journey – from Nowojelnia to Oszmiana – took three or four days.512 I did notfind my family there, so I went to Mołodeczno.513 There, I rested for a few daysand then went to Vilna, which I reached in the third week of the war. I saw Germans for the first time in the Oszmiana area. Even before that, I had heard about their actions and had seen Lida in flames, air combat, and German raids.
The attitude of the rural population, Belarusians and Poles, became more and more pro-German. Farmers did not hide their satisfaction that the Bolshevik regime would be overthrown, and thus there would be no collec-tivisation, previously expected to be introduced in the summer. (Immediately before the war, there had been a large-scale operation of resettlement fromvillages and towns.) People also hoped for religious freedom. On the way from Mołodeczno to Vilna, pro-German sentiment took the form of anti-Jewishdemonstrations, initiated by leaflets thrown over the area by planes, and later directly by the Germans. (Looting [2] shops, robbing Jewish refugees, and – rarely pogroms. I heard about the pogrom in Wołożyn.)514
I saw a leaflet with roughly the following content: the German army eliminated the Jewish-Bolshevik regime, which was guilty of the miserable existence of the working class (they used socialist propaganda terminology in the leaflets), which deprived rural people of their land, and incarcerated them in collective farms governed by the Jewish parasite. The population was tired of mindless “stakhanovism”.515 Thus, the achievements of bloody revolution
