Bogusław Szumowski

"The Russians, the ones who were here in Lubcz, it could have been different perhaps. But the Russians, when they wanted to have a good time, they first of all were looking for girls, and vodka, and wanted to drink. But they had to get the vodka somehow, had to pay something. And the German things after some three, four … Sometimes they were carrying things, a truck, and on the truck they took chairs away somewhere where there was a German woman alone, they would enter, and they would carry the armchairs, tables. He wanted half a litre of moonshine for those two chairs. Those who did not have enough chairs would give them that half a litre of moonshine, and they would give them the chairs. But later on there were ever more people coming, the Poles, so a few Russians were killed in Krzyż. They lost their lives for all those excesses of theirs like going to the shops and taking the cash away or something. Because they were doing such things, two of them were pretending to be very drunk, with sub-machine guns, and took cash away from the cash desk. But it is … maybe in Poland it is like that today, too, if they take you by surprise, they will take away. But they came to our Lubcz, they came by cart, because they had horses and they had medals like the Russians from the left arm to the middle of the chest, half a chest covered, but they went to steal pigs! And there was such a stranger from Poland, from the head office, staying at one farmer’s place, and he was hiding, too. But nobody could anything … And he worked for that farmer, helping him on the farm. But he had a gun, because he had to. And when they started knocking on the door, “Khazyain, otvari!” And there was a man from Poznań, from behind the Noteć River. Maybe he could understand one word in a hundred, nothing with them … That woman, his wife, started screaming, his children squealing, that the Russki had attacked them at night. And they pulled in the cart into the yard with their horses, and they had already let the pigs out, a big poker, and started to load it into the cart! And that man, the one that was helping, did not sleep at home, but in the farm buildings, somewhere in the barn, or over the cowshed on hay. And he opened a small window slightly and fired his gun! And he shot dead the one with the medals on the spot. And somebody ran over him, that Russki, with a wheel later on when he was lying …? And it was like that, he was decorated with medals for Berlin, for Leningrad, he covered such a long distance, and he was killed because of a pig."

"In 1945, when we finally arrived, we were going to Poznań but we stopped at Kobyle Pole and the shooting started all of a sudden. People thought that the Germans came back, that they repelled the Russki from the frontline. All sorts of weird and wonderful things happened, because we could be right under fire, because fire was coming from many sides. Nobody knew that it was already the end of the war, and that they had signed. That nice day befell us at Kobyle Pole near Poznań, at a dead track, where we were. Later on, after two days, the train started from Kobyle Pole. And the train arrived in Krzyż, and in Krzyż at the Wałcz track, also a dead track, and we were to detrain there. We unloaded with difficulty, because my father as a cripple could not do anything, and there were two wagons to unload. It was quite a job to unload two wagons full of everything. First we found ourselves in front of the school, where the secondary and grammar school is now, and the park, we stayed two days more at that park, we stayed two nights at that park. I grazed the cows in the railway park at Staszica Street. That job caught me when I was nine. Water was extremely dark but was flowing very rapidly in that canal which is no longer there. Thus, we went there to search around. At the time we arrived our train was the first train to Krzyż, the first transport of repatriates from behind the Bug River. Two days later people from Tarnopol arrived, just like we did. They were also all detrained to that park, and everybody who wanted … Houses were empty in Krzyż, all of them vacant. We as children, I was nine, were running from house to house, we were not interested in anything. We came to one of the houses; there was a decorated Christmas tree, by the school, that is inside. There was nobody inside, the doors were open, and there were pots and glasses, everything in sideboards. But since it was not ours, as the children were told then: “Do not touch if it is not yours.” So we ran around a bit looking for a ball, we wanted to find a ball, so to say. And later on, on 13 May we already started to change for Lubcz Wielki, because our father found a house. There was a vacant house there, not closed, open. There was nothing inside apart from straw. The Russki troops, when they were moving with the front, stayed at that house, on the straw on the floor. Because we are close to the border with Drawsko, the Noteć River, the Polish-German border, the houses in the nearest villages were already all looted. Not a single animal, not a dog, not a cat, nothing. Everything was empty. The Russki took the cows away. Only some agricultural machines were standing at the barns, because nobody needed them yet, it was still like that. And there was not even a single chair in the house, nothing, only, like the Russki could have behaved at home, the troops, can you imagine, there was one room where they relieved themselves, because no one would go out."

"When my father learned that all the people who had nothing, nothing to do with politics would be deported to Siberia, he came home and said: “Our life here is over, because they may come any day now and tell us to get ready; they will give us a few hours to get ready and off we go to Siberia.” And then my father, it was already possible at that time, The Russian and Polish front was already on Polish lands, and then, it was around the end of April, we left the place. It was 14 kilometres to the station, even though the town was a county town. There was no railway to entrain in your own town. To the freight station, in the open air, with all our belongings and provisions, because we went there without any idea of what to expect, we did not know where we would come and what for. The only reason why we were going there was not to land in transport and not to be deported."

"When we tidied that straw, tidied up the house, swept everything, the owner came. She came crying that it was hers. “Okay, if it is yours, that’s okay, we have not taken it away after all. But now it will be yours and mine.” She rebelled a great deal. My father did not want anything, he went to a Russki lieutenant who was in office in Krzyż and told him that things were like that with that German woman, that she rebelled all the time, and he told him “I may not stand it and give her a kick.” And he said: “No need to kick, punch her in the kisser and tell her to get out of here!” But we did not do that, and after a few months an order came from the Russki for all of them to shove off, to transports."

"As he made up his mind he found out everything and was absolutely determined to go. Even though the Russians did not want to. That is to say there was no compulsion not to let him go. But they urged him not to go, that he would get a job, that his son was already a teenager – because we were five, I had a brother who was five years older than I and he sometimes replaced my father and went to bring the mail – that there were so many men, many boys, that it was great strength. But my father kept saying: “My son is already there on the Polish side, I am going there, I have a family there, too.” And so they let him go. But anyway that Russian officer said that: “You will see when you come there. Because they are taking you, he already knew where to, to the land abandoned by the Germans….” But we still did not know, and they directed the entire transportation wherever they wanted to, wherever there was free space, after all they could not take people to the place where other people lived. So when it was all settled, the Russki still told my father, and my father repeated it at home, that: “The son can persuade you but the father cannot persuade his son to come back from the army. You will have a job here and everything.” But my father knew that they had already started transporting all those people. And, anyway we left, in railway wagons, we got covered railway wagons. Since my father had already been there and had already worked for the Russki and was harmed by the Germans, and suffered so much, so they came and jammed people, three, four families with their possessions to one wagon. But my father, when he came to that Russki, the Russki asked him: “How many wagons do you want?” And right away he gave three wagons for our family only. We entrained, crammed to the top, because there was a lot of corn, food, everything, because my father was not bad in terms of wealth at that time. And horses, cows, but they would not others take more than one cow to the wagon, and a horse if you had one. And he told us: “Take as much as you have.” So we arrived, two horses, three cows, pigs, we brought all our possessions here."

"When we already entered that household, the buildings, transported ourselves from Krzyż to Lubcz, after two or three days a German woman came back and was very surprised that we were at her place. And none of us could speak any German and could not understand anything. We knew a few simple words, but nobody could understand anything more in German. She bellowed, and we did not know, if she was calling us names or something, but when we were talking she did not say anything. But we knew she kept saying “meine, meine”, that it was hers. And then she came and brought in what was in the outbuildings, such farm things, forks, and spades, and hoes, everything into the room. She took two rooms. My mother was not very happy right away and said: “We have so many things and she has two rooms, and we have two rooms, too, and the kitchen.” Then she slowly stayed until the evening and again was gone, and nobody was inside. Her rooms were empty, there were no keys in the doors, they were closed, neither hers nor ours. And then we already knew that she was leaving. She was very beastly. Knowing that there were so many kids in our family, everything, the gooseberry was not ripe yet, she picked everything and disappeared, and again we did not know where she went. She was going somewhere towards Krzyż. But we would not ask, and then she already … One of those Poles who came there came to us and said that she was going somewhere to Łokacz, to the lake. She had some family there and she was going to them. And then she was coming with such a small girl of ten, she said “her mother ‘kaput’” there and that she had no father, either. She came over a few times, and then she came only once, somehow closer to the autumn, and she hold out her hand to us and was crying and we learned from our neighbours again that she was leaving for Germany."