and other entertainment, all in one building. The civilian population is also invited, but what you find there are loads of girls, many of them Jewish. They were all after Red Army soldiers, especially Cossacks. The Jewish girls [31] from Białystok looked at us refugees with contempt. And what use were we to them, when they could have a Cossack with twinkling black eyes and a jetblack mop of hair? After all, the Cossacks were the finest-looking soldiers: a red uniform with dark blue facings, dark blue trousers with red stripes, and on top a carelessly slung cape lined with fur on both sides. After them came the air force pilots in their fine uniforms, and if they were in short supply, then Red Army soldiers from other units would do. Or Soviet officials. Jewish boys were out of the running as romantic competition. The new couples were everywhere, outside town, on the streets, in the cafés and restaurants. They managed to understand each other. No common language, yet theymade themselves understood… . Maybe it came from the practical nature that Jewish girls possess. For one thing, the Red Army soldiers took them everywhere and provided them with all the good things missing in other homes. Above all, the Red Army boys were (as we saw it) very naïve. Compared with us, they lacked the shopkeeper’s cunning and sense of ownership. They were capable of sharing their last bite, and many of them paid the price for it and learned the hard way.
Cinema
I went more often to the cinema. I saw a few films, but they all had the same tone – praise for the father of the people and his entourage. The last filmwas entitled [32] Years of Fire. It tells what a hero Molotov is, how he conquers Poland and defeats the “Ukrainian counter-revolution”. At the time,here we saw the reality differently and, I would say, in the opposite way. All the films take the form of reportage, with the leader and his entourage depicted as the world’s greatest heroes. We come out disappointed and dissatisfied from such tendentious films, all cut to the same pattern. According to my information, a great many films are produced in the Soviet Union but, to tell the truth, very few of them are any good. Maybe that was just the first phase of showing Soviet-produced films in the occupied territories, because in Poland I saw a couple of good Soviet films: Świat się
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