The War
Rescued
real house in the woods. My uncle, by then, already owned a horse and a cow that we were able to milk for ourselves. My uncle was able to obtain enough food through his contacts and we no longer had to go begging for food. In comparison to what I had lived through previously, living in this house was like living in paradise. There was food and a big oven where we could bake our own bread, we had meat, and we ate reasonably well. We had enough wood from the surrounding forest, so the house was warm. Because my aunt had mercy on anyone who asked for help, the new cabin quickly filled with people. Within a short time, we were fourteen people living in the house. We were crowded, but felt safe because we had weapons and were fairly secluded in an area away from major pathways. We heard news from time to time that the Germans were re- treating and the Russians were coming. The Russian partisans were becoming more active and raising their profile. Our hopes that per - haps, somehow, we were going to make it through the war were lifted once again. I remember that one day during this period when we felt slightly safer I was walking outside. On the other side of the hill where our log cabin stood, I found the corpses of two Ukrainians lying frozen in a ditch. They were civilians, not soldiers. Boris and I were fas- cinated by the corpses, and every couple of days, we went back to look at them and check whether they were still there. Earlier, Boris had been in a Polish village called Kozarnik, quite a distance away. He had seen the whole village chasing two guys who had run towards him shouting in Ukrainian, but the villag- ers caught them and locked them up. Then the Poles celebrated and drank vodka far into the night. Boris drank with them, but did not find out what the two Ukrainians had done wrong. He thought these were the two prisoners. We always wondered about what they had done, and why their corpses were in a ditch so far away from Kozarnik.
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