Two Roads Home by Daniel Finkelstein

Author:Daniel Finkelstein [Finkelstein, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

And that is where he was—working in the Gulag office in the town of Ukhta—when news of the amnesty arrived in the middle of August 1941. Dolu and his fellow Polish Gulag prisoners were to be released, and a representative of General Anders’ new army arrived, seeking to recruit them. They were relatively lucky. In some camps, the news of freedom took months to arrive. In others, the news was ignored by the Gulag administrators.

Not everyone wanted the offer now being made. It was possible to carry on working in the Gulag as free men, helping the slave-labour business function. And one of Dolu’s friends urged this course upon him. This man was a dental technician and pointed out that, as a result, he had a free supply of alcohol. The two of them could sell this alcohol for extra food, he suggested. “Don’t go,” he said. “You’ll not be better off elsewhere.”

Dolu was starved, physically broken, only falteringly recovering from illnesses which had nearly killed him. The idea that this life—bookkeeping in a concentration camp, scrapping for crumbs, selling dental spirits on the black market, sleeping on desks—would be his future, that he would actually choose such a life, struck him as impossible, ridiculous, unthinkable.

Besides, he was being given the chance to find his family, and to serve Poland. He wasn’t about to give that up for the false security of employment in a Gulag.

He refused his friend’s offer, and the jobs that the Gulag administrators pressed upon him, and took pride in trying to persuade as many others as possible to join him. He was sure he was doing the right thing, but the departure itself, on the morning of 7 September 1941, was nevertheless unnerving. The Poles were expelled from the prison and made to lie down on the railway tracks. It was a horrible moment. Dolu feared that the Soviets were about to run a train over them. But then, as if it had been nothing, they were told their transport had arrived and they could leave.

Dolu’s destination was Totskoye, the main camp of the Anders army. It was 1,600 kilometres to the south, but with the Soviet Union fighting a desperate war against the Germans, the journey took sixteen days. To be among so many Poles was a joy, but it was also sobering. At Totskoye, he saw a mass of people who looked nothing like a military force. They were all like him. Drawn, malnourished, disease-ridden, exhausted, dressed in rags. Their only asset, a determination to show the Bolsheviks that the Poles had fighting spirit. From this, Anders was supposed to create a military force.

And Dolu had one last obstacle to overcome before he could take his place in it. The fact that he was a Jew.

His admission interview had gone smoothly through questions about his skills and military history, until finally the question of his ethnicity arose. “Jewish,” he responded. Why, then, did he want to join the Polish army? “Because I am an officer in the reserve, and it’s my war.

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