their droppings. But one of the Polish members ran back and pulled me out of the stupor, and then I did complete the run across before the bridge went down.
After getting our well deserved sleep, we continued, but now the aim was supposed to be that we gradually disperse.Whenever on that way east people came closest to where their families were, they were to separate and go there. By that criterion, I was the first to take off, my parents having been allowed to leave Zbaszyn shortly before the war for Dynow, the town where my father had been born when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg) empire. It is on the river San, which flows into the Vistula just north of Sandomierz. Two of the Polish speaking members went with me to the nearest San ferry crossing.
As soon as I got off the small ferry, people there asked me where I was going. That I could still answer in Polish, since I had heard the same question and corresponding answer many times along the way. But to the next question I had to answer that I don't understand Polish (in Polish), and I had to go with them. I managed to transmit the gist of my story through a gymnasium (~ high school) student two years older than I, in what must have been the first real use of French, rather than school exercises, that either of us ever had. Not much later, a Polish army officer, riding by on a horse, after hearing one sentence, and obviously indifferent as to whether I am a 14 year old Nazi spy or Jew, without a word drew his revolver{9}.
No, this is not being written by a dead man. The photo that will be added below shows that I not only survived that episode, and other hazards of that war; that I still managed to be part of one of the victorious Allied armies whose soldiers were received in audience and then blessed by the pope; which he had not done for the axis soldiers. Judging by the army overcoat I am wearing, the St. Peter's square photo (with another of my company I just happened to meet there) must have been taken a few months (weeks?) before VE day; the 60 anniversary of which is imminent. Wadowice, the birthplace of Karol Wojtyla, just deceased as Pope John Paul II, is marked on the map with an illuminated W.
_
posted by solar_sol | 8:57 PM
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