There was a wounded man in urgent need of an operation and Gantman had been called from Czarna Puszcza. He was an irreplaceable person with great authority. Efraim immediately told him about me and I was again subjected to interrogation, this time in the presence of both Durov and Gantman. At first the proceedings were in Russian, then I and the good doctor changed to Polish because he was not fluent in Russian.
I explained that I could not reveal where I had been hiding for fear of endangering the people who had helped me. Durov trusted Gantman, who was in any case the only doctor they had, and I trusted him, too. We agreed that I would tell him where I had hidden on condition that he would not divulge the secret to Durov or anybody else. Gantman persuaded Durov that the reason I could not say where I had stayed was entirely personal and offered himself as a guarantor of my innocence. The second guarantor was Efraim. Durov said that if I was tricking him, both guarantors would be shot along with me. He imagined I had been hidden by a lover. That was evidently something he could understand. My execution was put on hold.
Before the interrogation was over, two partisans from the Jewish unit, also from Emsk, arrived. They had been sent by the commanding officer of the Jewish unit to testify to my having saved the lives of Red Army soldiers and Jews while serving with the Germans. News spread surprisingly fast in the forest, considering how uninhabited it appeared.
In the end, our joint efforts persuaded Durov I was innocent. The report about my sentence had already been sent to General Platon, the head of the Russian partisan movement in Western Belorussia, and a new report was now sent in its wake requesting that the death sentence should be annulled as there were witnesses to my innocence. I was allowed to join the brigade.
I spent a total of ten months with the partisans, from December 1943 until the Red Army liberated Belorussia in August 1944. Looking back now after so many years, I can honestly say that being a partisan was worse than working in the gendarmerie. There I knew I had a mission to help people and save lives as best I could. Matters were considerably less straightforward in the forests with the partisans. Life in the brigade was brutish. When I joined, it consisted of Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and a few Jews. There were already no Poles. Some had fled and the rest had been shot by the Russians, as I later heard.
A partisan was half-hero, half-outlaw. In order to survive we needed provisions, and these could be obtained only from the local peasants. They were robbed by the Germans and they were robbed by the partisans. The peasants never willingly surrendered anything and we were obliged to take it by force. Sometimes we took their last cow or horse, and it was not unknown for the stolen horse then to be exchanged for vodka. Vodka was more highly prized than bread. These people could not live without it.
When raids of this type were being conducted, I was usually one of the sentries guarding the village while the others went and seized everything they could find. My conscience was nevertheless not clear.
I took part in combat only once, a sabotage operation to blow up a bridge and derail a German train. I did my best to avoid bloodshed and tried to make myself useful in other ways, by guarding the camp and working in it. There was no shortage of work.
I found the situation of women in the unit deeply dispiriting. There were far fewer of them than men, and I saw the way they suffered. It was hard enough for them to be living in the forest in dugouts, with all the privations, and to this were added the sexual demands of the men which they could not escape. There was ceaseless rape. I felt very sorry for them, but had also to recognize that most of them when they yielded to violence were hoping for favors in return. I had old-fashioned views on relations between men and women and could not reconcile myself to what I constantly encountered. I was appalled by the thought that Marysia, too, if she had survived and been here, would have had to submit to these ways. This was probably when I began thinking of becoming a monk. I stopped viewing women as a man, and for me they were not sex objects but only suffering human beings. They sensed that and were always grateful to me.
At the end of the war the Russians started giving out medals. I was awarded one also and kept it for a long time. It had Stalin’s profile on it. In August 1944 the Russians liberated Belorussia. We were all very glad to see the Red Army and most of those in the brigade merged with it. By this time, however, I had decided to enter a monastery and in order to do so needed to get to Poland. It was clear to me that east Poland would be retained by the Russians. Warsaw was still occupied by the Germans. When the people of Warsaw rose up against them, the Red Army stood aside for two months on the far bank of the Vistula and gave them no support.
While I was wondering how to get home and find my parents—although there was little likelihood of their having survived—the NKVD caught up with me and I was taken back to Emsk on a special mission. I had no desire whatever to work for the NKVD, but nobody asked me.
Emsk was almost empty. All the people I knew had left the city, and those who had collaborated with the Germans had vanished. Many houses had been burned down and the fortress was half ruined and empty. I was issued with a Soviet uniform and allocated a room in the very building the Gestapo had occupied. There I was to write reports on people who had collaborated with the Germans. To my relief, they were long gone. My reports were mainly about German operations against the Jews. I compiled a list of all the Jewish villages and hamlets which had been destroyed while I was working there. My bosses were far more interested in anti-Soviet sentiment among the local population, but I gave them no help with that.
A number of Jews who had survived returned to Emsk. They hailed me as a hero, but we could not find a common language. My Christianity had been baffling for those I had become close to in the partisan unit, and now I had to recognize that it was unacceptable to my old Jewish acquaintances. Indeed, to this day many Jews consider my choice a betrayal of Judaism. The person who tried most energetically to change my mind and turn me from Christianity was Efraim Cwyk who, along with Dr. Gantman, had once staked his life on my not being a traitor. Later, when I was already in a monastery, he came and tried to rescue me from the clutches of the Christians. The people closest to me at that time were my nuns. They supported me.
It did not take long for me to see that the NKVD would not just let me walk away. I sought a means of escape and the opportunity arose when the chief went off to the district center for a couple of days. His deputy saw me as a dangerous career rival and gave me permission to go to work for a secret service major in Baranowicze, a place whose only advantage over Emsk was that it was closer to the border with Poland. I reported to the major, he inspected my documents, saw that I was a Jew, and refused to have me. This was just what I had been hoping for. I asked permission to travel to Vilnius and he wrote me out a pass. My only joy in Vilnius was meeting up with Bolesław again. The Germans had not harmed him and everyone living on his farm had survived through to liberation. He greeted me warmly and again offered to let me stay with him.
Vilnius, like Emsk, was half ruined and empty. Many Polish townspeople had fled to Poland, those who had collaborated with the Germans had left with them, and six hundred thousand Lithuanian Jews had been shot. These postwar sights only strengthened my resolve. I went to the Carmelite monastery in Vilnius but the abbot refused to admit me.
In March 1945 I was on the first train taking Poles back to their homeland. So were Isaak Gantman and his wife. I told him that I was going there to enter a monastery. “You are turning away from life’s great treasures,” he told me, and I was unable to make him see that I had chosen the most precious treasure of all.