Selected text
We stayed there until the Germans arrived. When the Germans got there, our unit was moved to the Volga River. There were temporary bridges there. We were helping to build a river crossing. I couldn't find a dry place all winter long, so I fell ill. I got sick, because of that cold water and had to spend some time in the sick ward.
Since 1942 I was in the Soviet army. But it wasn't a regular army. They didn't trust us. Well, they didn't trust us, because we were Polish citizens. We were always supervised, because they didn't trust us. There were NKVD [19] officers all around us and we were simply discriminated by them. We would set up mine fields, that's what we specialized in. We served the bridge over the Volga. Some also worked in factories. I didn't feel like it.
A bomb fell on one of the temporary bridges in Dubowka [approx. 8 km from Stalingrad]. I was injured, I had to spend some two months in hospital, in Krasnoarmiejsk [Krasnoarmiejskij, approx. 55 km from Stalingrad]. My teeth were knocked out, I could later take them from my mouth like sunflower seeds. But I somehow pulled through. I still have these scars, but the accident mostly damaged my airways. When I got out of hospital, I went back to the unit, to the minesweepers.
We mostly worked the mines. We had to set up and clear mine fields. Because at first you had to set the mine field up and, after they had surrounded the Germans, then you had to clear it. We reached the Volga River. The town of Kolacz [Kalacz, approx. 15 km from Stalingrad]. When we were walking from Kolacz, I think it was on New Year's Eve, we encountered the French squad Volga-Niemen [Normandie-Niemen]. The French were hospitable - they gave us tea. We got there after they had already liquidated the Germans, this Paulus's army, the Russians surrounded them from both sides. And the second German unit, they were chased all the way to Ukraine, to Rostow. Our task was to clear the mine fields and pick up the dead bodies. There were lots of corpses there. German, Russian and Romanian. There was great hunger. We ate horses, as long as they weren't stinking yet, we didn't care if they had been killed or died on their own. And that's how we made it until, I think, March [1942].
There were these valleys near Stalingrad. The Germans were roaming in the valleys. At first, when the Russians caught them, they'd kill them. And then there was an order that you couldn't. That you had to take them to the headquarters. Once they caught three Germans and three of us had to take them to the headquarters. We took them there and, when we were coming back, we went into one of those valleys. We saw that there was some smoke coming from a hut. Six guys, German. They were armed. They were cooking something. They had something from those packages and some warm coffee. Because the Germans would drop packages there, these canvas bags with food. They had better food than we did. Sometimes we also found these packages.
Once we were sitting in a hut, there was snow, a plane came by, we thought: bomb! We got down on the ground. We waited for the explosion, but there was none, just this canvas bag dropped down. One of those Germans could speak Russian and he told us not to be afraid, that they wouldn't hurt us, that they wanted us to take them to the headquarters. They surrendered. They were armed, but they were afraid!
There was this one corporal in my unit, his name was Strug. He was just like me, they didn't trust him too. He took the locks out of their automatic guns, ordered them to get up. We searched them. We took their grenades, everything. We left the automatic guns, but took the locks with us. We took them to the Russian headquarters. There were officers there, or whoever, they admitted us and confirmed receiving those Germans. We left the headquarters as heroes. We got three days off for that deed, so that we could go somewhere, get ourselves cleaned up.
There was this town called Bikietowka near Stalingrad. It was a larger settlement, really. There weren't many civilians there, everything was military. But there were some civilians. We found out that there was a small market there. Well, if there's a market, we've got to see it. We had to dress up a bit. There was everything in those valleys, whatever you wanted. We took the best things off those corpses, leather bags. Leather shoulder bags. Soldiers usually carry maps in these. We cut out pieces of leather from them. We needed that for [shoe] soles, because it was war. Money didn't mean anything and leather would be used for shoe soles or something. We took blankets, sheets and went to this Bikietowka. We wanted to exchange it for something to eat. We were hungry like dogs.
We reached Bikietowka and we saw some woman standing on the street selling pierogis. Pierogis are these large pancakes. Where she got them from, I don't know, but we gave her a blanket or something and she gave us five pierogi each. They were so bitter we couldn't stand it, but we ate them. It turned out that a barge with barley had sunk there, on the Volga. They dried the barley, ground it and that's why it was so bitter. We ate it. We kept going.
We reached the house of an elderly couple, this grandma and grandpa. They told us that we could find a place to sleep there and they gave us shelter. We spent two days there. There was dry wood out there in the backyard, so we chopped it up, heated the oven. The grandpa had some barley, so we found a hand-mill, ground the barley and we had some barley groats. That was our feast. We didn't pay anything for sleeping there. Well, what could we have paid, what could a soldier have given them? Some long johns, a piece of soap, some underclothes, German pants, we gave that to the grandpa. After three days we returned to the unit.
In early May we went to the front, on the Orlow-Kursk Axis [Orlow, approx. 65 km from Moscow, Kursk, approx. 85 km from Moscow]. It was 1943, after Stalingrad. They loaded us on trains and let us out in a village called Kapuscino. It was still a second-class unit. It was a minesweeping division. We built bridges, trenches, fortifications, these ditches that are used on the front. We set up mine fields, masked roads, we would move an entire forest. The road to Rostow and Kursk was constantly under fire. From their side of the Oka [River], where the Germans were sitting, they could see open space. And they'd shoot. So there were several kilometers of a road they could shoot at and we had to mask that road, so they wouldn't see it. We had to move an entire forest in one night. We chopped up these trees, branches and set up these green fences, along the road. From a distance it would look like a forest. NKVD soldiers guarded us and shook their guns at us.
I was wounded by the time the Kursk battle [20] began. And here's how it happened. There was a river there on the Orlow-Kursk Axis, a tributary of the Oka. I knew we would finish setting this fence up at night and we were supposed to start preparing the river crossing. The river wasn't deep, I was curious, I wanted to check out what the shore looked like in the morning. So I left the forest. It was a sandy shore. I looked around a bit, I figured out what the crossing should look like. I also wanted to get cleaned up, so I approached the water. It was still dark. And then, suddenly, a plane appeared out of nowhere. But those scout planes never had bombs. Everyone knew that. So I was sure this plane wouldn't have any bombs. I got out and the plane dropped a bomb. I fell down. I was hit in the leg.
I didn't lose consciousness, I somehow managed to get ashore, out into the open. I crawled to the bomb hole, there was a rule that if a bomb hole was fresh, you could find shelter there, because they would never hit the same place twice. So I crawled in there. And by the time I managed to get in there, the bone was sticking out of my wounded leg. My leg was like a bow. I had a belt with me, a canvas belt, so I tied it around the leg, above the knee. My leg was getting numb. Only in the afternoon did some soldiers who were distributing food and water find me there.
They took me to this village, Kapuscino. There was this village chamber there [a field hospital], there was a nurse and she tended wounds there. She put in some splints. This kind of wire bed and she put some bandage around my leg, so it wouldn't bend. And I stayed there until evening. I had to be taken to the 'sanbat' [sanitary battalion]. It was a serious wound. I had to lie down for seven months because of that leg!
There were cars there [on the Orlowsk-Kursk Axis], which were used for taking ammunition to the front. They were preparing for that battle. The famous Orlowsk-Kursk battle, an armored battle. Those cars would come back empty. So they took me in one of those cars to a sanitary point. The Sanitary Battalion. There was no special transport. There was no bed in that car, it wasn't comfortable, because they used it for ammunition. And the road was very bumpy. It was very uncomfortable. I couldn't stand the pain and I cried horribly. So the driver stopped and left me in the ditch by the road.
A nurse was taking me there and she stayed with me. I couldn't stand it. I was in the ditch, there were planes flying overhead. She went to get some grass, because there was some freshly cut grass nearby. She wanted to put it under my head. So she took a handful of this grass and put her hand on a mine. The blast took her hand off. So we were both wounded. We were there in that ditch until nighttime. A driver was driving by at night and took mercy on us. He took us in his car. Over those bumps. He let some air out of his tires and he took us. He didn't take us to the 'sanbat,' but to some village in the forest, I don't remember the name. But there were civilians there, kolkhoz workers.
They took us on a wagon then. There was hay in those wagons and they took us to some forest. There was the so-called Medsanbat there. A medical battalion. And here's what it looked like: there used to be stables there, cattle, cows, horses. Those stables had been bleached a bit, there were makeshift beds there. There were lots of us there. They collected wounded soldiers from all over until there were enough to fill a train. Then they'd be loaded up on a train and taken somewhere.
That's when I had surgery done on my leg. They took off those splints, stretched the leg out and put a cast on it. I asked them to shave the hair off my leg, because I knew it would hurt when they were taking the cast off. But they told me they wouldn't, because they were getting me ready for transport and the cast would stay on better with the hair. The cast started drying at night. Those hairs were getting pulled, it hurt like hell. It was such horrible pain, I was crying out from pain, yelling. I couldn't stand it and nobody would help me. I hadn't eaten for two days, my body was getting healthy, regenerating, I had to eat something. There were lots of patients there and all of them were complaining. I called the nurse, but she wouldn't come.
And that's where I met a kindred spirit. I didn't know him well, I only found out here in Lodz, in the 1970s, who he was, but it was too late, because I couldn't meet him there. His name was Kielerman. He was also wounded. This man with a cast on his arm showed up unexpectedly and asked, 'What's wrong with you?' So I told him. He knew who I was, because it takes one to know one.
He was also a Jew, from Poland, central Poland. I was from the Vilnius area and Jews used a different dialect there, a different accent. They used this jargon in my home town. He spoke differently, he had an accent resembling Russian. He went to get the nurse, brought her there. Then he'd keep coming to see me and asking, 'How are you doing? Better?' He also brought me water and something to eat, because I hadn't eaten for two days. He went and brought back this large biscuit. A black one. I can still see that biscuit. I dipped it in water as if he'd brought me the best meal ever. He was my guardian angel, as it turned out. I don't know how he knew it, but whenever I needed help, he'd show up. He saved me so many times, did so much for me. Even after the war, here in Lodz, he also took my side more than once. It was always something nice, unexpected.
After some two, three days there were enough of us and they brought in the train cars. Those were those Russian sanitary cars, with these stretchers attached to the sides. Those stretchers I was on got dislodged and fell down. I fell down on the wounded leg and those who were above me, fell down on me. But the cast was strong and nothing happened. They brought us to the station at night, loaded us up into the train cars. It was all very fast and we were off. We went east, towards Moscow. To Mozajsk [approx. 20 km from Moscow]. There was a hospital there. And some planes came flying by when we were on our way there. Those who wouldn't be able to get out by themselves in an emergency were up on the top bunk. Those who had good arms and legs were down on the bottom bunks.
So when the planes appeared, they stopped the train in the forest and those who could got out of the train and hid in the forest. I stayed up there on the top bunk. We could see, from the window, those planes dropping bombs. There were a few more men there and we decided to get down from the top bunk. But my cast got caught up in something, there were these chains there, and I found myself upside down on that bunk. And who came to my rescue? Kielerman. He was in that transport, found me, helped get me free from those chains and went to the forest himself. They unloaded us in Mozajsk, took us to the hospital, started shaving us. These young women came. And there was Kielerman again.
The way this hospital was organized was like this. If they hoped to cure someone within a month, they'd keep him in Mozajsk. And those who had to be treated for longer than a month were transported. They took us all the way to the Ural. The town was called Gorod Otmulinsk. In the direction of Komsomolsk. There was a hospital there, which had been evacuated from Charkow. There was a Jewess there, Pertka Aronowna, this 'gyeroy' [Russian: hero] woman. Everyone was afraid of her.
There were different people there. One man had been wounded near Charkow, in his heel. He stepped on a mine and his entire heel was blown off and the nails from his shoe got imbedded in his foot. He spent the entire war in that hospital and didn't let them amputate that leg. They wanted to amputate my leg too, but finally those bones mended, they were set well, so they mended. They wanted to cut it off, because it was the easiest for them. They cut off your leg and sent you home after two weeks. But they didn't amputate the leg after all. I had no home to go back to.
I was there in Otmulinsk for four months. It was the end of 1943. November, December. When I got out of hospital, they sent me to Kiev [approx. 800 km from Moscow] and from there to Gorki [approx. 400 km from Moscow]. It was winter 1943 [actually 1944]. I was not on the front line in Gorki. I was dismissed from military service for six months, I could go wherever I wanted to, but I didn't have a place to go to.
Since 1942 I was in the Soviet army. But it wasn't a regular army. They didn't trust us. Well, they didn't trust us, because we were Polish citizens. We were always supervised, because they didn't trust us. There were NKVD [19] officers all around us and we were simply discriminated by them. We would set up mine fields, that's what we specialized in. We served the bridge over the Volga. Some also worked in factories. I didn't feel like it.
A bomb fell on one of the temporary bridges in Dubowka [approx. 8 km from Stalingrad]. I was injured, I had to spend some two months in hospital, in Krasnoarmiejsk [Krasnoarmiejskij, approx. 55 km from Stalingrad]. My teeth were knocked out, I could later take them from my mouth like sunflower seeds. But I somehow pulled through. I still have these scars, but the accident mostly damaged my airways. When I got out of hospital, I went back to the unit, to the minesweepers.
We mostly worked the mines. We had to set up and clear mine fields. Because at first you had to set the mine field up and, after they had surrounded the Germans, then you had to clear it. We reached the Volga River. The town of Kolacz [Kalacz, approx. 15 km from Stalingrad]. When we were walking from Kolacz, I think it was on New Year's Eve, we encountered the French squad Volga-Niemen [Normandie-Niemen]. The French were hospitable - they gave us tea. We got there after they had already liquidated the Germans, this Paulus's army, the Russians surrounded them from both sides. And the second German unit, they were chased all the way to Ukraine, to Rostow. Our task was to clear the mine fields and pick up the dead bodies. There were lots of corpses there. German, Russian and Romanian. There was great hunger. We ate horses, as long as they weren't stinking yet, we didn't care if they had been killed or died on their own. And that's how we made it until, I think, March [1942].
There were these valleys near Stalingrad. The Germans were roaming in the valleys. At first, when the Russians caught them, they'd kill them. And then there was an order that you couldn't. That you had to take them to the headquarters. Once they caught three Germans and three of us had to take them to the headquarters. We took them there and, when we were coming back, we went into one of those valleys. We saw that there was some smoke coming from a hut. Six guys, German. They were armed. They were cooking something. They had something from those packages and some warm coffee. Because the Germans would drop packages there, these canvas bags with food. They had better food than we did. Sometimes we also found these packages.
Once we were sitting in a hut, there was snow, a plane came by, we thought: bomb! We got down on the ground. We waited for the explosion, but there was none, just this canvas bag dropped down. One of those Germans could speak Russian and he told us not to be afraid, that they wouldn't hurt us, that they wanted us to take them to the headquarters. They surrendered. They were armed, but they were afraid!
There was this one corporal in my unit, his name was Strug. He was just like me, they didn't trust him too. He took the locks out of their automatic guns, ordered them to get up. We searched them. We took their grenades, everything. We left the automatic guns, but took the locks with us. We took them to the Russian headquarters. There were officers there, or whoever, they admitted us and confirmed receiving those Germans. We left the headquarters as heroes. We got three days off for that deed, so that we could go somewhere, get ourselves cleaned up.
There was this town called Bikietowka near Stalingrad. It was a larger settlement, really. There weren't many civilians there, everything was military. But there were some civilians. We found out that there was a small market there. Well, if there's a market, we've got to see it. We had to dress up a bit. There was everything in those valleys, whatever you wanted. We took the best things off those corpses, leather bags. Leather shoulder bags. Soldiers usually carry maps in these. We cut out pieces of leather from them. We needed that for [shoe] soles, because it was war. Money didn't mean anything and leather would be used for shoe soles or something. We took blankets, sheets and went to this Bikietowka. We wanted to exchange it for something to eat. We were hungry like dogs.
We reached Bikietowka and we saw some woman standing on the street selling pierogis. Pierogis are these large pancakes. Where she got them from, I don't know, but we gave her a blanket or something and she gave us five pierogi each. They were so bitter we couldn't stand it, but we ate them. It turned out that a barge with barley had sunk there, on the Volga. They dried the barley, ground it and that's why it was so bitter. We ate it. We kept going.
We reached the house of an elderly couple, this grandma and grandpa. They told us that we could find a place to sleep there and they gave us shelter. We spent two days there. There was dry wood out there in the backyard, so we chopped it up, heated the oven. The grandpa had some barley, so we found a hand-mill, ground the barley and we had some barley groats. That was our feast. We didn't pay anything for sleeping there. Well, what could we have paid, what could a soldier have given them? Some long johns, a piece of soap, some underclothes, German pants, we gave that to the grandpa. After three days we returned to the unit.
In early May we went to the front, on the Orlow-Kursk Axis [Orlow, approx. 65 km from Moscow, Kursk, approx. 85 km from Moscow]. It was 1943, after Stalingrad. They loaded us on trains and let us out in a village called Kapuscino. It was still a second-class unit. It was a minesweeping division. We built bridges, trenches, fortifications, these ditches that are used on the front. We set up mine fields, masked roads, we would move an entire forest. The road to Rostow and Kursk was constantly under fire. From their side of the Oka [River], where the Germans were sitting, they could see open space. And they'd shoot. So there were several kilometers of a road they could shoot at and we had to mask that road, so they wouldn't see it. We had to move an entire forest in one night. We chopped up these trees, branches and set up these green fences, along the road. From a distance it would look like a forest. NKVD soldiers guarded us and shook their guns at us.
I was wounded by the time the Kursk battle [20] began. And here's how it happened. There was a river there on the Orlow-Kursk Axis, a tributary of the Oka. I knew we would finish setting this fence up at night and we were supposed to start preparing the river crossing. The river wasn't deep, I was curious, I wanted to check out what the shore looked like in the morning. So I left the forest. It was a sandy shore. I looked around a bit, I figured out what the crossing should look like. I also wanted to get cleaned up, so I approached the water. It was still dark. And then, suddenly, a plane appeared out of nowhere. But those scout planes never had bombs. Everyone knew that. So I was sure this plane wouldn't have any bombs. I got out and the plane dropped a bomb. I fell down. I was hit in the leg.
I didn't lose consciousness, I somehow managed to get ashore, out into the open. I crawled to the bomb hole, there was a rule that if a bomb hole was fresh, you could find shelter there, because they would never hit the same place twice. So I crawled in there. And by the time I managed to get in there, the bone was sticking out of my wounded leg. My leg was like a bow. I had a belt with me, a canvas belt, so I tied it around the leg, above the knee. My leg was getting numb. Only in the afternoon did some soldiers who were distributing food and water find me there.
They took me to this village, Kapuscino. There was this village chamber there [a field hospital], there was a nurse and she tended wounds there. She put in some splints. This kind of wire bed and she put some bandage around my leg, so it wouldn't bend. And I stayed there until evening. I had to be taken to the 'sanbat' [sanitary battalion]. It was a serious wound. I had to lie down for seven months because of that leg!
There were cars there [on the Orlowsk-Kursk Axis], which were used for taking ammunition to the front. They were preparing for that battle. The famous Orlowsk-Kursk battle, an armored battle. Those cars would come back empty. So they took me in one of those cars to a sanitary point. The Sanitary Battalion. There was no special transport. There was no bed in that car, it wasn't comfortable, because they used it for ammunition. And the road was very bumpy. It was very uncomfortable. I couldn't stand the pain and I cried horribly. So the driver stopped and left me in the ditch by the road.
A nurse was taking me there and she stayed with me. I couldn't stand it. I was in the ditch, there were planes flying overhead. She went to get some grass, because there was some freshly cut grass nearby. She wanted to put it under my head. So she took a handful of this grass and put her hand on a mine. The blast took her hand off. So we were both wounded. We were there in that ditch until nighttime. A driver was driving by at night and took mercy on us. He took us in his car. Over those bumps. He let some air out of his tires and he took us. He didn't take us to the 'sanbat,' but to some village in the forest, I don't remember the name. But there were civilians there, kolkhoz workers.
They took us on a wagon then. There was hay in those wagons and they took us to some forest. There was the so-called Medsanbat there. A medical battalion. And here's what it looked like: there used to be stables there, cattle, cows, horses. Those stables had been bleached a bit, there were makeshift beds there. There were lots of us there. They collected wounded soldiers from all over until there were enough to fill a train. Then they'd be loaded up on a train and taken somewhere.
That's when I had surgery done on my leg. They took off those splints, stretched the leg out and put a cast on it. I asked them to shave the hair off my leg, because I knew it would hurt when they were taking the cast off. But they told me they wouldn't, because they were getting me ready for transport and the cast would stay on better with the hair. The cast started drying at night. Those hairs were getting pulled, it hurt like hell. It was such horrible pain, I was crying out from pain, yelling. I couldn't stand it and nobody would help me. I hadn't eaten for two days, my body was getting healthy, regenerating, I had to eat something. There were lots of patients there and all of them were complaining. I called the nurse, but she wouldn't come.
And that's where I met a kindred spirit. I didn't know him well, I only found out here in Lodz, in the 1970s, who he was, but it was too late, because I couldn't meet him there. His name was Kielerman. He was also wounded. This man with a cast on his arm showed up unexpectedly and asked, 'What's wrong with you?' So I told him. He knew who I was, because it takes one to know one.
He was also a Jew, from Poland, central Poland. I was from the Vilnius area and Jews used a different dialect there, a different accent. They used this jargon in my home town. He spoke differently, he had an accent resembling Russian. He went to get the nurse, brought her there. Then he'd keep coming to see me and asking, 'How are you doing? Better?' He also brought me water and something to eat, because I hadn't eaten for two days. He went and brought back this large biscuit. A black one. I can still see that biscuit. I dipped it in water as if he'd brought me the best meal ever. He was my guardian angel, as it turned out. I don't know how he knew it, but whenever I needed help, he'd show up. He saved me so many times, did so much for me. Even after the war, here in Lodz, he also took my side more than once. It was always something nice, unexpected.
After some two, three days there were enough of us and they brought in the train cars. Those were those Russian sanitary cars, with these stretchers attached to the sides. Those stretchers I was on got dislodged and fell down. I fell down on the wounded leg and those who were above me, fell down on me. But the cast was strong and nothing happened. They brought us to the station at night, loaded us up into the train cars. It was all very fast and we were off. We went east, towards Moscow. To Mozajsk [approx. 20 km from Moscow]. There was a hospital there. And some planes came flying by when we were on our way there. Those who wouldn't be able to get out by themselves in an emergency were up on the top bunk. Those who had good arms and legs were down on the bottom bunks.
So when the planes appeared, they stopped the train in the forest and those who could got out of the train and hid in the forest. I stayed up there on the top bunk. We could see, from the window, those planes dropping bombs. There were a few more men there and we decided to get down from the top bunk. But my cast got caught up in something, there were these chains there, and I found myself upside down on that bunk. And who came to my rescue? Kielerman. He was in that transport, found me, helped get me free from those chains and went to the forest himself. They unloaded us in Mozajsk, took us to the hospital, started shaving us. These young women came. And there was Kielerman again.
The way this hospital was organized was like this. If they hoped to cure someone within a month, they'd keep him in Mozajsk. And those who had to be treated for longer than a month were transported. They took us all the way to the Ural. The town was called Gorod Otmulinsk. In the direction of Komsomolsk. There was a hospital there, which had been evacuated from Charkow. There was a Jewess there, Pertka Aronowna, this 'gyeroy' [Russian: hero] woman. Everyone was afraid of her.
There were different people there. One man had been wounded near Charkow, in his heel. He stepped on a mine and his entire heel was blown off and the nails from his shoe got imbedded in his foot. He spent the entire war in that hospital and didn't let them amputate that leg. They wanted to amputate my leg too, but finally those bones mended, they were set well, so they mended. They wanted to cut it off, because it was the easiest for them. They cut off your leg and sent you home after two weeks. But they didn't amputate the leg after all. I had no home to go back to.
I was there in Otmulinsk for four months. It was the end of 1943. November, December. When I got out of hospital, they sent me to Kiev [approx. 800 km from Moscow] and from there to Gorki [approx. 400 km from Moscow]. It was winter 1943 [actually 1944]. I was not on the front line in Gorki. I was dismissed from military service for six months, I could go wherever I wanted to, but I didn't have a place to go to.
Period
Interview
Leon Solowiejczyk
Tag(s)