five lady companions. As we were travelling mostly by bus and less often by train, I had the opportunity to discover the scope of destruction that the war had wreaked, particularly in the vicinity of Warsaw. Let us take Garwolin,677 which was simply a heap of rubble, or nearby Kurów,678 where there was literally no undamaged building and where I saw Jewish families cooking food in cauldrons in the open.
The place from where we were to cross the border was the infamous Chełm,679 where our company unexpectedly acquired two new members: a Russian man, whom we suspected might prove very useful to us during our journey, and an officer of the Polish Army heading for Romania. We spent ten idle days in that small town, fooled by the rumours that were going round that Chełm and its vicinity would be incorporated into the USSR as an integral part of Ukraine. But time was passing and there was nothing to suggest that those beautiful plans would be carried out. Consequently, the three most energetic of us (including me) separated from the rest and went to nearby Włodawa, which was located at the very border. It was 7 November680 – [2] the anniversary of the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution – so we could hear joyful cries and shots coming from the Soviet side. We saw floodlit streets of some town decorated with flags, which for us was like a red rag to a bull: we decided to risk everything and immediately cross the border. So we went to a smuggler, who lived two kilometres out of town, and we gave him all the money we had for him to transport us to the other side of the River Bug. The crossing of the river was all the more difficult, as the Germans had taken away all the boats, but our smuggler had a canoe hidden away.
