I am being gallantly pulled up onto the bank. We began begging them to let us go, but they refused. They ordered the guide to carry my baggage, because it was not right for a girl to carry heavy baggage. This was between Dohiczyn and Siemiatycze. I started talking with one of the Red Army soldiers. I tell him: “I’m going to my husband. I’m carrying his diploma and compasses”. “Compasses?” cries the moloyets,649 “I know damn well what compasses you mean! We, proletarians, we know chto takoye tsyrkle!”650 I tried to convince him in that way to let me go, but without success.
One of the lady smugglers began to pretend to be sick and to have had recurring attacks, but that did not work either.
That was how we were escorted into a pigsty, where I began to worry terribly that we would be ordered to go back. We sat there the entire night. There were many people there: either heading for the other side [of the river], or returning to Warsaw. All of our sharp objects were taken away. Some peasants who were sitting with us warned us against a trick the Bolsheviks used: they would ask who wanted to go to Warsaw [3] and who wanted to go in the opposite direction, and then those who wanted to go to Warsaw were sent to Białystok, while those wanting to go to Białystok were sent to Warsaw. We were hungry so we ate something: somebody had bread and I had sardines. We then began to wonder how to convince our guards not to send us back. One of the men advised me to say that I was pregnant and a Ukrainian physician agreed to confirm that I was expecting.
They let us out early in the morning. I approached the komandir and said, pointing at my stomach, U mienia syn ili doch.651 He understood, looked at me, and said: Paydyosh nazad.652
After some time we were told to take our things and we were asked what we had. Some of the people’s baggage was searched and a length of cloth was found in a small parcel. The owner started shouting that the fabric was not his, that it had been planted. The persuasion of those around him to confess was of no use and in the end everybody agreed that the fabric would be a gift for the komandir. Then we were to walk to the ferry and return to the German
