[1] III. In the peasant’s hut
At last the peasant arrived and didn’t make a bad impression at all. We got on a cart and rode 12 kilometres to the village. On the way, we saw strings of carts with Jews moving towards the border. We encountered German taxis, but no one bothered us. Some peasants shouted at us that we were going to man-eaters. This and similar epithets describing the Soviets were repeated several times along the route and were typical expressions of the mood of the peasantry in that area. When we arrived in the village of Wola, we found dozens of Jewish fugitives in huts, waiting for an opportunity to cross the Bug. Some had been waiting in the village for weeks, had been to the river a few times and come back empty-handed. There was a Yiddish saying popular in the village: it’s easier to get smuggled across the Bug than to cross Nalewki Street. A couple of weeks before our arrival, it had indeed been child’s play to cross the Bug at that spot. Hundreds had crossed unnoticed until the border guards got wind of it. Lately, it was necessary to wait for a dark night and, for fear of disaster, beat a retreat at every suspicious rustle in the bushes or on the river bank. A whole row of huts were full of refugees: young people, women with little children and even babes in arms, lying on beds and floors covered with straw. Our hut had relatively few people: several Nalewki traders, who were apparently waiting for a better opportunity, since they had rather more belongings to ferry across than we did; a blonde, very elegant woman, who looked like a Christian. They already felt quite at home in the hut. They assured us that no Germans came to the village and we had no need to worry. We sat down to eat, and after supper we had to get ready to set out because a group was leaving for the Bug that same evening and we were to be lucky enough not to have to stay even one night in the village. Suddenly, a young gentile girl came in and whispered something secretively in the ear of the hut owner. The peasant murmured in a trembling voice that the Germans were in the village [6] and told us to leave the hut together with a gentile boy, who would show us a place to hide. In panic and great haste, we threw on our coats (getting them mixed up) and didn’t know whether or not to take our packages with us. In our confusion we grabbed the less important packages, leaving behind precisely those that could betray our presence in the hut. We crawled over fences and mounds of earth and fell into a dark storage space or stall, nearly breaking our necks. We lost sight of each other. Some time went by and we were told to
BIA ŁY STO K AN D THE WESTERN BE L ARUS [ 17 ] 165
