“Go home, you Russian pigs!” a Pole yelled. Ihor had no trouble following him. He wasn’t so sure the Great Russians could. The Pole sounded more Ukrainian than Russian. Maybe he’d come from eastern Poland when it turned into the western Ukraine after the revived Polish nation saw its borders shift several hundred kilometers westward.
“Keep going! Fire and move!” Lieutenant Kosior called. The veterans in the company already knew how. They’d done it before often enough. The machine gun didn’t have enough friends and couldn’t fire every which way at once. Before long, three dead Poles lay behind it.
“Murderers! Russian fucking bandits!” other Poles shouted. “Freedom for Poland! Freedom, damn you!”
“Death to the Fascists!” Lieutenant Kosior shouted back. Some people truly believed whatever their superiors told them.
He did succeed in infuriating the Poles who were trading fire with the Red Army men. “Fuck Stalin!” some of them yelled, while others shouted, “Death to Stalin!” One man added, “He’s a worse Fascist than Hitler ever was!”
“What are you bastards doing shooting Poles inside of Poland?” still other rebels called. “This is our country. It’s not yours. Go home!”
Ihor wouldn’t have minded. Only the certainty that an MGB man would put a bullet into the back of his neck without even smiling if he tried to abandon his post kept him banging away with his Kalashnikov-that and the equally grim certainty that the Poles would shoot him if he didn’t shoot them first.
“No one insults the great Stalin!” Stanislav Kosior dashed forward with his PPSh, as furious as if the Poles had cursed his mother, not his political boss. Then he spun and crumpled. He tried to drag himself back to cover. Two more bullets slammed into him and made his body jerk. He lay very still after that.
Another old German machine gun in Polish hands snarled to life. Ihor dug like a mole. These are our socialist allies, too he thought as the dirt flew. Christ have mercy if our enemies ever get this mad at us!