Return to Radziwillow

Painting by Stefan Cmentomirski

Seventy years after my mother and her family were forcibly deported to Siberia by the Soviets, I returned to the town of Radziwiłłów in Volhynia, from whence they had been taken, to discover what traces (if any) remained of that episode of forgotten History.

In 1940, Radziwiłłów was an important town in Wolynia, a district of Eastern Poland. Today, it lies within the newly-independent Ukraine.

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On the 10^th February 1940, five members of my family (two adults and three children) were forcibly taken from this place at gunpoint, packed into cattle trains, and transported to the forced labour camps of northern Siberia. Their crime: that they were Polish citizens.

They were not the only ones whose fate was sealed on that February night. A quarter of a million other Polish citizens were similarly awakened to the sound of Russian soldiers knocking on their doors in the early hours of February 10th. They were given no hint or warning of what was to come. The vast operation, carried out all over eastern Poland on a single night under cover of darkness and snow, had been prepared months in advance. It was first of four mass deportations of the population resulting in the incarceration on Russian soil of almost two million Polish citizens. They were taken away in order that no trace would ever remain of their language or their culture in the territories occupied in 1939 by the Soviet Union.

You are not likely to have heard any of this at school, or read about it in the mainstream history books. For there are blank spots on the mental map of Europe, areas corresponding to the regions once labelled “Terra Incognita” by medieval cartographers. Britain, the US and the Soviet Union colluded together for almost 50 years to cover up, or obfuscate, the details of the crime. Even in (Soviet- dominated) Poland, until as recently as 1989, it was forbidden to refer to any part of this story.

All the arrests on that fateful night, February 10th 1940, followed a basic standard pattern. At four o’clock in the morning, while the whole family were asleep, a loud knock was heard at the door. Three or four soldiers entered, armed with pistols. They herded everyone (including children) into one room and put them up against the wall in their nightclothes. Meanwhile, the house was searched and an inventory made of all the family’s assets. They were then ordered to dress warmly and given fifteen minutes to gather together their belongings and prepare for what they were told was, “a long journey”.

It was the coldest night in living memory. The earth was frozen to a crystalline hardness and the snow was falling lightly. My family were packed into two waiting sledges and driven to the railway station of Michajlówka, a few miles outside Radziwiłłów. No-one saw them leave. The snow covered up the tracks of the sledges. They never saw their home again.

Michajlówka

Seventy years later, I discovered Michajlówka easily, a well-signposted, sleepy village 15 minutes by car from Radziwillow. The railway station was hidden away from the village by a corridor of mature pines. No sign or monument existed to commemorate the events of February 10^th 1940. Everything was quiet and peaceful, uncontaminated by intrusive uncomfortable history.

It was to this place that the Soviet soldiers drove the sleighs carrying the huddled members of my family. Here, a train with cattle wagons were waiting for them.
Thousands of frightened people were assembled in the snow: old men, women, children with the sand of sleep still glued to their eyelids. Many were crying. Some old women were wandering about outside with baskets of food looking for their relatives. Meanwhile, Soviet soldiers with rifles ticked off names on a list.

It was somewhere here, at the side of the railway track that one old woman, Mrs Bednarska, raised up her arms up to the sky and began to curse the Russians in a loud voice, crying out to God for revenge. She was immediately encircled by a dozen armed soldiers who aimed rifles at her. Several people leaped to her defence and pleaded with the officers to release her. She was mentally ill, they said. She did not know what she was saying. And the Russians, to their credit, lowered their rifles and released the old woman. In truth, Mrs Bednarska was not mentally ill at all, but highly intelligent. When the soldiers who arrived earlier that morning at her house to arrest her son, she had asked to be taken to Siberia along with him. “Let me go with him”, she had pleaded. “Because how can he look after himself?” And the soldiers granted her that great privilege. She was allowed to accompany her son to his place of slavery (and ultimately death) in the work camps of Siberia. This was the same Mrs. Bednarska, whose daughter later saved my mother’s life in the Siberian camp. But that is another story.

Here, at Michajlówka, everyone was loaded into waiting cattle wagons like sardines, one next to another in a standing position, families with children. There were seventy or eighty people to a wagon. In the centre stood a stove. There was also a small barred window. A hole in the floor served as the toilet, which was concealed with a bedcover for modesty’s sake. The doors were locked and padlocked, and were not opened again for three days while other families were collected and loaded onto the wagons. Some of the children began to faint for lack of water. The men beat against the metal doors with their hands and feet in desperation, until they gave up with exhaustion.

But the train was still standing. And while it did, there was still some hope that someone would learn of their fate. People back home must be told what was going on, they argued. Many people in the wagons voiced their belief that they had been taken by mistake, and would soon be freed. Oh God, how they hoped and prayed for help from their allies, from Britain and France! But their gallant allies did not hear them. And even if they had heard, they would not have helped (1).

Finally, after what seemed like an interminable wait, the train buffers shuddered. There was a sound of steam. The engine whistled, and slowly the train began to move off: in the direction of the East. 

Everyone in the wagon began to shout, and although the wheels made a loud noise on the rails, the wailing and the shouts of the passengers were even louder. Cries of injustice went out to God: “Out of the depths do we cry out to you O Lord!” They were heart-rending these last moans. Desperate and lashed with despair.

And then there came a song, one that has often imparted spirit to this tortured nation. From inside the sealed wagons of tightly pressed bodies burst a loud rousing hymn: the National Anthem: “Poland has not yet passed away while we are still alive”! It burst out spontaneously. Totally exhausted, crowded together like sardines, they sang together through their tears. The engine whistled again. The melody of the national anthem ran out over the deserted fields, lost itself and disappeared into the emptiness of the open landscape.

Radziwiłłów

My mother had often spoken of Radziwiłłów as a large town with a predominantly Jewish population. From the many stories she told me about it, I had always imagined it as a city with wide boulevards and well-manicured parks. But in the summer of 2010 I found little more than a village consisting of a few rows of houses with colourful gardens, dissected by a long featureless railway line. The constant queues at the level crossing in the centre of town were the only bustle in a place so small and quiet, that it was difficult to believe that anything of note had ever occurred here to disturbed its solitude.

My grandfather, a forestry administrator, had been sent to Radziwiłłów just a few months before the outbreak of the war, so it was not the family’s real home. They were assigned a modest wooden villa outside the town in a patch of woodland next to the railway line. They did not consider it to be home.

It was this house that my companions and I searched for when we arrived in the town. If my mother had been with me, she would no doubt have been able to point out the place to us. But as it was, we were forced to find it ourselves from hand-written diagrams and verbal accounts. The process soon became frustrating and we were forced to ask help from the local Ukrainian inhabitants.

And it soon became evident that the people of Radziwiłłów were reluctant to say anything. From the youngish policeman who seemed so sympathetic to the officials at the newly-renovated railway station who phoned around for us, no-one seemed able to help. We were sent on one wild goose chase after another to find frightened elderly villagers who, we were assured, knew for certain the whereabouts of our war-time home. But always to no avail. No-one seemed to know anything. . Or else they were afraid of re-kindling old fires.

So we continued our search alone, cross-crossing the railway line and the following the vague directions my mother had supplied. Thick mature pine forests covered the whole area. In one place, we found a cemetery, all but overgrown in a clearing in the woods. But only one grave dated from the war period. Eventually, having resigned ourselves to failure, we met a middle-aged woman and her daughter gathering raspberries in the forest and she supplied us with directions to where she believed our villa may once have been.

And, we found it: the site of my mother’s home. There was no house that I could touch. Only a clearing in the trees to which my imagination reached out through the variegated shadows with a childish eagerness to the past. Not even one mute stone remained upon another, and yet the forest still remembered. It had reserved a space for it among the scubbery, where nettles waved their heads in the bright sunshine and baby saplings were already beginning to choke the place with a green forgetfulness. I remained here for a long time in silence.

Jews of Radziwiłłów

Before the war, the Jews had constituted the largest ethnic group in Radziwiłłów. Today there was no sign of them. My mother had often spoken of one particular Jewish shop where she had sometimes gone to buy foodstuffs. The woman-owner was very friendly. Whenever she saw her, the woman would laugh and pull her physically into the shop to entice her to buy. But when the Russians arrived, all this changed. Some of the Jews in Radziwiłłów had welcomed the invading Russians as their saviours. Many voiced complaints that the Poles had been their oppressors. The once-friendly Jewish shopkeeper now ignored and refused to serve my mother whenever she arrived at the store, while enthusiastically welcoming all Ukrainians and Russians.

What had happened to the Jews of Radziwiłłów? It was only by accident, while searching the forest for my mother’s house, that we came across a vast Jewish massacre site. It was wholly unsignposted, and accessed only by a dirt road through the forest. When the German army ploughed through Soviet occupied eastern Poland in 1941, the Jews of Radziwiłłów were rounded up and massacred in their thousands, just tens of metres from our home. Yet no-one in Radziwiłłów had even mentioned the existence of this place, or what it was about.

The site consists of a high, white, commemorative wall in the middle of the forest. On its curved surface can be found inscriptions in Ukrainian and Hebrew scripts. In front of it are several communal burial pits, now overgrown with grass. From the inscriptions on the wall and from an older commemorative stone further back, we learned that Jews from the town had been massacred and buried here in 1942 by the Nazis. There were almost 4000 of them.

NOTES

1. Three years later, in 1943, they would secretly collude with Stalin to sell their ally, Poland, to the Soviets. The Poles would not be consulted, and would not learn of the agreement until two years later, by which time their military and intelligence services were no longer required. 

© Ryszard Antolak
Painting: © Stefan Cmentomirski