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I was kept in the Red Army, but in the rear, in Akmolinsk [today Kazakhstan], in a minesweeping unit. I learned to drive there. We were sent to Gorky, where they wanted to take me into the ‘trudarmia,’ a forced labor army. But somehow I managed to get out of that, and when Zygmunt Berling [21] and Wanda Wasilewska [22] began to create the First Tadeusz Kosciuszko Division, I reported for the front. By then it was 1943. I joined the ZPP Union of Polish Patriots [23] and I was sent to Moscow, to the headquarters, where Wanda Wasilewska held office. In summer 1944 I was sent to Lublin, to officer training school.
Traveling from Moscow to Lublin, I passed through Krasnik. I asked the group commander if I could stop for a day or two in the town. The railroad station in Krasnik is about three to four kilometers from the town, so I walked there on foot, and there I met a friend, called Szurym Garl. He was older than me, and before the war he had had a newspaper kiosk in Krasnik; he delivered Jewish newspapers from Lublin and Warsaw. And he said to me at once, ‘Listen, you’re all alone – all your people have been killed. We don’t even know where they were burned.’ It was only then that I found out that I had no family left. All the time I had been in the Soviet Union neither the press nor the radio mentioned the fact that Hitler was murdering the Jews in Poland. In Krasnik the only Jews who survived were those who worked in one of the two camps. Garl was among them; he had been working as a carpenter.
After I finished officer training school in January 1945 I was sent to Zamosc to do medical courses for the Front. I was second in command of a company there. And the other second-in-command was Joel Kopytko, a friend from my old gang back in Krasnik, who had been arrested with me in 1935. The NCOs [non commissioned officers] in that company were pre-war stock, with anti-Semitic attitudes. As one of them was leaving the unit one evening, Kopytko ordered him to show his pass. ‘You miserable Yid!’ came the response. A scuffle broke out, and the NCO got a shot straight through the heart. The news spread around Zamosc: a Jew has killed a Pole. We feared a pogrom.
Kopytko was arrested. I had been in prison with the senior prison officer in Lublin before the war, so he let me visit Kopytko, even gave me the keys to his cell. I looked at him – he had his head bandaged. It turned out that earlier on, when he had been locked up in UB [24], during an interrogation they had found his Komsomol [25] identification on him. And the people who were interrogating him had transferred to the secret police from the NSZ [National Armed Forces] [26], so they had given him a beating. A few weeks later they abandoned their posts and returned to the woods. In fall 1945 Kopytko was taken to Lublin for trial. And can you imagine – the same panel of judges tried his case as before the war! As a re-offender he was given ten years’ imprisonment. I intervened on his behalf in Warsaw. The news of Kopytko’s sentence reached Bierut [27] himself, who had also been in prison with him before the war in Lublin. Kopytko was soon released.
Traveling from Moscow to Lublin, I passed through Krasnik. I asked the group commander if I could stop for a day or two in the town. The railroad station in Krasnik is about three to four kilometers from the town, so I walked there on foot, and there I met a friend, called Szurym Garl. He was older than me, and before the war he had had a newspaper kiosk in Krasnik; he delivered Jewish newspapers from Lublin and Warsaw. And he said to me at once, ‘Listen, you’re all alone – all your people have been killed. We don’t even know where they were burned.’ It was only then that I found out that I had no family left. All the time I had been in the Soviet Union neither the press nor the radio mentioned the fact that Hitler was murdering the Jews in Poland. In Krasnik the only Jews who survived were those who worked in one of the two camps. Garl was among them; he had been working as a carpenter.
After I finished officer training school in January 1945 I was sent to Zamosc to do medical courses for the Front. I was second in command of a company there. And the other second-in-command was Joel Kopytko, a friend from my old gang back in Krasnik, who had been arrested with me in 1935. The NCOs [non commissioned officers] in that company were pre-war stock, with anti-Semitic attitudes. As one of them was leaving the unit one evening, Kopytko ordered him to show his pass. ‘You miserable Yid!’ came the response. A scuffle broke out, and the NCO got a shot straight through the heart. The news spread around Zamosc: a Jew has killed a Pole. We feared a pogrom.
Kopytko was arrested. I had been in prison with the senior prison officer in Lublin before the war, so he let me visit Kopytko, even gave me the keys to his cell. I looked at him – he had his head bandaged. It turned out that earlier on, when he had been locked up in UB [24], during an interrogation they had found his Komsomol [25] identification on him. And the people who were interrogating him had transferred to the secret police from the NSZ [National Armed Forces] [26], so they had given him a beating. A few weeks later they abandoned their posts and returned to the woods. In fall 1945 Kopytko was taken to Lublin for trial. And can you imagine – the same panel of judges tried his case as before the war! As a re-offender he was given ten years’ imprisonment. I intervened on his behalf in Warsaw. The news of Kopytko’s sentence reached Bierut [27] himself, who had also been in prison with him before the war in Lublin. Kopytko was soon released.
Period
Interview
Boleslaw Janowski
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