Free The Testimony by Halina Wagowska

their right places to be fried on their other side. Others tried that trick but failed, often barely able to lift the skillet.
    Soon I was able to hobble about and to help Sasha by peeling and grating bucketloads of potatoes. While we worked he sang Russian folksongs and arias, and a ballad about his beloved Leningrad. Only once did he mention the long siege of his city and the heavy loss of life. He tried to hide his tears.
    Sasha had a magnificent, deep, baritone voice. It enchanted me. I recall one moment clearly. Sasha was singing a jaunty song, ‘ Kalinka, Kalinka ’, as he flicked the pancakes particularly high in the air. The smell of this food was also magic and, as I watched their flight, it suddenly dawned on me that I might survive the war. I was struck so forcibly by this thought that it took my breath away: I am out of prison and this really is freedom! I gasped. Sasha noticed and thought I was in pain. In my limited Russian I explained that I was a prisoner no more. We embraced, both quite wet around the eyes.
    The flying potato pancakes are strongly embedded in the images of my liberation. As a cue to discovering freedom, pancakes might rate as a bit bizarre; but then so was everything else. In my wildest fantasies of ‘if we survive’, I could not have imagined this setting.
    Our progress westwards was slow, with many stopovers. The army would not enter towns or villages until they had surrounded them completely, Sasha explained. By the time we got to Danzig—Gdansk, when part of Poland—now bombed and free of Germans, I could walk with a stick and had put some padding between my skin and my bones. There was no real hospital there in the bombarded Gdansk. We were stationed in an elegant three-storey house, where only the roof had been damaged by shellfire; from some rooms we could see the sky.
    It was in Gdansk that Doctor Nina presented me to a high-ranking medical officer, described the state I was in when found, showed my many healing wounds and said that on me ‘everything had healed like on a dog’. This was not derogatory, but a Russian idiom for fast-healing people. Sasha stood nearby, beaming with pride, but did not get any mention for his nursing role. The big boss said that Polish authorities were establishing the city’s administration, and I should be handed over before the unit moved towards Berlin.
    With all the wounded soldiers in hospital, discharged or back in action, there were only Nina, Sasha and the three support staff at my farewell party. Sasha made my favourite pork pancakes, and the men raided the cellar and found a lot of alcohol. Nina made a speech, wished me luck and offered a toast to victory and another to Stalin. She warned the men not to drink too much and left.
    But they became very drunk. While washing the dishes in the kitchen I heard an argument, then a scuffle. Sasha, the gentle giant, was swinging his skillet like a weapon and was threatening to smash heads. The noise brought Nina in her dressing gown. She tried to pull rank and shouted military commands, but to no avail. Perhaps commanding while in a dressing gown doesn’t work. But her threat to call the military police patrolling the streets had some effect. She and I took the mattress from my bed into her room, and I spent the night there. Nina put the chest of drawers against the door, just in case. This, my first farewell party, remains memorable.
    Next morning there were hangovers and much embarrassment. Sasha held his head in both hands, apologised and kept looking away. Nina told him to take me to the Polish authorities. We went to an office where an elderly man told me that, as I had no papers proving who I was, and as a minor could not sign a statutory declaration of my identity, I must find myself a proper legal guardian and come with him or her. He was applying prewar regulations that made no sense in the immediate postwar chaos.
    On the way back I worried about what to do next, but Sasha seemed