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Your Story: The Kaleidoscope of Youth |
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My thoughts were now increasingly reverting to food. Air raids became more frequent. This made shopping and cooking more difficult as we spent considerable amounts of time sitting in shelters. Food figures prominently in my wartime diaries. The entry for 6 September 1939 I intended to be a rather grand opening. Roughly translated it reads, ‘To the sound of exploding bombs and crashing buildings we left Warsaw as the German tanks rolled in’. After that, as we made our way though Poland, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Italy and France, the entries get shorter and shorter and increasingly more repetitive: ‘Today we had food’. Today we had no food’, ‘Food again’.
Our progress through Poland was slowed down by diving for cover as German planes swooped, machine-gunning anything that moved. Pilots flew so low that some planes barely cleared the tree-tops. This was the undoing of one of them: a single shot brought him down and he burned. There was little time to bury the dead.
It had been a hot summer and the oil refinery had been hit and was burning fiercely. There was a lot of smoke and the fire was spreading. Lvov was still a Polish city then and had as yet not been annexed to Russia. My mother’s family had lived in the area for generations. I would have liked to look round but as the fire got out of control we moved on and eventually reached the spa town of Zaleszczyki near the Rumania border.
Here a military hospital was being set up to receive the wounded from the Western Front. Soon there were no empty beds left. Men lay on stretchers everywhere. Some moaned unconscious, some prayed out loud, others screamed. Many just lay quietly waiting to die. The stench of vomit, diarrhoea and gangrenous wounds was all-pervading. There were a number of children around and we were told not to run, make a noise or get in the way. Several of us made ourselves a tree house on an old magnificent chestnut.
It was from this vantage point that we spotted the arrival of British Embassy cars and watched in fascination as an immaculate figure of a man emerged. He wore pin-striped trousers and a fresh flower in the buttonhole of his jacket. A small dog that looked equally impeccably groomed followed on a lead. We were convinced that we were looking at the Ambassador. He may have been a butler, but whoever this man was he was splendidly unperturbed.
The news the Embassy staff brought us was bad. Some Polish detachments were still putting up resistance. There were reports of cavalry charges against heavy German armour, but these were symbolic gestures. Men on horses were not a match for tanks. It was the end, the diplomats said, and drove off to Rumania. I heard the grown-ups saying that there was still a hope that the Russians might come to help us as they had a treaty of friendship or non-aggression with Poland. I was not sure what this involved or what was the difference but it sounded reassuring.
Words: Lady Danusia Trotman-Dickenson
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