Arnhem

The 1,200-mile, 3-week journey in cattle trucks to the wastelands of Siberia and winter temperatures of minus 40ºC weeded out the old and the weak, their bodies simply thrown out on to the side of the track. In Siberia – greeted by a work camp commandant in the endless forest with the promise that, ‘As a pig will never see heaven, neither will you see Poland again’ – the family worked as slave labourers, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. The genocidal Soviet authorities were happy for the Poles to die from malnutrition, cold, disease and exhaustion, and a million did.² Szmid survived only because his mother sold her wedding ring for potatoes to keep him alive through a deadly bout of dysentery.

Moscow’s curse on its captive Poles was lifted temporarily in the summer of 1941. Hitler turned on his erstwhile ally, Stalin, and invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin needed soldiers to die for Mother Russia and, in his mind, Poles were good at dying. He granted them an ‘amnesty’ – which begged the question of what so-called crime they were being forgiven for – if they would fight. The young Szmid and his family travelled by train to the southernmost reaches of the Soviet Union, where a Polish army was assembling for training. This was another nightmare journey of 2,000 miles in overcrowded, death-trap wagons. He remembered ‘mothers abandoning the bodies of their own children to be devoured by the wolves in the woods and the jackals in the desert. Who can count how many Poles were left by the railroad tracks in Russia during this trip to freedom?’ He lost his own mother and sister when the train they were on departed without warning and he failed to jump on in time. His father died from typhoid in Tashkent, and the teenager was on his own.

He was fifteen and alone in a savage world. ‘Stranded, penniless, hungry and alone, my father dead and my mother and sister God knows where, this was the worst time of my life. I had one boot only and just rags on my other foot. I was filthy and full of lice.’ To survive he became virtually feral. ‘At night I used to find a hole, nook or cranny and crawl into it for safety. I begged for food, I stole, I even ate dog. Eventually I joined up with about twenty other youths like myself and we operated as a gang, stealing, scrounging and scavenging. We’d pick up anything from the ground that looked edible, even if it wasn’t clean. Once I was sleeping rough at the railway station and huddling up to another person for warmth. We chatted until we fell asleep. In the morning I attempted to wake him, but he was dead. I examined his boots, and they were better than mine, so I took them. His coat was warmer than mine, and had roughly the same amount of lice, so I took that too. Life was cheap. The most important thing was survival.’

It was at that same railway station that he was rescued. A train came in with members of the Polish army on board. ‘I told them I was Polish too and they hauled me on.’ They took him to their training camp, deep in Kazakhstan in Soviet Central Asia, where he lied about his age – he was seventeen now – and joined the Polish 5th Infantry, as much from desperation as patriotism. His lice-riddled rags were replaced with a clean uniform, size seven boots (he was small) and a cap with the white eagle of Poland on it. He may have been at a desert-hot, scorpion-infested and fever-prone camp in a far-flung region not so far from the Soviet border with China, but he had food in his belly from three meals a day, a roof over his head at night (albeit a canvas one) and friendship. And a purpose – even if the distrustful Russians supplied the Polish soldiers with wooden rifles for drilling rather than the real thing.