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Authors: Chaim Potok
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Service, but some days I couldn’t. We kept marching or waiting for hours on end, there was a confusion of jammed roads and lost units. We heard that the Germans had taken the city of Vilna.
One day we forded a shallow river and I saw two villages burned to the ground and along a road dozens of men hanging by the neck from trees, and an old toothless peasant standing by the side of the road, his hat in hishand, told us they were Jews who had been spying for the Germans. I think that was near the border of the part of Poland called Galicia.
We came to a region of low hills and rolling fields and dirt roads and there we dug lines of trenches and the Germans attacked and our soldiers drove them back and then we attacked and afterward all I could see in the fields were bodies. Amid the poppies and birch groves and flower-covered slopes—a rich harvest of torn bodies.
They gave me a shovel then and told me to help with the digging of graves. We dug them more than six feet deep and very long and wide and filled them nearly to the top with the bodies of our soldiers. For days we dug and filled graves. Bodies in odd positions stiff as wood, and gasses and eerie sounds coming from the wounds. We tried to keep their faces covered. The dead, the dust, the flies. Sometimes I saw from a partially naked body that it was a Jew I was tossing into a mass grave and I quietly said a psalm.
We were retreating again. Then my platoon leader told me to run forward with the others and if one was killed I was to take his weapon. I pulled a rifle from the hands of a headless soldier and ran alongside another soldier and fired when he fired, stopped when he stopped, fell when he fell. I saw he was dead and followed another soldier. For a while artillery was landing just behind us and I thought our own batteries must be firing on us to drive us forward into the attack. But I really could not figure out what was happening. Whining shells and erupting earth and the dry, distant rattle of machine-gun fire and lines of men falling andterrifying noises and the smell of gunpowder and blood. I had no idea where I was going and did what those around me were doing, running toward a forest. I kept slipping in blood and stumbling over parts of bodies and falling into dust and dry grass and getting to my feet. Abruptly, everyone stopped heading toward the forest and turned and ran back, and I with them. No one seemed to know where to go. Then I remember swamps, frost, icy winds. And many dead lying in strange positions everywhere. During all that time I was not seriously hurt—some cuts, a badly bruised foot, a wrenched back, lice, blisters, rotting skin between my toes, but never truly hurt—though on occasion I never slept without bad dreams and there was little to eat. We built fires in the open and in trenches and scoured the fields for vegetables and sometimes I ate the meat of pigs but never of horses.
Early one morning I turned a corner in my trench to be alone so I could put on my tefillin and pray the Morning Service. I was wrapping the tefillin around the fingers of my left hand when an artillery shell landed where I had stood minutes earlier and blew to pieces everyone there, six men. I stood amid the blood and pieces of flesh, and trembled and vomited.
Can you believe that for some weeks I was a machine gunner and killed many German soldiers? Then they found that I could ride a horse and they gave me the chestnut mare of a Cossack who had been killed and suddenly, feeling the eyes of the battalion upon me and insane with reckless courage and heeding the orders of an officer, Iraced ahead into a forest where we lost most of our men but routed the enemy and they made me a platoon leader because there were almost no noncommissioned officers left after that attack.
All the time I followed orders and did what those around me said to do. One day I heard my men cursing the Tsar—my men, peasants mostly, actually cursing their own Tsar. Soon
One day we forded a shallow river and I saw two villages burned to the ground and along a road dozens of men hanging by the neck from trees, and an old toothless peasant standing by the side of the road, his hat in hishand, told us they were Jews who had been spying for the Germans. I think that was near the border of the part of Poland called Galicia.
We came to a region of low hills and rolling fields and dirt roads and there we dug lines of trenches and the Germans attacked and our soldiers drove them back and then we attacked and afterward all I could see in the fields were bodies. Amid the poppies and birch groves and flower-covered slopes—a rich harvest of torn bodies.
They gave me a shovel then and told me to help with the digging of graves. We dug them more than six feet deep and very long and wide and filled them nearly to the top with the bodies of our soldiers. For days we dug and filled graves. Bodies in odd positions stiff as wood, and gasses and eerie sounds coming from the wounds. We tried to keep their faces covered. The dead, the dust, the flies. Sometimes I saw from a partially naked body that it was a Jew I was tossing into a mass grave and I quietly said a psalm.
We were retreating again. Then my platoon leader told me to run forward with the others and if one was killed I was to take his weapon. I pulled a rifle from the hands of a headless soldier and ran alongside another soldier and fired when he fired, stopped when he stopped, fell when he fell. I saw he was dead and followed another soldier. For a while artillery was landing just behind us and I thought our own batteries must be firing on us to drive us forward into the attack. But I really could not figure out what was happening. Whining shells and erupting earth and the dry, distant rattle of machine-gun fire and lines of men falling andterrifying noises and the smell of gunpowder and blood. I had no idea where I was going and did what those around me were doing, running toward a forest. I kept slipping in blood and stumbling over parts of bodies and falling into dust and dry grass and getting to my feet. Abruptly, everyone stopped heading toward the forest and turned and ran back, and I with them. No one seemed to know where to go. Then I remember swamps, frost, icy winds. And many dead lying in strange positions everywhere. During all that time I was not seriously hurt—some cuts, a badly bruised foot, a wrenched back, lice, blisters, rotting skin between my toes, but never truly hurt—though on occasion I never slept without bad dreams and there was little to eat. We built fires in the open and in trenches and scoured the fields for vegetables and sometimes I ate the meat of pigs but never of horses.
Early one morning I turned a corner in my trench to be alone so I could put on my tefillin and pray the Morning Service. I was wrapping the tefillin around the fingers of my left hand when an artillery shell landed where I had stood minutes earlier and blew to pieces everyone there, six men. I stood amid the blood and pieces of flesh, and trembled and vomited.
Can you believe that for some weeks I was a machine gunner and killed many German soldiers? Then they found that I could ride a horse and they gave me the chestnut mare of a Cossack who had been killed and suddenly, feeling the eyes of the battalion upon me and insane with reckless courage and heeding the orders of an officer, Iraced ahead into a forest where we lost most of our men but routed the enemy and they made me a platoon leader because there were almost no noncommissioned officers left after that attack.
All the time I followed orders and did what those around me said to do. One day I heard my men cursing the Tsar—my men, peasants mostly, actually cursing their own Tsar. Soon
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