Ludwik Finkelstein

They decided that we required education. So they imported a large quantity of A Short History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – in Kazakh. Now there were very few people who could read Kazakh who cared about this. So we burned Short Histories of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and I remember it had its humorous aspects.

My father’s view was that there would be a Polish Jewish community and Jews have got to be engaged in it. He had been an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. He then became an officer in the Polish Army reserve out of belief that Jews cannot achieve full citizenship rights if they did not take part in the defence of the country. That was a very important thing to him.

I was about age eleven then. And I started thinking about myself: ‘Well, why is it that we lost these twelve people and the Kazakhs on the whole tended to survive?’ One of the first things I realised was the lack of fuel. We didn’t know about fuel. We didn’t have reserves of fuel. I therefore applied myself systematically to the gathering of cow dung. Morning, noon and evening I collected cow dung. I set up a cow dung pile. One of the best cow dung piles in the village. It was admired! It was beautifully done. I knew where to collect the cow dung and how to arrange it and so on. And that determined me to become an engineer which I did because in fact I came to realise that survival very much depended on actually the practical things. All the other things were not that significant; it’s the practical things - the water, the shelter, the food and so on. So I collected a large amount of cow dung and this determined me to do something practical, something that you could actually contribute to people’s living.

My mother was a magnificent woman. It became dark round about three o’clock, not that you could do much more than that because you couldn’t really go out. It was terrible gale winds all the time as well as snow. And she was very determined to educate me. We had two or three Polish books as a result of which I’ve got a very detailed knowledge of Polish poetry. Some of the books were circulating around the village - round the settlement. My mother taught me from memory, also I remember The Iliad and The Odyssey, and quoted Schiller to me and sang songs and so on, educated me a great deal. Once a day she went out to fetch water. It was a terrible expedition because the river was some distance away where the men made a hole in the ice. She wore everything, all the clothes that she had. I remember she wore my coat on the head. on the head as a form of hat. And she always reminded me subsequently that one day she came in from fetching water. And my first question to her was: ‘What’s the difference between an anode and a cathode?’

It was September 1st 1939 - a beautiful day. Suddenly, I saw three planes flying overhead. I was aware of political tensions. I said: ‘Oh, they’re German planes.’ And everybody said: ‘Nonsense.’ And then the bombs dropped on Lvov and life changed entirely. The 3rd of September news came that Britain and France declared war on Germany. We said: ‘Oh well. The war is won now. It’s OK now.’ But of course it wasn’t.

One of the things that caused us to be full of courage was our complete conviction of our superiority over those who oppressed us. It wasn’t a religious one, but it was a very Polish one: the obvious superiority of Western civilisation over the barbarian.